Companies with a high degree of digital payment literacy tend to become industry leaders. This research report outlines the ten key digital payment trends that every modern CEO needs to be aware of.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION STRATEGIES

How Digital Payments Can Drive New Opportunities

Every CEO today is being bombarded with messages that a key part of their company success lies in transforming their business digitally. While it may be debatable that any business can go fully digital, every business wants to take advantage of the benefits of a digital business model: minimal or no friction, elimination of paper, and the optimization of key processes.

The worldwide outbreak of the COVID-19 virus and the resulting global economic shock amplified (and accelerated) the need for very near-term digital transformation of the money handling value chain. Implicit in this “go digital” promise is the ability to digitize money flows–how funds actually change hands, how the information about the payments (the metadata) is captured and tracked, and how that information is made available to all relevant parts of an organization from finance and accounting to the executive suite, sales, operations, and compliance. It is much more than simply the ability to pay businesses and individuals digitally or to accept a variety of digital payment methods. Payment automation and increased speed are only half of the benefit. The other lies in payment metadata, affording companies the ability to capture and leverage payment information for communication with customers and suppliers.

In our research practice, we find that there is currently a huge gap between a basic, required level of digital payment literacy and what most senior business executives actually know about the critical last mile of their potential digital enterprise. Most see the entirety of digital payments as no different from personal credit card processing and expect CFOs and the rest of finance organization to tackle the bits and bytes of moving money. While this is not an unfair expectation, it is the organizations in which CEOs and other non-finance executives are literate about innovative digital payment strategies that lead with business innovation and benefit from market share gains.

KEY ISSUES

  • What are the durable, global business opportunities driven by advances in digital payments?
  • How can organizations leverage digital payments for speed and cost containment?
  • What are the risk factors in digital payments for large, global enterprises?
  • How will banks and other financial ecosystem participants be impacted by innovation in digital payments?