Opportunity for payments industry to shake survival mentality

The payments industry had been dealing with a series of rolling crises, tectonic shifts in the global financial system, before the world’s central banks sounded the alarm on stagflation. It feels like the right time to note that with crisis comes opportunity.

The payments and banking industry can seize the opportunity to establish a new level of trust and restore the confidence in the global economy, with a new system of trustees, a new generation of moral and ethical leadership, and an increased role for Australia in that process.

For context, there have been four major contractions that have hit the market to varying degrees in my time as a management consultant in technology for the financial services industry. There was the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and today’s fight against stagflation.

The problem with today’s crisis is it comes so hot on the heels of the pandemic. COVID-19 created a mentality of ‘surviving’. Making decisions with only the short-term in mind became the norm everywhere from home to the boardrooms.

This combined with the diminished confidence in some of our major international economic and political institutions fed an attitude of coping rather than addressing some of the long-term structural problems we face. Concerns about the strength of the Western Alliance, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations and NATO pose major challenges to the payments industry that relies on a stable and growing international community and economy.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s an emerging playbook for payments industry players to follow that will help build a system that’s better than the one we had before we entered the inflation-fighting crisis.

In the short-term, companies need to focus on stability of their supply value chains and financials. Turning to the medium-term, reassessments of roadmaps and risk management plans take centre stage, making sure to maintain attention on your core values as a company and what you want for broader society. Finally, the long-term goal for the payments industry must be to re-establish trust norms, industry rules and to help open new trading relationships, as well as using its maturity to bring more stability to the system.

For this we need a new generation of leaders that recognise the opportunity at hand and can lead us to it. I’m cautiously optimistic this generation is emerging.

The Australian fintech industry’s blossoming in the lead up to COVID-19 was undiminished by the pandemic, illustrating a maturity and resilience, as well as broader relationships across the globe, that Australia can now showcase to the world when it’s needed. I expect Australia can play a pivotal role in the global financial services and fintech industry as we look for a way to navigate ourselves through this turbulent period.

There is opportunity in crisis, the more crisis the bigger the opportunity. The global payments industry has been lurching from one crisis to another, which means we’ve got no shortage of problems that can be fixed with some determination and goodwill.