The most surprising thing about American Banker's Payments Forum — which brought together experts from across the payments industry for three days in May — was what wasn't discussed.
And I wasn't even the one who noticed.
"In all the years I've been coming, such a [major] theme was mobile payments, mobile wallets, mobile everything. And I feel like it barely got mentioned this week," Ginger Schmeltzer, principal for data and services at Mastercard, said as she sat next to me in the final panel discussion. "It just is part of what we're doing every day with Apple Pay and various wallets."
Back in 2019 — the last time we hosted this conference in person — it was called Card Forum. The new name is, in itself, a reflection of how far the payments industry has come in just a few years. But the transformation isn't over yet; we are still very much at a turning point.
In past years, people asked how we could get consumers to use plastic cards instead of cash. Should the cards be made of metal? Should they be
And in place of the card, there will be the mobile wallets that nobody is talking about anymore because they are becoming commonplace. Personally, I didn’t use cash during my entire trip to Payments Forum; I paid for my meals with an Apple Watch and used the Lyft and Uber apps to pay for rides.
Another thing people weren't talking about: whether to implement artificial intelligence and chatbots as part of customer service. That’s because many customers already have access to these features today.
After months of coronavirus-induced branch closures that shifted digital holdouts to online banking, it's a given that the online and mobile customer-service channels must be every bit as robust as the in-person ones.
And that means a chatbot with a fictitious name, an age, and a life and interests outside of customer service.
"Sydney is our chatbot or intelligent virtual assistant, but she's not just any chatbot," said Bess Healy, senior vice president and chief information officer at Synchrony. "We have put a lot of focus in really developing a more humanized experience in your interaction and engagement with her, and it's caused us to do some interesting things that some might not actually expect."
Sydney debuted in 2017, but her character is that of a 27-year-old — and she ages with time. Sydney has a dog named Waffles. She has a relationship status. Sydney also adapts her mannerisms to match the brand of each retail partner Synchrony works with.
"We have done a number of things to really help humanize her with a focus around empathy," Healy said. "There's no finish line to Sydney's growth."
The result is a virtual employee who works every hour of every day and has a more than 85% resolution rate and is on track to reach nearly 17 million interactions as of this year, according to Healy.
And finally: No one at the conference was asking if the payments industry will return to the way it was before the pandemic. It won’t.
It's clear that the maturation of cryptocurrency, the popularity of buy now/pay later lending, and the ubiquity of technology have forever changed the way consumers and businesses make payments.
Companies have already decided how they plan to move forward. Umpqua Bank in Portland, Oregon, adopted a remote-work strategy in 2020 that it still adheres to; Segpay in Deerfield Beach, Florida, had its employees return to the office at around the same time.
Under both models, business can move faster than ever.
“We used to plan an in-person meeting with customers two weeks out, and now we often say, ‘How about this afternoon?’, and we can accomplish everything we need on a whiteboard in a virtual meeting — it’s quicker than ever,” said
Those pre-conference sessions are unlike any other part of the event. Prominent female executives come to discuss not only their predictions about the payments industry but also the finer details of how they lead their organizations through disruption and provide mentorship in a rapidly changing work environment.
"You have to create those opportunities for people to really showcase themselves," said Alisa Ellis, global head of innovation and emerging products at Discover Financial Services. "We've hired people in the last two years who've never been to the home office, nor have they met any people with whom they work in person. That's a tremendously different experience from someone who's been there for 10 years."
The payments industry is moving faster than ever. I can't wait to find out what we are — and aren't — talking about a year from now.
