How to Give Cardholders Digital Self-Service, Fraud-Fighting Capabilities

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Despite the dramatic changes in consumer spending habits over the last 18 months, an unnerving constant remains: Fraudsters are ever-present, and financial institutions and consumers must stay on guard.

To address fraud issues and enhance safety, credit and debit card payments are being reimagined and increasingly conducted via digital channels. By deploying digital self-service card capabilities, banks can better protect their consumers and allow them to keep transacting securely.

Recent research by Raddon, a Fiserv company, shows the ongoing primacy of credit and debit card payments. In a typical month, 77% of U.S. households use a debit card for purchases and 80% of household use a credit card for purchases, according to the research.

 

Card usage among varying demographic consumer segments remains robust, with millennials, Generation X and baby boomers all reporting significant reliance on card-based payments.

However, the definition of a “card payment” is changing. Consumers are increasingly using their cards digitally, with 40% saying at least half of their monthly transactions are done digitally on their mobile phones or computers, according to Raddon.

Mobile card applications are the answer to these changing trends. Today’s digitally minded consumer needs card apps that help them manage their accounts when and how it suits them. Banks can keep customers satisfied and safe by implementing a comprehensive mobile card management solution.

Digital wallet participation enables banks to give cardholders the ability to add a card to their smartphone or wearable. If cards can be digitally issued at the time of account opening, all the better. This process enables immediate card access via the digital wallet and provide an easy, secure and contact-free way to pay. Card apps can also provide control features designed to keep cardholders safe and their financial institution top-of-mind. Consumers can use these apps to protect their accounts, manage their money and take charge of card usage. Their increased peace of mind will drive transaction volume and cardholder engagement, empowering users to fight fraud through alerts for card transactions and personalizing usage controls.

Consumers are concerned about their spending patterns. Providing cardholders with detailed spend insights and enriched transaction information makes it easier for them to understand their spending and make informed spending decisions. An enriched transaction can make the difference between a panicked consumer who is worried about fraud and someone secure in knowing that each purchase is one they’ve made. The transactions should include real merchant names, retail locations for physical purchases, transaction amount and purchase date. It should also include contact information for the merchant, so consumers can make any inquiries about the purchase directly with the merchant.

Every interaction with consumers is a chance to make a great impression, especially on mobile. Consumers appreciate fresh app designs and features that focus on simplicity, including one-touch access to functions. For example, consumers should be able to quickly and easily lock a misplaced card to prevent fraud and unlock it when located. These digital-first, self-service capabilities create an efficient and safe cardholder experience. Banks can leverage existing marketing resources and creative assets to keep their consumers informed about and remind them of secure self-service aspects of the payments program.

Consumer expectations continue to rapidly evolve and drive change. Banks must respond by staying focused on consumer needs and regularly delivering new app features and interconnected payment experiences. The institutions that do will succeed by continuing to provide consumers with convenient and safe digital management capabilities for their credit and debit cards, whenever and wherever consumers transact.

Three Steps to Building a Post-Pandemic Payments Strategy

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The Covid-19 pandemic spotlighted contactless payments. To stay competitive with the future of payments, community banks must offer multifaceted options, like virtual cards, P2P payments and digital wallets.

But building a digital and contactless payments strategy goes beyond just offering digital wallets — though that can be a key tool. To become their customers’ primary transactional relationship, community banks need a strategy to make credit and debit payments easy in any digital channel.

Digital banking and contactless payment adoption accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. A Mastercard survey conducted last year found that contactless transactions grew twice as fast as traditional checkout methods at grocery and drug stores between February and March. Additionally, Juniper Research found that spend in digital wallets is projected to increase 83% by 2025 due to adoption of digital payments during the pandemic. Three key steps for community banks looking to construct a card strategy are to audit your payments capabilities and gaps, use digital to become the passive provider of choice and diversify your card and payment portfolio.

Audit Payments Capabilities, Gaps
Before bank leaders can roll out new card programs, they must evaluate where their bank’s existing programs are and if any service gaps exist. Common questions every manager should evaluate are:

  • How much revenue is the current card program driving, and is it increasing or decreasing?
  • What is the wallet share of the bank’s current cards and is it increasing or decreasing?
  • Who are customers using to make payments outside your network?
  • What payment options can you support? Options should encompass virtual cards, P2P payments, purpose-driven cards that are targeted to specific audiences and needs and digital wallets.

