22
21 EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES | BDO LLP
EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES | BDO LLP
‘The current world of payments, in the West at least, is very much card- dominated. Cards are a pull payment: you provide your card details to a payment gateway/acquirer, they take that card information, contact the banks, and move the funds from one account to another.’ ‘On the other hand, account-to-account payments are cardless, push payments initiated by a consumer. We connect the merchant to the consumer, in order to create a payment which the consumer just needs to securely authorise. It’s a better-than-card experience, with customers never needing to type a password or a PIN, funds settling into the merchant’s account within 10 seconds rather than waiting a couple of days for a payment gateway to settle back to you. Fraud & chargebacks are significantly reduced because there are no cards or numbers to lose, and the payment is authorised with SCA (Strong Customer Authentication).’
For James Duez, CEO of Rainbird, FinTech’s focus on expedient solutions with a clear path to ROI will help them weather the current storm. ‘Senior people in enterprise are focused on restructuring around the same uncertain future that tech organisations are facing, and reducing costs wherever possible,’ he says. ‘It’s worth reflecting that according to Beauhurst 40% of jobs are at risk across early-stage tech firms – but only 22% of UK FinTech jobs are at risk, signifying a relatively low impact on the sector compared to the rest of its technology peers. This resiliency is because B2B FinTechs primarily provide mission-critical services to their customers.’
In 2017, he set out to find a way to make it easier to identify and pay online that reduces both fraud and friction to the two parties, while reducing the cost of making those payments. As an FCA-authorised payment institution, Citizen can transact both card and cardless payments for consumers and businesses. Neville sees the real opportunity for growth and innovation in the mainstream adoption of cardless account-to-account real-time payments. ‘We’ve predominantly operated in the regulated spaces, so anywhere where there’s a need to identify the customer on the end of the payment transactions, such as trading assets online, FX remittance, prepay, gaming and so on. But I feel very blessed that our business is digital identification and payments, because if anything’s going to thrive horizontally in a remote economy, this is it.’
innovating or transforming digitally, when in fact many of these partnerships were little more than vendor arrangements bolted onto existing creaking infrastructure, the New Reality will see a greater focus on metrics around operational efficiency and monetisation. ‘Banks will need to accelerate their investments in FinTech to achieve both the top-line increases and expense reductions needed to maintain margins and profitability,’ writes Shriven. He quotes the Centre of Excellence on Emerging Development Perspectives : ‘The potential of digital financial services in providing secure, low-cost, and contactless financial tools has become even more apparent during the crisis. But there’s a catch, the reliance is on the “convenience” that digital finance provides and not necessarily on the unicorn startups that have driven the rise of FinTech.’
CASE STUDY: CITIZEN.IS James Neville, CEO and founder of Citizen, has worked in the ecommerce and payments space for 20 years. A former CTO of WorldPay, he founded Citizen to solve a key payment puzzle. ‘The one thing that I always found challenging in the merchant space was the fraud-friction trade-off: The more you tried to make things easier for consumers, the more you reduced the friction; but at the same time, the more the fraud goes up.’
Made with FlippingBook HTML5