NEA On The Transparent Payment Future

The PYMNTS team caught up with experts in the payments field to ask them their views on industry trends, predictions for the future and what their ideal payments system looks like.

Here’s what Rick Yang, Partner at NEA, had to say.

PYMNTS: What are the biggest trends you’ve been tracking in 2015?

RY: There’s a huge portion of the demographic, globally, but mostly in the U.S., that does not view their bank as a financial service provider. They view banks as a place to store their money, and then they get their financial services from all other sorts of places. Robinhood, Venmo — these are the things that people think “Hey, these are the applications that help me do things with my money.” Paying friends, investing in stocks and bonds — but they don’t really think of a bank as doing that.

So we continue to think about the areas where banks and traditional services can continue to be disrupted by new technologies, this whole idea of catering to the millennials. I think consumers, especially the younger demographic, are looking for a different kind of financial services brand — one that is much more transparent, one that is much more aligned with the consumer, versus feeling like a customer that is to be monetized as much as possible in different ways.

PYMNTS: What trends in particular are you looking forward to in 2016 and beyond?

RY: Along the lines of this transparency piece, I think consumers don’t think enough about what it means to them for a merchant to bare the cost of credit cards, or to bare the cost of fraud. They think, “That’s the merchant’s problem.” At the end of the day, that gets passed back to the consumer in the way of increasing prices, fees, or things like that.

I think people are starting to understand that, so I think you’re starting to see really innovative companies like Jet build that into the flow in a way that’s transparent, but doesn’t really change the user experience — it actually improves it because consumers like to make these kinds of choices.

I think the second thing is how you tie much more data into payments and transactions. So you’ll end up with a lot more technology providers that will help merchants and payment providers gather and analyze that data in a way that’s digestible and actionable, and it will translate into higher customer satisfaction, better consumer experience, and better loyalty.