Cards & Payments

An Industry Catching Up with Itself

In a curious reversal, big players in cards and payments are mostly playing catch-up with boutique and niche players on the newer solutions like Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), Real-Time Payments (RTP), Cross Border Payments, Open Banking, and Embedded Fintech. Their response has been to increase acquisitions and consolidations and they need to be nimble to integrate the newer systems. All players are racing to take advantage of newer solutions coupled with existing services to gain further market share.

Large enterprises continue to be burdened with complex platforms and legacy technologies that inhibit their ability to innovate quickly and at scale. Those failing to embrace cloud computing, enhanced customer experiences, and automation face falling behind more nimble players.

As technology advancements and expanding global networks become more pervasive, organizations face major problems protecting the systems and data. Consumers continue to embrace new payment methods, increasing cyber security threats for businesses.

Trends

Contactless payments have become a driving differentiator around the world, consumers are choosing to shop with business that offer contactless payments at the point of sale. The ability to pay by tapping a physical card, wearable or smartphone-enabled RFID or NFC technologies were already on the verge of widespread global adoption and will continue to gain acceptance in our pandemic-dominated world.

Deferred payment (BNPL) will continue to see accelerated growth in the coming years. Additionally, consolidations are imminent and big payment providers are expected to make defensive moves by acquiring smaller BNPL players. Brands will focus on their merchant selling strategy, leveraging BNPL as value-added services.

COVID 19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of Digital Payments focusing on feature rich, personalized end-to-end payment experience. e-Commerce and m-Commerce are now mainstream and prime shopping preferences for customers. Person to Person (P2P) payments started gaining popularity, picking up significant momentum during the 2020 pandemic as well. Venmo, Zelle, and Square Cash apps have grown in popularity, with volume hitting $393.9 billion on the back of massive user growth in 2020.

Businesses need to embrace technology’s ever-evolving nature and leverage the latest advancements in order to remain competitive. Cloud technology, open banking, API-driven solutions are seen as key to drive business growth further particularly when digital experiences continue to influence commerce more than ever. Businesses will reap the benefits of cloud technology by combining the value of existing platforms for greater reliability, faster product delivery cycles, better economies of scale and innovative analytics.

Orion’s Digital Solutions

Digital Product Engineering – Our teams understand the API-led payments ecosystem, including point of sale products and services, digital payments, marketplace. We know businesses need to be more responsive to address the evolving demands of the marketplace. Our unique scalable, agile operating model equips customers with development engineers, automation experts, QA engineers, cloud-native specialists to build the products for the future at an accelerated pace.

Cloud Transformation and Platform Modernization – Although the digital revolution redefined the world of cards and payments, Orion simplifies these complex systems and builds value for our client’s transformation journey. Our payments modernization offerings include core platform assessment, portfolio rationalization, Cloud strategy, decommission strategy, platform re-architecture and DevSecOps.

Digital Experience Transformation – Our experts create the digital experiences that matter most for your end customers. Our deep domain experts in banking and payment products work closely with our digital experience teams to conduct product studies and develop strategies to transform the customer experience. We uncover actionable insights and deliver highly personalized digital products for merchant insights, customer 360 and market expansions.

How we can help

Orion can partner with your firm to anticipate evolving client and employee expectations, find the right answers, conceptualize and build the right solutions, and deliver the business transformation you need. We bring decades of experience transforming financial services operations with Digital Strategy, Experience Design, and Engineering.

Cards & Payments

An Industry Catching Up with Itself

How we can help

Further Reading