They Said That: Notable Quotables From the Last Week of Summer 2024

Cue the Beach Boys and Jimmy Buffett. It’s the last week of summer, and while a lot of the banking and payments world was on vacation, we were busy covering development in everything from AI to zillennials. Here’s a sample of notable quotables from the last official week of Summer 2024.

We started with an exclusive interview with Instacart chief product officer Dan Danker. In “Instacart Product Chief Says Grocery’s Future Is All About the AI-Powered ‘Personal Planogram,” he told us: “It’s about knowing what’s in the store, and specifically knowing what’s on the shelf. It’s extremely important. We do that better than anyone. If you’re placing an order right now for tomorrow, and those items are going to get replenished overnight, not letting you buy a certain product because it’s out of stock tonight might be foolish because it’ll be on the shelf by tomorrow morning. That requires so much history, right to every store in every location that we can predict when these items are going to show up on the shelf.”

Next up we got into the healthcare payments space with an exclusive panel interview. To understand how the evolution of healthcare billing and payments can remove frictions from the complexities faced by consumers and providers, as well as help streamline care delivery, PYMNTS’ CEO Karen Webster sat down with Tom Furr, CEO of PatientPay, and Ryan Zemmin, CEO of ClearGage, to discuss not just the Tuesday (Aug. 27) merger of their two companies, but also how digital innovations are enhancing the patient experience in healthcare billing and payments. In “Why the Future of Healthcare Payments Starts With Getting Rid of the Bill,” Zemmin told us: “The reality is, if you can give somebody the insight ahead of time to what the cost of a procedure might be, and then provide them a range of options to pay for that service, it gives them much more confidence in their ability to not only to get the service, but to be able to afford it.”

We also covered the continuing migration toward open banking and pay-by-bank payments. In “Trustly CRO Says Pay-by-Bank Solutions Benefit From Regulation and Shifting Consumer Preferences,” Frederick Crosby told us: “Cards allow commerce to happen that never could happen before. And to do that, they put this interchange rate, this 2% to 3% tax to protect people from fraud … But do you always need that beyond the first transaction? No, particularly when it comes to subscriptions … We see these repeat use cases as the perfect spot for open banking payments, whether it’s utilities, media services, even things like taxes.”

We also published excerpts from our quarterly eBook last week, one that covered the “Wild Cards” or factors that might not be obvious to a business. In “Regulatory Change Tops List of Payments Unexpected Threats,” we learned that the rise of technology requires a careful balance between innovation and risk management, as i2c Chief Client Officer Serena Smith wrote in “Beyond the Horizon: How to Identify Unexpected Threats That Could Impact Your Business.” “Another unpredictable factor is the rapid pace of technological advancement. Emerging technologies being created with artificial intelligence (AI) and continued releases like FedNow present both opportunities and challenges. Banks struggle to determine where to invest in the payments landscape, with numerous options complicating decision-making. The rise of these technologies requires a careful balance between innovation and risk management.”

And as always, we covered earnings season, including one of the more intriguing players in the connected economy: Peloton. In “CEO: Peloton Struggles to Shift Consumer Perception Despite Rebranding,” CEO Karen Boone told the earnings call: “Looking at the unit economics across all products and across all channels, right now, the subscription margins are quite good. It’s the hardware margins that are a little more challenged. It doesn’t mean that we won’t ever entertain a subscription price increase, but it’s not something that we’re planning for any time in the immediate future.”

And speaking of regulations, California is being aggressive about AI. In “Looking Ahead as California Signs Landmark AI Safety Bill,” Chamber of Progress Senior Tech Policy Director Todd O’Boyle said in a statement after the vote. “The California legislature is passing laws based on science fiction fantasies of what AI could look like. This bill has more in common with Blade Runner or The Terminator than the real world. We shouldn’t hamstring California’s leading economic sector over a theoretical scenario. Lawmakers should focus on addressing real-life bad actors and harms while empowering the best minds in California to continue innovating.”