From here, bank leaders can figure out where their greatest opportunities lie. It might be in building a set of niche card programs to meet a specific need, such as teen card accounts, gig worker cards or a virtual card offering. It could also be expanding card options to include prepaid programs, bringing debit cards in-house or adding card controls to enhance the customer experience.

Become the “Passive Payment” Provider of Choice
Once bank leaders understand their opportunities, they need to build strategies that help their cards become the “passive payment” provider of choice. Taking security as a given, customers care most about convenience. They will use the payment option that is the easiest for their chosen channel of commerce.

Digital wallets and contactless are becoming table stakes for banks; they are no longer “nice-to-have” products that will differentiate your institution from your competitors. The rise in e-commerce means that banks must make it easy for their customers to fulfill those purchases with their preferred payment option virtually.

Additionally, customers are increasingly demanding instant access to new accounts. Instant digital card issuance enables customers to issue or reissue a credit or debit card digitally and on demand for immediate use.

Banks should also work to ensure that their cards are able to integrate with existing digital wallets, allowing customers to “push-provision” their cards into their preferred wallet or app, rather than manually entering their card information.

Diversify the Card, Payment Portfolio
A diverse payments strategy is more than just offering a general-purpose debit or credit card. People increasingly want purpose-driven cards that meet their specific needs and situations. Families love accounts that provide the parents control over funds while giving their teens the ability to learn how to manage their money and spend with some autonomy. A dedicated business card can make paying vendors and other bills easy to manage without staff in the office to run a traditional accounts payable team. In addition, many businesses want “team” or “disbursement” cards they can issue to employees and monitor the transactions in real-time while retaining some control over how the funds are spent. The combinations are endless — elderly care accounts, affiliations with membership organizations and gig worker cards are other popular options.

To determine which products a community bank should focus on, leaders need to analyze customers’ spending behaviors by channel, using transaction data to look for trends. Then, they can build campaigns to target the most profitable or most engaged customers.

The additional revenue sources will be vital to community banks’ survival, given continually low interest rates. By building a comprehensive digital, contactless and physical card payments strategy, institutions can positioned themselves to remain the bank of choice for their communities.

The Blockchain Players: Understanding the Current Environment

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blockchain-8-23-17.pngFinXTech Advisor Christa Steele has created a four part series to educate our community about how blockchain is changing the transaction of digital information, its implications and the players who are shaping this technology. Below is the final part in this series.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Banks may be slow to adopt blockchain in the long run but commercial clients may force their hand. Companies that use blockchain such as ConsenSys, Linux Foundation, Hyperledger, and R3 aren’t just working with banks. Kaiser Permanente, Toyota, Cargill, Amazon, and several state, local and foreign governments, among others, are looking to implement blockchain technology as well. The list of prospective commercial clients continues to grow daily.

Why Community Banks Must Pay Attention
It’s too soon for a community bank to dedicate precious and limited resources to blockchain beyond just staying educated. Blockchain, also known as digital ledger technology, will no doubt be led by and developed by the larger financial institutions and regulatory bodies. I believe a community bank’s first interaction with the technology will come from interactions through their correspondent banks in excess of $50 billion in assets or larger commercial clients with robust treasury management requirements.

Blockchain is potentially so transformative, banks are likely to see changes in how banking infrastructure works today in the areas of payments clearing and settlement; digital currencies; capital markets, including securities clearing, settlement and custody; digital identification; supply chain management and regulatory compliance.

Current Regulatory Vibe in the U.S. and Abroad
It is safe to say that blockchain technology is becoming mainstream. The Securities and Exchange Commission, Internal Revenue Service and several other regulatory and governing bodies acknowledge the technology and have adopted policy language surrounding blockchain, digital ledger technology and virtual currencies over the course of the last 12 months. The most notable foreign government to announce its acceptance of blockchain is Dubai which aims to be a “city built on blockchain.”

