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regulators are encouraging new entrants, but mobile- based account providers also are popping up in the U.S. these startups say they can offer better services than traditional banks and are targeting millennials as well as disenchanted bank customers and small businesses. Joining green Dot’s goBank and Simple, Varo money launched in 2016, offering private-label checking and savings accounts through its relationship with the Ban- corp. in the U.K. alone there are more than 50 challenger banks, including atom, Starling Bank and monzo.
arTIfIcIal InTEllIgEncE gETs smarTEr
From chatbots to engage and service cardholders or enable purchases via social media to machine-learning fraud tools, ai burst onto the payments scene in 2016
and is continuing apace in 2017. although it’s still in its early days, the largest banks (Bank of america, Santander UK and RBS) and networks (mastercard, american Express and PayPal) as well as startups are launching chatbots or
virtual assistants to help cardholders man- age their money or make payments.
integrating chatbots into messaging platforms like Facebook messenger
and Wechat also is on the rise. companies whose bots are available on Facebook have access to 1 billion
users in 200 countries who use messenger monthly, and developers
and businesses have built more than
30,000 bots for the app, according to the social network. meanwhile, amazon’s alexa, google’s cortana and apple’s Siri easily could become part of the omnichannel com- merce experience. in march, amazon announced alexa’s integration with its app and Samsung announced the launch of Bixby, the voice assistant built into Samsung galaxy S8.
BITIng InTo BIg daTa it’s not a new trend, exactly. Experts have
been espousing the bene ts of big data for at least a decade. the key for the future is usability of that data. “What the nancial industry
is really trying to do is create actionable data—information that
better connects nancial institutions with their customers and drives revenue,”
notes Bruce Lowthers, executive vice president and cEO of global Retail Payments at FiS. the emphasis for the technology company already has shifted away from collecting big data to using actionable data for a variety
of purposes, including proactive fraud protection, enabling clients to give deals and offers to their customers, and helping clients with prospecting and acquiring new business, according to Lowthers.
Parts of this article originally appeared in Paybefore’s 2016 Payments in Review report sponsored by The Bancorp.
want to create customized apps for, say, 40 di erent entities you sell through.”
The proposition is proving to
be popular with Digiliti’s client base, a majority of which have committed to migrating to the updated platform. Three are in the process of doing so. As the com- pany looks to the future, arti cial
intelligence-supported customer service, while not yet on the road map, is certainly coming up in client conversations.
More immediate value-adds might include the ability for cardholders to generate an email to program providers within that app that includes all the transactional in- formation they need to challenge
an improper charge. Granville says giving cardholders access to their credit scores and a host of other features also are in the pipeline.
“The important thing for us is not only to create value for the card- holders but to make it easy for program managers and issuers to add those customizable, sought- after features e ciently,” he says.
volume 10 • spring 2017
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