The digital ecosystem of financial payment solutions is rife with frustration. Highlighted in the Gartner 2023 CIO Agenda, more than half of digital initiatives lag leadership expectations: 59% take too long to complete and 52% take too long to realise value. To get to market at speed with the right product you need everything, and everyone, to align. And too often they don’t. Realising a bold vision takes the right attitude, partners and a culture that isn’t afraid to embrace change.
Frustration 1
It’s impossible to move at the pace of customer needs.
According to our research* two-thirds (66%) of established businesses feel anxious that implementation of their Financial Services Provider won’t meet the delivery timeline. And a similar proportion were concerned they will need to make major trade-offs to deliver against the timelines.
This anxiety is warranted because speed matters. Speed-to-market means you can respond to customer demand, get feedback then iterate your product and experiences in far shorter timeframes. Ultimately this allows you to maintain engagement with customers, reducing churn, and improving lifetime value (LTV).
As customers become savvier and are conscious of everyday efficiencies needed in their businesses and lives, being able to move at the pace of their needs allows you significant advantages over competitors.
With the right provider you can leverage best-in-class tech to not only implement faster and gain more control but deliver quick payment and auxiliary solutions.
Look for vendors that are incentivised to help your business grow as quickly as you can. The most advanced will provide accelerators such as technology, business process and operational tools, and access to expertise.
Frustration 2
You can’t control the customer experience.
Your customers are everything. That means their experience of your product is paramount. So, if you need to design tailored, valuable customer experiences, and no one knows your customers like you do, that means you need to be in control of your CX.
To create the customer engagements you’ve always dreamed of, a large network effect needs to operate across the entire ecosystem. Complex vendor arrangements will chip away at the level of control you have over the CX diluting the experience itself. This will leave you spending your time managing stakeholders rather than building a better customer experience. Architect yourself toward a relationship that makes sense for a customer, so you get closer to them. Look for a vendor that improves your control – so they can “hand over the keys”. This allows you to control the way your customer experiences your products and services - that’s your key differentiator so you need a provider who can deliver on that promise. Remember, not all vendors give you control. The right one will.
Frustration 3
Your vendor is difficult to work with.
Often vendors do not speak your language and are unable or unwilling to operate at the pace or cadence you need.
Nine in 10 CXOs we surveyed expected to be able to launch a new financial services product within 12 months, so you need mutual investment where both parties look to avoid project delays and cost overruns by making the process as seamless as possible.
With the right partner there’s a shared vision and alignment – they match your ambition, not just in a technological sense, but a cultural one, resulting in transparent, open and clear lines of communication.
When things go wrong, you sit down together and work towards the north star to which you’ve agreed because success requires dealing with people who are excited and invested in your outcome. That’s the power of partnership.
Frustration 4
Your provider can talk the talk, but they can’t walk the walk…
Before project kick-off, your provider shows you their demo product and it’s just fabulous!
But in the real world things change, and it’s almost never the case that particular demo fits your specific product.
You need to work with people who can give you what they said was on the tin.
If they promise an end-to-end solution with APIs that integrate quickly, they’ll deliver it.
And you know because they’ll show you.
You can jump in their Sandbox and validate everything by testing and showcasing your proposition in a live environment with live rails generating live transactions. Everything is transparent: you can test core capabilities for your specific requirements. And that gives you something almost no other can deliver – confidence.
Frustration 5
You want to innovate but your provider is (unashamedly) inflexible.
Some platforms don’t allow innovation. Some are designed for it. You’ll come across providers with digital tools that have clearly identified prices but equally clear restrictions.
And sometimes you’re stuck with your own legacy stack that only works on a fit-for-purpose basis.
In either case, you’re stuck. Inflexible technology was the biggest frustration with current financial services provider offerings, at 47%.
It’s much better to work with a model where innovation is baked in, allowing you to do things such as orchestrate any financial journey.
That’s where a modular platform with multiple microservices offering a full set of payments capabilities comes in. A partner with an API-first, microservice architecture, that’s constantly evolving and improving can leverage the best technology.
Ultimately, an innovative, flexible platform means you can get products to your customers faster and de-risk the decision and execution of delivering valuable products to customers.
But again, it’s more than just the tech. It’s cultural. You need a group of people who are willing to change when the need arises. Suppliers that speak the same language, build technology in a similar way, have the same urgency in their work ethic and can operate at a similar pace or cadence.
With the right partner, innovation isn’t a risk, it’s business as usual.
In conclusion...
Many frustrations arise from becoming beholden to a vendor whose technology is as inflexible as their culture.
At Shaype, our team sits down with our customers and offers them the tools and education to make informed decisions - and then we work towards a shared vision, together. We think that’s more than a vendor relationship, that’s true partnership.
We bring together a range of financial experiences in a single ecosystem to avoid slow, expensive, inefficient implementations and ultimately deliver a tailored product designed for the end customer experience.
Payments Innovation Demand research conducted by Shaype in 2022 n=170 businesses looking to improve their payment capabilities by 2024