Payments Professionals’ Digital Priorities for 2016

Change, some say, is imminent, and in the world of corporate payments, one might say it’s omnipresent. When it comes to technology, in any case. It’s no longer a question of whether or not an organization will embrace digital payments—on the B2C and B2B end—it’s become a question of when. Or, perhaps, it’s a question of how?

Prioritizing strategic needs is a great place to start. To understand where organizations will spend their budgets, manage stakeholders’ expectations, and measure success, it’s critical to know what lies at the heart of their initiatives—what’s driving their efforts.

It’s All About the Customers (and Technology)

The white paper Payments Strategy–Renew the Old, Ring in the New from Infosys and MobilePaymentsToday.com explores the payments industry’s evolution from cash to digital. The global survey conducted for the report sought insights from industry professionals on a range of topics from the challenges of payment digitization to the opportunities to meet their customers’ needs with new practices and technologies. Here’s a look at the breakdown of the major business priorities for survey respondents’ 2015-2016 digital strategies:

• Gain new customers – 69%
• Drive revenue and/or market share growth – 50%
• Gain a competitive advantage over our traditional and/or emerging competitors – 41%
• Create a unified experience for our customers – 40%
• Offer customers omnichannel options – 40%
• Allow for better security – 38%
• Allow for real-time payment transactions and settlement – 35%
• See a lift in our customer satisfaction metrics – 35%
• Accommodate regulatory requirements and changes – 33%
• Allow for faster-to-market product introductions – 31%
• Gain better insights and better predictive data on our customers – 31%

There’s nothing particularly surprising in the fact that customers’ needs define organizational technology investments today. What’s thought provoking is that the priorities uncovered by the research are deeply rooted in the customer experience—that is, the creation of a customer experience, one that naturally requires technological capabilities that many companies don’t have today. The paradigm has clearly shifted, and the message has been received: technology is the way forward with customers.

Moving Forward: Asking the Important Questions

When it comes to developing a digital strategy—and then making an investment in it—today’s businesses have a lot to consider, including:

• Who at the company has ownership over creating and deploying a digital strategy?
• What are the limitations of their existing legacy systems that get in the way of change?
• How much of an impact can digital payment technology have on the financial big picture?
• What do customers expect?
• Is the company prepared to handle security threats?
• Who can we partner with to support our digital initiatives?

These questions represent the breadth and depth of the what’s-next-for-payments technology decision at companies across the globe. How can decision-makers begin to answer these questions and arrive at a workable strategy that truly propels them? How do they make the best use of their existing technology, build upon it, and innovate in a way that results in higher revenue and competitive advantage? Every company has a unique solution.

For certain, virtually every organization is automating their payment process in some way, shape, or form in order to satisfy their customers and take their business to the next level. They’re reimagining consumer payment interfaces to gain relevancy (or to get ahead) and they’re retooling their workflows to achieve process optimization. What they tackle first and how they tackle it really depends on their internal readiness, willingness to change, and capacity to conform to the needs and expectations of their customers.