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Catching Hold Of Rapidly Digitizing Consumer Bases

Catching Hold Of Rapidly Digitizing Consumer Bases
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It’s been a busy week in payments and commerce as June kicks off and consumers around the world are ready to reemerge into the physical world. But their path back to normal still looks decidedly uncertain, as the pandemic’s future remains unknown and civil unrest throughout America acts as a headwind just as normalcy begins to make an appearance. Of course, what “normal” means remains something of a jump ball at this point, as consumers and SMBs readjust to new habits and bigger businesses formulate new ways to reach customers.

Hear from Amir Wain, i2c Founder and CEO, as he shared his thoughts about how the landscape is suddenly more complicated than it was three months ago, during the latest edition of This Week in Payments with Karen Webster, CEO of PYMNTS.com. “Companies are finding solutions and traction in pockets, and payments players with global ambitions are participating in building the next generation of products or offerings that can connect all of these digitizing pieces for consumers and SMBs,” Wain said. As consumers and SMBs have become more digital-focused over the past several months, the competition between traditional financial services firms and challenger FinTech-backed banks with seamless digital service and slick UIs suddenly looks more formidable.

Wain relayed the risk is that traditional banks will look at those UIs and think all they have to do is upgrade to something similar and compared it to realizing your car needs improvements and deciding to upgrade the paint instead of putting in a new engine. “If your car is old and you start focusing on the paint job rather than worrying about your transmission and your engine, the car may look good to your neighbors for a little bit, but it’s going to break down,” he said. “The paint is important, but that can‘t be my priority. There’s so much focus in the financial market right now that there’s a whole ecosystem of people coming up who are just focused on the UI layer and their plan to integrate that into the old legacy systems.”

The future of FinTech won‘t be won by what looks the best, Wain said. The systems that go the distance will actually deliver more than their competitors – and more consistently and smoothly. That theme reverberated across big news items of the past week and both Wain and Webster agreed that everyone wants to rule the emerging digital world, but actually being able to deliver requires a lot more than a simple, slick interface.

Click on the video above to listen to the full episode of This Week in Payments.

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