“Do you take plastic?”
There was a time when consumers were asking that question in Retail outlets around the world. Nowadays, the ability to pay for goods and services with a debit or credit card is so commonplace that consumers simply assume that card acceptance is available virtually everywhere. It wasn’t always like this but several decades of investment has built the card payment infrastructure to its current state. However, despite the continued growth in consumer payment transactions, card payments does have its drawbacks. The level of fees paid by merchants has been a long standing area of contention, often resulting to protracted legal action to enforce greater billing transparency and reductions in overall fee costs. Another area of serious concern is the dramatic increase in card and account fraud, clearly aggravated by consumer behavior changes during the pandemic. Of course, the quest for ever simpler and more secure payment options is of great interest to many consumers. There has been a lot of payments innovation over the years including stored value cards, digital wallets, and bio-metric authentication. However, many of these schemes piggyback on the card infrastructure or achieve only limited levels of success. In most industries technology has been reinventing itself at accelerating rates but this is not the case with card payments. This begs the question – “Is the card itself the bottleneck to change?” Putting aside the entire settlement cycle there are several key elements that a truly alternative consumer payments option needs to address. Firstly, the consumer needs to have some form of payment token and authentication method. Additionally, the alternate payment scheme needs to ensure the secure acquisition and routing of the payment to the appropriate institution for authorization. The advent of smartphones and wearable computing, coupled with the growth of real time account to account payments is already proving to be an interesting possible alternative to card payments. Some adoption rate projections suggest that account-based payments could notionally obsolete card-based payments. It seems that the real hurdle to obsoleting card payments is a commercial issue, not a technical one. As long as the new entrants into the consumer payments market all seek their own “magic bullet” then they are most likely to be left nibbling around the market share of the traditional card brands. The last thing consumers want is to be drip-fed an endless array of different payment options with no clear indication of convergence and interoperability. The electric car market provides a great comparison in this regard. In an age of climate change and excessive wastage it seems obvious that governments should demand all electric cars sold in their country to have the same charging connection. The cost and timescales to create an effective charging stations infrastructure is immediately reduced, and consumers would have greater confidence to switch to electric cars. I have no doubt that were the governments of a few of the major market countries to take this bold step it would be universally applauded and the card manufacturers would deliver the requisite standards in a heart beat. The US market saw a strong consortium of banks cooperate in the launch of Zelle as a competitive counter to Venmo. However, the really big question is whether the banks, Fintechs, and Retailers can cooperate to deliver a single, ubiquitous consumer payments option that can move us beyond the 70 years history of plastic cards. I recently read a BBC news article that noted the German cyber-security authority had warned against using the Kaspersky anti-virus software. Among other things it stated “Russian information technology businesses could be spied on or forced to launch cyber attacks.” Perhaps the easiest response would be to simply shrug this off. However, Putin’s illegal war against Ukraine and his alarming threats against Russian citizens with Western sympathies casts a cautious shadow over dependencies on mission-critical Russian software systems. In addition to cyber security software and networking, I wonder about payments systems – are these at risk? Payments systems carry sensitive card details and customer information and significant damage can result from compromised payments infrastructure. Hopefully this is all just plausible speculation but it highlights the fact that once trust has gone, fear sets in, and uncertainties multiply. And trust it seems, is a diminishing commodity. #cybersecurity #payments #infrastructure #software #security 2021 has been another tough year for Covid-19 related challenges. Our thoughts continue for those who have been impacted by the virus especially those who are sick, we extend our heartfelt wishes for a full recovery.
