Stewart A. Stockdale, co-founder of #Rellevate and its chairman and CEO, said it differs from the #early #wage #access companies in the comprehensive services it offers.
Financial Technology
Stewart A. Stockdale, co-founder of Rellevate and its chairman and CEO, said it differs from the early wage access companies in the comprehensive services it offers.
Financial Technology
N26 prides itself on its smooth interface and user friendly features like saving by category and tracking expenditures by category. Will that be enough in the U.S. #market where other #mobile providers already offer similar features?
Financial Technology
#DTCC knows the markets have #risks, but it doesn’t expect history to repeat itself, so it surveys the horizon for potential problems.
Financial Technology
I always like to start from the beginning. So, let me begin my blog by introducing myself. I recently joined Accenture to lead our North America #Payments practice. After more than 30 years in financial services—much of it working with companies across the #retail and commercial payments value chains—I am no stranger to change.
But in today’s era of digital payments, it is not just velocity of change but the scale that brings with it both opportunity and peril. It is exhilarating, but can be overwhelming. My focus is helping payments players make sense of it all, so they can harness the potential of digital payments to drive their businesses forward.
Retail payments is in the thick of digital disruption. That should be no surprise. Digital is reinventing daily life fast—how we watch, listen, talk, shop, travel, ride and connect. It is a powerful and profound force of change. One that is ubiquitous for everyone. The combination of consumer demand, evolving technologies and retail #market dynamics is creating a new future for retail payments with digital payments at the core.
Remember when you joined Facebook or made your first online banking transaction? I bet you did it from a desktop computer. I also bet that today, you check social media and bank from your smartphone. This is the trajectory of digital #technology adoption. All roads lead to mobile. While US consumers haven’t embraced mobile payments with the gusto we expected considering their smartphone obsession, a tipping point is near. Accenture research shows that 64 percent of North American consumers plan to use a mobile wallet in 2020—a 39 percent rise in the user base in three years.1
This is a pivotal moment for payments players. Should they double down on the inevitability of mobile as THE consumer access point or move more deliberatively? History offers a cautionary tale. From Blockbuster and Napster to Borders and Polaroid, there’s a graveyard of companies that took a wait-and-see approach to digital disruption. Digital economies tend to scale toward natural monopolies with most markets consolidating into a handful of winners—Amazon owns nearly half of the US e-commerce market.2 I expect this consolidation to occur in mobile payments too. That’s why payments players should act now to create mobile payments experiences that capture consumer’s hearts—and wallets.
Consumers want payment transactions to disappear. Uber, Amazon and countless online subscription companies have shown that making a payment can be seamless and convenient. So much so that the payment becomes invisible. Consumer interest in frictionless payments is palpable driving recency, frequency and monetary value to digital payment savvy retailers. Consider that visits to US restaurants where payment is by mobile app jumped by more than 50 percent over the last year.3 I expect this interest across all retail categories to gain momentum fast.
But the payments industry has work to do to meet consumers’ expectations. Today, the payment transaction is often the speed bump—actually, the rush-hour traffic jam—in the retail experience. Research reveals that consumers loathe complex checkouts. In fact, they will not stand for them. Eighty-seven percent of online shoppers abandon their carts due to complex checkout. And over half (55 percent) would not just leave their carts, they would never come back to that retailer’s site.4 The time has come for payments players to make invisible payments a visible priority.
Traditionally, companies were built in a linear fashion with stores, call centers, online and mobile—a maze of departments, functional areas and channels. These silos reflect organizational structures and internal complexities, not consumer mindsets and behaviors. Put simply, channels are about companies, not consumers.
When consumers interact with payments companies and merchants, they want to learn about a product, buy a product, or service a product. They want to do this on their own terms. And in the digital era, they have countless options to do so. For payments players to be truly customer-centric, they have to stop being product- and channel-centric. They must kill channels as we know them, driving integration and absorbing complexity to provide simple, streamlined experiences to consumers. Integration must be so seamless that channels stop existing. Rest in peace.
