Inefficient card programs are costing you

Unlock operational efficiency with automation and scale

Financial institutions are laser focused on efficiency, and rightly so. A poor efficiency ratio – the relationship between your expenses and your revenue – will slow the movement of money through your institution to a crawl and negatively impact your service to customers.

Efficient operations, on the other hand, speed up money movement and help you achieve your growth goals without ratcheting up your expenses. Why is operational efficiency so critical, and how can you execute more with less?

The traps for lost revenue

Financial institutions of all sizes need to understand the changing landscape of revenue regarding baseline interchange costs. The revenue that’s lost from interchange needs to be replaced. Everyone in the card ecosystem now must think about efficiency and providing better services for less cost, but also seek out new ways to earn revenue that are not interchange-based. This opens the door for innovation in revenue-generating services that can go to market quickly.

Another challenge to retaining your customers and driving more transactional growth from those relationships is that, in this new digital world, they can easily move their accounts to another institution within minutes. This puts further pressure on your institution to drive efficiency in your operating environment while innovating, retaining cardholders and developing new revenue streams. For smaller banks, in particular, this can be an overwhelming prospect.

The new path to efficiency

Over the past decade or so, if you had an operational or efficiency goal, you would probably look at your employee costs, vendor costs, your mix of onshore vs. offshore, etc. It was a labor-intensive way to reduce costs and required continuous investment of time and energy.

Today, if you invest in efficient processes, you can achieve a similar or greater outcome. These processes can speed up work at scale, with minimal ongoing involvement and continuous returns. For example, conversations in a contact center could take seven minutes rather than 17 because employees have access to more information. Larger projects could be reduced by months. Rather than simply cutting costs, these types of investments can pay off across your organization and for years to come. Look toward the future, advancements like AI will only make automation faster and more accessible.

Finding efficiency in card operations

Your card programs can be a prime target for more efficient processes. When you process card payments on legacy platforms, you need to bolt on a new, disparate system every time you extend your services. That leaves you working with a range of software vendors and makes it more complex and costly to run card programs and add new payment products and solutions.

With a unified, modular platform of open, well-integrated technology for debit and credit card processing, you can reduce the high overhead of running a fragmented, multi-vendor technology environment. You’ll be able to process higher volumes of card payments for less cost and improve speed to market for new payments solutions that help you compete for new customers and retain existing ones.

Partnering to unlock efficiency

A strong technology partner can provide scale to your operations, freeing you from repeatable processes that can be automated and allowing you to reinvest that money in strategic investments focus on last-mile delivery of services to your cardholders.