We would also like to take this opportunity to thank all of our clients, partners and teammates for another extraordinary year. The dramatic surge in demand for electronic payments continues from 2020 and the Lusis Payments delivery team has been hard at work helping customers grow their systems and businesses. Lusis completed a record number of projects in 2021 including:
This summer, HPE selected TANGO as their preferred GreenLake financial payments solution. You can watch the HPE Discover interview with Lusis Payments CEO, Philippe Preval and Keith White, GM of HPE GreenLake cloud solutions here. “HPE is delighted to partner with Lusis Payments and TANGO as the premier Retail Payments solution for future generations.”- Keith White. Also this year, Lusis and HPE successfully demonstrated TANGO running at 4500 TPS on a HPE NS server the ATC – proving that TANGO is still the most performant and cost effective payments solution for HPE NonStop. To read more details about the test read the blog here. Our product investments have continued in earnest, ensuring that TANGO remains at the forefront of FinTech payments. Some highlights include:
We are looking forward to the exciting adventures we will share in 2022 and would like to wish all of our customers, partners and staff a Happy and Prosperous New Year!! Meet Dave Smith, Payments Specialist with Lusis Payments’ European team. Q: Let’s kick off with a direct question - the payments, and more broadly the financial sector, is facing a myriad of challenges, would you say you’re optimistic about what the future holds? Dave: Definitely. I’ve been in the financial sector for a long time, and I’ve seen waves of economic, social and technology events that all threaten to completely rock the sector. But this is an incredibly resilient industry - one of the pioneers of technology in business. We’re at our best when we’re putting customers first, developing products that help them in their lives, and enabling the global economy to function - payments are central to that. That makes me very optimistic about the future of payments - powered by technology. At the end of the day, payments are at the heart of the way we live, and that makes them central to an organisation’s reputation. Q: You say that payments are at the heart of the way we live, do you think banks recognise that enough as they look for new revenues and business models? Dave: There can be a mindset within banks that see payments as a commodity or utility. I think that’s a big mistake, because if you take payments away then the rest of the banking infrastructure loses a sense of purpose. Banks can sometimes see it more as a chore that the central bank makes them handle than what it really is - a direct connection to the customer. That’s when they run the risk out trying to outsource it to another institution. Big mistake. Consumers want banks to handle payments. It’s one of the most trusted aspects of banking - that you help me move my money, pay my mortgage, get cash out or buy goods and services. The trick is to turn that into an effective business model, which, with the right infrastructure, is very achievable for almost every financial services institution out there today. Q: What challenges do you see banks facing in terms of their business models? Dave: There was a massive acceleration pre-pandemic of online only banking - not just the challengers we see in the UK and Europe, but also traditional banks who would offer you an extra half a percent of interest in order to bank online and not use a branch. So managing a physical footprint is certainly on the list. On top of that, you have a new generation of consumers who will live very differently than those before. More subscription services and less ownership, more renting homes and less buying. That has a knock on effect for the range of other financial services products banks typically facilitate - from mortgages to insurance. There has been a continued depression of interest rates which means the classic business model of banks taking and lending money is more difficult than before. On the other hand, transaction volumes have gone up hugely in the pandemic. However, banks haven’t necessarily been the quickest to respond with new products and services (and I include challengers in that too to a certain extent), in part because of regulation but also because they didn’t have the right infrastructure in place to move rapidly. Q: What role do you think regulators do, and should, play in the development of payments going forwards? Dave: Regulations can create opportunity for the financial services sector, often in how they govern consumer service levels. Faster Payments is a great example of that - people want to get their money instantly (and in a 24/7 world why would they not!) and so it helps focus technology and innovation on meeting those wants and needs. Q: What’s the big infrastructure challenge that’s holding banks back from seizing these opportunities? Dave: At the end of the day, too many financial institutions are using technology that is seriously outdated, and wasn’t built for the range of scenarios that we see now. Challenger banks that only came onto the market a few years ago are already rebuilding their infrastructure, so it makes no sense that you’d have a big name bank that’s using technology someone purchased in the 70s or 80s to run significant parts of their systems. The name of the game is flexibility. You need to put infrastructure in place that can survive any unknown scenario. No one in banking predicted the challenges that 2020 would bring - but too often they only build technology that copes with the scenarios they know about. Banks need a new approach - they need to build for uncertainty, for flexibility and for an unknown future. Then you get resilience. Whether they rip and replace, or take a bit-by-bit approach, is completely down to their needs, but something needs to change. Quickly.
We’ve launched a new whitepaper on preparing your payments infrastructure for the next decade. Complete the form below to download the whitepaper, and find out what’s changing in the European payments landscape, How failure to adapt became the biggest infrastructure risk facing payments businesses, and how you can design a payments infrastructure that allows you to reduce risks and quickly bring new products and services to market. Retail payments are a route to profitability for banks, but it’s also a route to market share and new customers. FinTechs have one main advantage in the market - flexibility. They have been able to move quickly to develop new features and roll them out before traditional banks could. Now however, we see traditional banks rolling out those same features - FinTechs will lose some of their competitive advantage if they can’t maintain the same level of innovation as before. The challenge for traditional banks is that it’s taken them a long time to get here - they couldn’t respond to the challenge as soon as it happened. At the end of the day, this is a conversation about tech infrastructure. Challenger banks, working on modern tech stacks, could quickly develop and deploy. The way for traditional institutions to take this on is to introduce similar degrees of agility in order to give options to customers who don’t like the pared-back experience of digital banks but feel traditional banks don’t understand their needs either. The issue is inertia born of fear. When a bank’s technology fails, the first repercussion is that it makes headline news. The second is that the regulator gets involved. Combined, the bank could face fines, fees and a badly damaged reputation. The desire to avoid this scenario at all costs stifles a lot of technology advancement in the financial space. Unfortunately in the long term, this policy is likely to create more problems than it solves. If we look even further into the future, disruptions from the likes of Blockchain and AI could bring further, more dramatic change to the industry. While they are still very much in the early stages of development and roll out, a CTO must be able to anticipate the change that these, or other unknown technologies, might bring - and be in a position to react and adapt. Technology leaders must be able to keep pace with the new products and services that technology will introduce. And do it efficiently.
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