Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
What will the payments business look like when, God willing, the coronavirus vaccine becomes available and the plague lifts? That’s one of the questions we’ve been batting around here at Digital Transactions, so in this issue we decided to take a shot at answering it. The results can be found in our double-barreled Acquiring section.
“Payments in a Time of Plague,” this issue, looks in some detail at three technologies getting increased attention because of their utility for people in lockdown; contactless payments, e-commerce, and peer-to-peer payments, largely in real time. The case for these technologies in the middle of a viral outbreak is obvious, but the real question is, will the practices we adopt now outlast the pandemic and become habitual?
In this connection, we are struck by the example of image exchange, a now commonly deployed technology for check processing. But in 2001, checks were still flown in bundles around the country for settlement. The 9/11 attacks that year forced authorities to ground those and many other planes and started banks on the path toward adoption of the new technology (our thanks to Steve Ledford at The Clearing House for reminding us of that example).
We don’t pretend to know whether, for example, contactless will similarly assume ubiquity as a result of a quite different, but no less frightening, emergency. The experts we talked to, though, agree the likelihood is high. Fear of infection is strong and may well outlast the actual virus, helping to form a habit among consumers of tapping a card while not touching a keypad.
Our second story, “Acquirers in Survival Mode,” describes the ways in which third-party acquirers are coping with stay-at-home orders, store closings, plunging retail sales, and the disruption of acquisitions, both those in progress and those planned.
The heartening thing about this story, as senior editor Kevin Woodward found, is the resilience of these players in the face of daunting challenges. Some prospective deals had to be discarded, but others were consummated. Required equipment was installed in multiple homes—now remote offices—so employees could perform critical duties. Services such as loyalty programs and payroll processing were continued for clients at little or no cost to them.
I was struck especially by the positive attitude the acquiring execs have maintained through all this. As Austin Mac Nab, founder and chief executive of VizyPay, told Woodward: “It’s teaching us a lot about what our capabilities are. We found a lot of things we’re good at that we didn’t know that we were good at.”
May we all learn similar lessons in these unsettling times.
—John Stewart, Editor, john@digitaltransactions.net