Have You Opened a Digital Wallet?
Though I am focused on the underlying blockchain technology instead of digital currency adoption, I do encourage you to understand how the digital wallet works. It will be increasingly important in the coming months and years as these consumer digital wallets become mainstream. Xapo offers an easy-to-use and secure bitcoin wallet. I found Xapo’s account opening process to be seamless and easy to use.

Resources for Staying up to Speed
I remain convinced our industry will continue to be disrupted by improvements in technology. Technology enhancements are moving faster today than ever before. We can thank IBM and others for leading this technology charge. As you look to stay educated, great resources to consider include a membership with the Digital Chamber of Commerce and Linux Foundation. For more information, you can also check out CoinDesk, a blockchain news source.

Digital Wallets: Crossing the Chasm Between Online and Offline Payments

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chasm.jpgDigital wallets are beginning to change how consumers shop and pay. However, the concept can be confusing and daunting. There are over 160 wallets in the market. Some refer to them as “digital wallets”, others as mobile or e-wallets. What should banks do? Should they launch their own wallet solutions? Should they partner? If so, with whom?

The retailing landscape is changing. The growing number of smartphones and ubiquitous connectivity has been pushing the retailing industry towards “online-offline convergence”. Consumers are increasingly using their mobile phones when shopping to read product reviews, compare prices, and sometimes order online, leaving the physical shop empty-handed. Equally, they might order something online via laptop, mobile or tablet, but go and pick it up from a local store. Online commerce, both e- and m-variety, is by far the fastest growing retail segment in many developed markets.

If traditional payment instruments, such as cards, were somewhat clunky but acceptable for e-commerce, they are poorly suited for m-commerce. No one wants to fumble around their mobile phones typing in 16-digit card numbers, shipping addresses, etc. Not surprisingly, both Visa and MasterCard saw the opportunity to develop their own digital wallet solutions, V.me by Visa and PayPass Wallet Services respectively, to help address this market. Other players, such as, for example, Isis have focused on bringing the mobile wallets to physical stores.

There are many different ways wallets can differentiate themselves from each other. However, fundamentally, there are two main types of wallets based on where the payment credentials are stored:

  1. Secure element-based wallets store the payment credentials (e.g. card details) in a secure area inside the phone known as secure element, and communicate those credentials to the physical point-of-sale (POS) terminal typically via Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. An example of such a wallet in the United States is the recently launched Isis.
  2. Cloud-based wallets store the payment credentials in a secure area on a remote server, or “in the cloud.” How those payment credentials are communicated to the merchant depends on the specific implementation. Perhaps the best known example of a cloud-based wallet is PayPal.

While online-offline convergence is rapidly becoming a reality for retailers, the same is not yet true for payments. It remains a challenge today to use online the payment credentials residing in the secure element-based wallet, and to use cloud-based credentials at the physical POS. For example, PayPal, a leader online, is working hard to get to the physical POS, while Visa and MasterCard are using their strength in the physical world to develop cloud-based digital wallets. Google Wallet is one notable example which does combine both secure element and cloud-based credentials, but given the transaction economics, it remains an exception to the rule.

There are a few solutions emerging as potential candidates to help bridge the divide between online and offline payments, however, most of them remain in relatively early stages of development. We believe that the payments industry will continue to try and solve this conundrum and we will see more solutions in this space emerging over the next 12 to18 months.

However, in the end, the desired online and offline ubiquity for any single wallet may prove to be illusionary. I do not share the view of those who think that there will be “one wallet to rule them all.” If anything, the mobile phone itself might become such a “wallet,” with consumers using multiple apps to shop and pay with payment credentials stored in multiple places.

In today’s fragmented world of digital wallets, our advice to banks would be to think twice before launching their own branded independent wallets. Some banks might be successful in doing so, but many others are likely to be better off by ensuring their payment credentials are available with the wallets most likely to win in the market. Supporting traditional scheme wallets, such as Visa’s V.me and MasterCard’s PayPass Wallet, should be a “no brainer” decision for most banks, but other specific market segment leaders, such as Isis or Google in the United States would also merit consideration. Banks should also remember that many already have a great asset in their mobile banking platforms and should focus on enhancing and extending them with rich value-added services, including payment propositions, such as P2P or access to card-based and other payment credentials.