The future of Mobile Banking and Payments. “With the offering of basic mobile banking services achieved, banks and credit unions must focus on adoption and usage growth, using mobile banking as a relationship-building tool. This can be achieved through increased education and promotion of value-added tools and services that consumers want, including P2P payments, card controls, external A2A mobile transfers, as well as vastly increased mobile alerts and security features (biometrics). Organizations must also focus on the offering of mobile payment solutions in response to competition and consumer demand/expectations. More and more merchants are offering mobile payment functionality, increasing the need to respond to this marketplace dynamic. P2P payments are also extremely important to offer, using payment services to grow customer engagement and increase loyalty, which will improve competitive positioning and lifetime customer value.” Integrated Payments: Beyond the buzzword. “Aberman said there are a few industries that have already “arrived” in the integrated payments arena. Retail is the classic example, he said: eCommerce completely depends on integrated payments. Brands with a digital presence can’t do business without embedding payments in their online stores. Online accounting and invoicing are another area where integrated payments have already gained traction, especially among small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and service providers who are now managing their books in the cloud rather than buying desktop software. These SMBs and service providers use integrated payments to slash paper invoicing and enable credit card payments online.”

If you’re looking to ‘do’ digital transformation, read this first. “Transformation doesn’t matter, unless we are talking about the transformation of mindsets and attitudes, from build-to-last to do-it-fast. That’s why agile methodologies such as DevOps are so important, not in themselves (yes, that would be putting the cart before the horse again) but because they give businesses an approach to innovating at high speed. As we continue on this data-driven journey, as complexity becomes the norm, traditional attitudes to change at the top of business, or indeed our institutions, become less and less tenable. The bets we make on the future become less and less important; what matters more is our ability to make new ones.

Terminology matters not a jot. But are you and your colleagues, at whatever level in your organization, prepared to change? If the answer is anything other than yes, you have a bigger challenge on your hands than understanding the latest set of buzzwords.”

Data Bias is becoming a big problem. “Our data systems are designed by people and inherit many of our human flaws. We need to hold them to higher standards. Good systems, like good people, need to be transparent and accountable. We should know what information is being used, how factors are weighted and how conclusions are arrived at.

It’s been a long time since we simply accepted “the will of the gods” as an acceptable explanation for our fates. Now that those gods have been replaced by algorithms in black boxes, we need to continue to question their objectivity. Anything less is not only bad practice, it’s immoral.”