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digital money
Igniting Payments Change
We know if you can get customers active
in the mobile application, they stay longer.
We have numbers showing it’s double or triple the average lifetime of a non-mobile app user.
are better and cheaper than what banks provide.”
AZ Payments’ Oglesby also sees
a shift happening in the way pay- ments technology is delivered. “Traditionally, payments was a one-size- ts-all business and you sold the same solution to everyone,” he says. “What we’re nding now is that businesses and retailers are trying to create unique experiences and there are nuances to all the di erent payment services they need. Providers need to specialize.”
Stripe, for example, is focused on helping e-commerce startups get to market quickly and inte- grate payments with as little pain as possible. “The API is the game-changing tech,” Oglesby says. “Stripe is solving payments like a technical problem, not a business problem.”
Wirecard’s von Waldenfels also expects more incremental changes ahead. “The boundaries between the online world and the o ine world are blurring. Cross-channel payments are a clear trend in 2017 and this is backed up by the evolution of m-POS terminals into SmartPOS terminals,” he says.
“At the same time, mobile pay- ments are becoming more popular. Merchants, such as Starbucks, Walmart and Kohl’s in the U.S. or suppliers like Payback and Orange Cash, already have realized that mobile payments are of strategic importance in bridging the gap between the real world and the digital world.”
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Australia, a regional accreditation from Visa for Asia-Paci c, integra- tion with a new issuing bank in Australia and setup of the new program manager and its program on the GPS platform—took less than three months.
“This is transformational in terms of time to market and demon- strates that the GPS platform and implementation methodology is driving change and innovation in the payments industry,” he adds.
GPS also provides an external auth- orization service that is proving to be popular. “Many customers wish to manage their own balances, supported by appropriate licensing and issuing-bank permissions,” says Chief Commercial O cer Neil Weeks. “This can give them advan- tages in foreign exchange treasury management, wallet-to-card balance management and other areas that support their customer proposition.”
For example, a customer’s app could give cardholders the ability to budget. If a cardholder set
a budget for $50 for a night out, the program manager can decline a transaction that would go over the budget even though the card balance is enough to cover the transaction, Weeks says. Clients are involved in the transaction authorization decision, which GPS routes to and from the client and
—Walt Granville, Digiliti Money
the Mastercard/Visa network in a few hundred milliseconds, accord- ing to Weeks. Ultimately, it gives customers more control, he says.
As GPS looks ahead, the company is con dent it will help clients adapt to change. “We now are starting to see signi cant traction in the wearables and mobile payments sectors and have invested to develop innovative processing architecture to support these emerging trends,” says CEO Tony Kerr.
Small Changes, Big Impact
Overall, the consensus among payments experts is that more changes will be incremental than monumental, but that doesn’t mean their impact will be small. It also may not be the technology itself that drives the transformation but its delivery or distribution.
“Disruption will not come from
the invention of new technologies,” says Samee Zafar, director in the London o ce of Edgar, Dunn & Company. “The real disruptors are and will be those who see opportu- nities in the delivery value chain that incumbents have missed. International payments, for exam- ple, have been dominated by banks who o er their services via corre- spondent banking relationships. Clever new entrants are o ering value-added and industry-speci c solutions along with payments that