The three Rs of education are reading, writing, and arithmetic. The four Rs of the customer-centric business model: recognize me regardless of my entry point and device, remember my history of interactions, recommend relevant products and services, and reward me for my loyalty. There’s been a wake-up call for payments providers in recent years related to these four Rs. The old days of focusing purely on payments transactions are no more. After all, the digital economy is an experience economy. More and more, the customer (and merchant) experience is becoming a critical differentiator in retail payments.
As payments players develop customer experiences beyond the transaction—such as providing advisory or expense management services, offering a single view of account information, or curating real-time rewards and deals through partner networks—they should look to digital powerhouses that excel in customer experience. Amazon is a leader. The company recognizes and remembers consumers every time, recommends products they will love, and rewards them. The benefits are mutual. Amazon Prime members spend about $ 1,300 more each year than non-members.5
There is not a more serious or consequential issue for payments players than security. Without it, nothing else matters. A day does not seem to go by that there isn’t news of a breach. As cutting-edge as their technologies are, even digital-born companies like Facebook and Google are not immune.
There is a silver lining in this storm for traditional financial institutions. Security is never absolute, and criminals are always getting better at being bad. Protecting data is central to the industry. It always has been. Compare this to the fact that digital competitors have built their business models on packaging and selling data, not on protecting it. The clarion call for payments players is to double down on security, to keep innovating to protect data while it is stored, and while it is in flight. Tokenization is the gold standard now. Expect biometrics and continued migration to multi-factor authentication to be the next wave.
In future blogs, I will explore these market shifts in detail and how new players are taking advantage of them. In the meantime, I hope to see you at Money 20/20 where Accenture will share more insights on what’s next in digital payments.
1 Accenture, “Driving the Future of Payments: 10 Mega Trends” 2017
2 Ingrid Lunden, “Amazon’s Share of the US E-Commerce Market is now 49%, or 5% of all Retail Spend” 7/13/2018
3 NPD Group, “In a Slow Market, US Restaurant Operators Step it Up by Offering Consumers Digitally-Enabled Convenience” 3/13/2018
4 James Melton, “Getting the Online Checkout Process Wrong Can Be Costly, Research Shows” 8/13/2018
5 Beth Braverman, “Amazon Prime Members Spend More on the Site— a Lot More” 7/7/2017
The post Retail payments: 5 crucial market shifts appeared first on Accenture Banking Blog.
#Marcus, the consumer lending platform of Goldman Sachs, added a new tool that lets users estimate the value certain renovations would add to the price of their house, before applying for a home improvement loan, Bank Innovation has learned. The move reiterates Marcus’ interest in building its loan offerings in the home improvements sector, as […]
Bank Innovation
#Realtime #payments (RTP) is great for the consumer, but what about for the #banks? Will realtime payments lead banks to lost revenue on transfer fees or fines from bounced checks? That is likely. But real-time payments will also open doors to new revenues possibilities, thanks to data from realtime transactions. “What we’re really talking about is […]
Bank Innovation
With the introduction of the EU’s revised Payment Service Directive (PSD2), the financial system is witnessing transformation in the banking system, along with the emergence of the concept of Open Banking.
On one hand, PSD2 aims to drive #innovation and competition in the #market by asking #banks to open their infrastructure to third-party providers (TPPs) with application programming interfaces (APIs), while on the other hand, it requires banks to reconcile authentication systems with frictionless user experience.
The number of TPPs connecting to banks’ systems will increase, boosting the risk of unauthorized access to customer data or even fraudulent initiation of payments. It also becomes very important for banks to move to a more standardized #security architecture and establish a security gateway for pre-validation of API calls, and more. The strict PSD2 security requirements stated in the Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS) on Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) and Common Secure Communication (CSC) could harm user experience, but the RTS provides a way out: behavioural biometrics.
With the arrival of new entrants in-market, banks will face increased competition. Thus, to retain their position in the payments space, banks could turn innovative security into a market #differentiator.
Hence, we can say that while PSD2 aims to protect consumers from fraud by increasing payments security measures around biometrics, it also enhances competition and innovation.
Read my complete blog on this in more detail and share your views.
The post Security innovation as a market differentiator for banks appeared first on Accenture Banking Blog.
