The way people make payments is changing faster than any area of financial services, impacted by the changes in digital technology, competitive forces and consumer demands. Understanding the trends in payments is important for any bank or credit union wanting to serve the complete financial needs of members. This is worrisome: Financial Institutions not prepared for future of payments. “The challenge is — who will be prepared to be the provider(s) in the future? What organizations will make the investment and commitment necessary to provide seamless and secure contextual payments that use AI to make recommendations on purchases and the determine the best way to pay given a consumer’s personal financial situation? The winners will be determined quicker than most realize as consumers’ expectations grow exponentially. Some organizations will be left on the sidelines, while others may play a prominent part in a consumer’s daily life. What is clear is that most traditional organizations are playing catch-up.” Inside Visa’s vision for cashless commerce. (Attached) Insightful report, centered around five key trends and seven research insights Visa believes will shape the next 18 to 24 months. “Cash registers and stationary points of sale aren’t disappearing, but they are diminishing, because the reality of software-driven, point-of-sale systems is that they don’t need to be limited to any one location in a store – and consumers have no great historical love of waiting in line. “We can look at Uber, or how Starbucks now takes 20 percent of its orders through mobile order-ahead,” Singh noted. “Can you imagine going to an Apple store and lining up at a cash register to pay? No, of course not. And now we have Amazon rolling out Amazon Go – it really is only a matter of time before that experience is part of Whole Foods as well.” Singh acknowledged that there are many ways of enabling the notion of “points of sale everywhere,” and that it remains an important work in process. But as consumers are getting more familiar with interacting with their smartphones to do more things, merchants now have a number of new endpoints and opportunities to rethink their models.” Educate your customer about Open Banking or someone else will. “The future customer is not the one that understands and values the history of the Wells Fargo story in western US, it’s the customer that can make purchases through the easiest possible route via the tech that they use. Loyalty in banking is like football players playing for their teams and not for the money, a thing of the past. If banks don’t wake up to this reality they will be replaced as we know them today. A simple possible scenario is Apple announcing a banking arm offering a series of services if you hold a banking account with them that ties into their current services like Apple Pay and whatever else is to come. How many users today rely on PayPal more than going to their bank to make the same payment? So if a big tech provided account services and was already a trusted plater, we still believe a massive movement of accounts wont happen? If banks do not step up and together with fintechs become creative and appealing, the above is only a question of time.”

Why millennials are facing the scariest financial future of any generation since the Great Depression. Innovative digital experience and very interesting read. “But what we are living through now, and what the recession merely accelerated, is a historic convergence of economic maladies, many of them decades in the making. Decision by decisions, the economy has turned into a young people-screwing machine. And unless something changes, our calamity is going to become America’s.

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