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