Domestic #payments have undergone a complete transformation in recent years and cross-border payments have started to move in this direction. Traditionally, cross-border payments have been subject to various challenges—long and uncertain funds transfer timings, lack of cost transparency and high transfer and conversion costs. Correspondent #banks have cut-off times and deadlines for same-day processing after which payments are processed the next day, so at the point of initiation, exchange rates remain unknown.
Transaction fees might also be deducted from the principal amount, so the beneficiary remains uncertain about the amount which will be credited. Payments need to be routed through many banks before they reach their destination, causing delays and accruing fees. Also, financial institutions have had to devote considerable headcount and efforts to manage liquidity and foreign exchange (FX) risk and to respond to customer enquiries, track status and investigate exceptions.
These long-standing inefficiencies have afforded the opportunities for players including #fintechs to provide innovative and customer-centric services in the #market. UK-based #fintech TransferWise has devised a peer-to-peer solution for money transfer (see Figure 1). Using a matching model where money is redirected to another recipient of an equivalent transfer in the opposite direction, the company avoids costly currency conversion and cross-border fees. This also allows TransferWise to charge between 0.5 and 2.5 percent in fees depending on the currency. Because of this cost benefit, close to two million people use TransferWise to transfer approximately £1 billion from 42 countries each month.
Another FX start-up, Revolut, provides an application that can convert or send money, as well as help users pay for products and services around the world or online. It is like creating a virtual bank account in three different currencies: USD, EUR and GBP. For minimal fees, users can top up their accounts in any of the currencies using a debit or credit card or via bank transfer. Currently, Revolut has nearly one million customers, acquiring 3,000 to 3,500 users every day.
SaxoPayments’s Banking Circle provides opportunities to fintechs, acquirers and payment service providers (PSPs) to offer their merchants the facility to perform immediate cross-border bank transfers and set up local settlement accounts worldwide for their customers quickly and at very low cost. Visa has also come up with a cross-border B2B payments solution called Visa B2B Connect, which uses distributed ledger #technology and leverages Visa’s existing global network of 15,000 financial institutions to create a private permissioned network. It offers speed and visibility of the payment from origination to the receiving end. Other fintechs like CurrencyFair, WorldRemit, Traxpay have also built cost-effective cross-border payment solutions and are rapidly gaining market share from traditional money transfer providers.
However, traditional money transfer providers such as banks cannot afford to keep losing market share to fintechs and new, emerging banking players. The cross-border payments market constitutes a very large portion of payments revenues (close to US$ 24 trillion per year) and is growing more as boundaries disappear for e-commerce.
Banks such as Santander and Fidor have partnered with Ripple to offer a #blockchain-based payment network that can complete cross-border transactions in a matter of seconds. Instead of using fixed correspondents, Ripple implements an automated instant auction for liquidity provision and FX to ensure the best price execution, removing liquidity and settlement risk from the process. Ripple has been able to combine payments messaging with funds settlement, which was previously unavailable for cross-border payments (where messaging is typically separate from the operation of the nostro and vostro accounts used for settlement). Ripple allows customers to keep their money with banks or other financial institutions as opposed to new start-ups and fintechs.
In parallel, the existing cross-border messaging network SWIFT has also launched its new network Global Payments Innovation (GPI). This new solution combines real-time payments tracking and the certainty of same-day settlement for its network banks. It introduces a unique end-to-end transaction reference number (which was missing earlier) to enable unique transaction identification and tracking of the lifecycle of transactions. Now, SWIFT is collaborating with various fintechs to build overlay services on top of the global payments innovation (GPI) platform.
There is a likely emergence of real-time cross-border payments as global banks or other market infrastructure providers begin connecting domestic real-time infrastructures to improve their customer offerings.
Fintechs have taken significant market share from traditional banks in this space and several banks have started to fight back. Banks have begun building new cross-border payment interface and mobile applications, repricing FX and transfer costs, collaborating with fintech players to enhance offerings, and in parallel trying to improve the back-end infrastructure to create a competitive offering. Is this a wake-up call for players who are still in a state of denial?
The post Will fintechs dominate the cross-border payments market? appeared first on Accenture Banking Blog.
More #fintech firms in developing economies could expand financial services such as credit and trade finance to small businesses which can’t access traditional #banks. But first the fintech firms themselves need financing.
Financial Technology
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