Money20/20 Day 3: Reimagining financial services

Day three of Money20/20 began with Keynotes from Accenture, Affirm, Ingenico and PayPal and then broke into tracks on customer experience, innovation, alternative lending, entrepreneurship, mobile wallets and more. 

Here Mintel SVP Comperemedia, Andrew Davidson, shares six different perspectives from industry leaders discussed over the past three days that challenged attendees to reimagine financial services…

1. Walmart’s view on EMV:“…we have put the customer in peril at the busiest time of the year. We are deliberately forcing anarchy in the payments system. Customers won’t read direct mail buck slips that explain how to use their cards, and issuers will get customer service calls, as a result, because customers expect their cards to work. Merchants have been put in an unfair position and we should make smarter decisions as an industry.” – John Drechny, Walmart

2. PayPal’s rallying cry: “…this industry is on the cusp of something historic. We all need to reimagine what financial services could look like and not just those at Money20/20 but the government, academia, NGOs and others. We have solutions grounded in tech that can make the saying “it’s expensive to be poor” obsolete from the financial services perspective. We can make payments faster, easier, simpler, more secure and less expensive. We have a moral obligation to make a difference but that is not counter to being a profitable corporation.” – Dan Shulman, PayPal

3. On the importance of CX: “…digital innovation is not the only solution as it can be copied and commoditized. Financial services companies should learn about customer experience from other industries. Prioritizing the customer experience is not just the right thing to do but it drives shareholder value – the leaders in customer experience have seen their market capitalization grow at five times the rate of the laggards. Fred Reichheld’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) was developed before the recession but has been particularly good at identifying customer experience leaders in the digital world including Apple, Warby Parker, Bonobo and Airbnb. As Steve Winn said, ‘it’s all about the guest experience and nothing else.’” – customer experience panel including Fred Reichheld, T-Mobile, Wynn Las Vegas, and Red Fish Media

4. Facebook and “mobile discovery”: “…consumers are three times more likely to search for products on their desktop compared to their mobile phone. Mobile is more about discovery and seeing what’s around you rather than searching and looking for commerce. It’s also about connections and conversations and commerce is one more social interaction. Facebook connects more than a billion consumers with some 45 million retailer pages and, as a result, commerce has emerged organically through innovations such as Facebook groups.” – Deborah Liu, Facebook

5. Best Buy’s hedge on choice: “…Best Buy only recently added Apple Pay but, while Apple Pay is driving higher value purchases, it will need rewards and loyalty to take it to the next level in terms of adoption. Best Buy was a founding member of MCX but felt it had to provide consumers with choice. All of the digital wallet plays want to capture both online and offline purchases eventually. Retailers suffer from extremely low margins so price discounts, such as those offered by Chase on Chase Pay, are very compelling.” – Mark Smith, Best Buy

And finally…

6. On Apple’s “walled garden”: “…the focus should be on the customer and the card life-cycle from both the pre-purchase and post purchase perspective. Apple’s ‘walled garden’ (for developers) is starting to breakdown as it opens up new APIs to integrate with banking apps. Android Pay has turbo charged that process.” – Chris Ackroyd, Monetise

Andrew Davidson is SVP Comperemedia at Mintel. He is a multi-channel marketing and payments expert with over 20 years of marketing research experience. Andrew is regularly called upon to provide analysis for leading media publications worldwide and is also a key speaker at Card Forum and other high profile international industry events.