Today’s Payments Solutions Market: A Personal Perspective

The payments industry is experiencing significant disruption because of rapid technological change, increasingly diverse consumer demands, and new entrants all competing for the consumer’s loyalties. Payments organisations are generally responding to this competitive landscape through one of two investment strategies:

• To remain locked in an expensive game of “patch-up and catch-up” with their existing legacy infrastructure and vendors, or
• To embark on a strategic journey of innovative transformation to establish a sustained competitive advantage. Invariably this involves shifting their IT infrastructure out of their data centres into the Cloud, and the deployment of highly adaptable, cloud-native payment applications.

Although it is true that the “patch-up” camp is still in the majority, this situation is rapidly changing as more and more major payments providers face soaring development costs and a diminished ability to compete.

It’s my assertion that choosing the right vendor to match your organisational ethos, and agreeing how you will work together, are among the most important investment decisions that an organisation can make.

Too often, organisations start their investment decisions with a feature-by-feature comparison of existing off-the-shelf products.  In my view this is a dangerously failed strategy - it only perpetuates the status quo and fosters an inability to react to new growth opportunities.

This “Pick What There Is” mindset fails because your needs will change faster than you think—because the market will continue to change faster than you can project. Sustained success requires a journey of transformative change where WHO you work with, and HOW you work together, has a significantly more profound impact on your long-term successes than the fine detail of WHAT you start with.

 The winning strategy in this new competitive landscape will be to enable transformative thinkers to innovate without constraint – enabling them to create the freedom to make positive forward-looking decisions that enhance future growth and customer satisfaction. Implementing such a strategy requires a corporate mindset founded on collaboration, trust, and delivery achievement.