In-depth: Fiserv on Removing Complexities in Commerce

There’s no doubt that customer experiences in commerce are enhanced when friction is removed from a business’ omnichannel approach.

A frictionless experience across a merchant’s different channels not only improves customer satisfaction rates, it also boosts retention and acquisition rates, thus increasing revenue.

We speak to Jeff Pomeroy, SVP and Head of Omnicommerce at Carat from Fiserv, who outlines three areas where merchants can reduce friction to deliver a seamless omnichannel experience.

Removing friction with new payments experiences 

First up for merchants is to ensure they offer customers convenient payment experiences.

“As businesses enhance their commerce infrastructure, delivering payment experiences that are convenient for consumers, and, most importantly, efficient for the business, is critical to success,” says Pomeroy.

“A perfect example is a retailer leveraging SoftPOS technology,” he continues, “to streamline checkout and build in-store efficiency by enabling payment acceptance on mobile devices. 

“Consider a music store that engages clients in a physical location to not only sell goods but also provide services such as guitar lessons.”

“This retailer can equip its staff with mobile payment options to remove friction as they provide services and take payments in-store, simplifying checkout by bringing the payment experience to the point of engagement.”

There are other ways checkout experiences can simplified, with payment options such as Pay by Bank. “This allows a customer to seamlessly connect their bank account as a payment option within the checkout experience,” adds Pomeroy. 

“Pay by Bank is becoming a preferred payment option for more consumers, especially as businesses reinvest savings from this lower-cost payment method to incentivise their customers.”

A convergence of commerce and financial services 

Second, while technology can offer new help merchants deliver new payments experiences, how you deliver financial services is equally important in next-generation commerce offerings. 

“One way retailers have begun doing this is through the expansion of their digital wallet capabilities,” says Pomeroy, “including leveraging a single ledger to create multiple stored value ‘purses’ with the retailer’s wallet. 

“These purses can store rebates or rewards points, gift cards, or even health and wellness benefits. 

“The values within multiple purses can then be drawn down within a single transaction, for example, if a customer is buying something with rewards points and a gift card, creating a simplified split-tender transaction for the customer.”

Indeed, some businesses are moving even further into this space by embedding finance capabilities into retail wallets.

“Examples of embedded finance include offering consumers access to credit or the ability to open bank accounts within the retailer’s digital environment,” adds Pomeroy. 

Maximising data and information

These new commerce innovations could not be employed successfully without having the ability to maximise data and information.

As Pomeroy puts it: “Data has become the oil that powers innovation. Whether it's real-time cloud sharing to accelerate financial closes, fuelling risk models to make more intelligent decisions, or augmenting customer and loyalty data with payments behaviours, businesses have more opportunity than ever to unlock value through insight. 

“At Carat, we’re partnering closely with our clients on strategies for simplifying how they ingest new data and make better decisions.”

These strategies include: 

• Enabling better data sharing between merchants and issuers
• Allowing users to leverage conversational AI to query data and understand insights instantaneously
• Deriving insights outside of payments data, including share of wallet, payments performance benchmarks, and out-of-store customer behaviour

**************

Make sure you check out the latest edition of FinTech Magazine and also sign up to our global conference series – FinTech LIVE 2024. 

**************

FinTech Magazine is a BizClik brand.