The payments team is no longer in the background.
“COVID has had a roller-coaster impact on consumer sentiment and behaviors,” Christopher Hudel, chief technology officer at Spreedly, told PYMNTS in a recent interview.
The great digital shift, he said, has spurred companies to focus on the last mile of payments — the interactions in the last few moments, and the ones that stick in our collective memories.
Payments, he said, aren’t just a back-end function anymore — they’re a front-facing component of everyday business. Companies can no longer simply chase growth at all costs. Instead, they need to find key points where they can improve customer journeys that deliver the best return on investment.
Variables like the point of checkout, the data inputs required and the ultimate acceptance or denial of payment can determine whether a consumer sticks with a merchant or provider or flees.
True Customer Fulfillment
“Think of it as fulfillment in making the customer happy,” Hudel said.
Against that backdrop, he said, the Amazon one-click checkout is still the gold standard. He noted that the eCommerce giant has led consumers to expect a broad range of details and transparency related to shipping, and to re-ordering items as needed.
But the firms — name the vertical, name the item or service — that want to emulate those intuitive payment experiences have challenges ahead of them. Smaller merchants may feel the vagaries of technical debt most keenly, but even merchant aggregators (with tens of thousands of sub-merchants) can benefit from partnerships that help smooth the way toward new payment models.
This is a far cry from the days when the payment options were limited, confined to payment networks like Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover.
“Now Google Pay, Apple Pay and others are part of the payments ecosystem,” he said. “And more organizations are moving towards local payment methods.”
Buy now, pay later (BNPL) options and cryptocurrencies are also gaining favor, and merchants need to include those payments options with the more traditional payment methods.
Related: How BNPL Upended Nearly a Century of Installment Payments
As consumers demand to pay (or in some cases, be paid) across their preferred methods and channels, and demand “buy online, pick up in store” options, companies can forge strong loyalty by meeting those expectations.
To get there, Hudel said an increasing number of enterprises — constrained by a lack of resources and development talent — are turning to providers like Spreedly to roll out new payment options. Those integrations take some of the pressure off legacy infrastructure, he said, which ensures that companies have minimal latency and no downtime.
“[Application programming interfaces] and their frameworks are always being upgraded, and security and compliance mandates change often, too,” he said. Operational efficiencies also improve as Spreedly’s offerings help migrate data, route payments and boost security, through a relationship he likened to “code as a service.”
The ultimate goal, he said, is to put the power of managing payments flows squarely into the hands of the client firm itself, helping them transform their tech proactively in-house as they reach new customers and segments.
Looking ahead, he said that the current macro environment is likely to change how customers interact with merchants and merchant aggregators. Hudel said those merchants will seek to reduce risk through partnerships with orchestration platforms.
“When you spread transaction volumes across multiple platforms, you can offer a wider range of services and payments to meet the quickening pace of customer demand,” Hudel said, adding, “When the consumer is in the driver’s seat, everybody wins.”
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