Banks and merchants are experiencing unprecedented change. And while this presents significant opportunities, it also requires stakeholders to overcome a range of challenges to ensure the pieces of its strategic puzzle are all in the right place.
Acquiring and issuing banks must balance the need to transform their strategies and infrastructures for long-term success, while ensuring short-term revenue growth. Retailers and merchants are required to make increasingly complex strategic decisions to reduce costs and increase revenues in today’s omnichannel world. But with margins constantly squeezed, it is difficult to know where to focus resources.
Merchant Acquiring and Processors
Fundamentally, acquiring banks need to balance increasing complexity while reducing transaction acquisition costs.
Transaction volumes are at an all-time high, pushing acquirers to develop new secure solutions to manage peak transaction volumes from multiple payment channels. All while maintaining PCI DSS compliance.
Additionally, retailers increasingly want to accept a wide range of payment form factors and new acceptance solutions like Android-based SoftPOS, as well as enabling seamless omnichannel buying experiences. All of this creates both opportunities and technical challenges to integrate new payments technologies for merchant acquirers.
Issuing Banks
Issuers face a range of challenges across all areas of their business. Firstly, increasingly complex regulatory mandates such as PSD2 and GDPR are changing business models and increasing competition. Issuers need to keep up to date with the new, agile FinTechs disrupting the issuing ecosystem and driving innovation across new payment platforms and form factors. Banks must decide whether to collaborate or compete with FinTechs on new, innovative projects, ensuring that they are delivering the highest levels of cyber and fraud security, while aligning with global and domestic payment standards.
The disintermediation created by FinTechs and ‘GiantPays’ is requiring new multi-factor authentication methods – that combine emerging technologies and protocols, including biometrics, risk-based, and 3-D Secure – to ensure security and strong customer authentication across in-store, in-app and online payment channels. Issuers must also ensure that they are upgrading back-end infrastructures to process payment data and authorization requests from new digital channels. Prioritizing and finding the best route forward can be difficult.
Retailers
As payment channels and form factors diversify, many retailers struggle to offer consumers choice while maintaining an interoperable and frictionless buying experience across multiple channels. It is essential that retailers deploy a seamless, omnichannel strategy to engage customers throughout the buying journey.
Retailers must also understand a range of new payment acceptance, authentication and security technologies to protect their business, and their customers’ data and money. The shift towards digital payments also means merchants need to aggregate increasing transaction volumes across large networks of stores both nationally and internationally, while identifying cost reduction and revenue enhancement opportunities.
Putting the pieces together
Navigating the complexities of digitalized payments and ensuring compliance with global and local requirements can be a real challenge for those looking to integrate new technologies. Expert support can help select the best technologies to meet business model needs and streamline the path to launch.
With unrivalled payments expertise, FIME can offer end-to-end project support, with testing, certification and comprehensive consultancy and solution engineering at the forefront, putting the pieces of a secure, compliant strategy together.
