APEX: Attracting Consumers amid Payment Solution Overload
On the final day of the All Payments Expo in New Orleans on March 23, Sam Maule, emerging payments practice lead at Carlisle & Gallagher Consulting Group, challenged the audience to change the way they think about providing payments solutions. “You all care [about new payment options], but consumers don’t. They have solution overload,” he said. “There’s way too much noise and what pain point does any of it really solve? It shouldn’t be what are we trying to solve for, it should be who are we trying to solve for?”
Putting consumers first is critical for anyone hoping to gain traction with new payment methods, said Maule, who shared some statistics about why consumers aren’t using digital solutions. Fifty-four percent say it’s easier to pay with plastic, 62 percent don’t want to store sensitive information on the mobile device—the industry must do more to educate on security—70 percent don’t want to transmit sensitive data to merchants and a whopping 85 percent of iPhone 6 users haven’t used Apple Pay, he said.
To overcome these consumer sentiments and behavior to monetize payments, you have to figure out how to get scale and repeatability, Maule noted. “That’s it. There are a lot of other factors, but without those two you’re wasting your time.” He cited successful alternative payment leaders—Starbucks, Uber, Airbnb and Venmo. “They’re killing it. They have customers and they have repeatability,” he said, adding that only one, Venmo, is tied to a financial services company. The keys—in addition to making the process simple and making sure it works every time—is to think narrow and think deep, Maule said. “Narrow the use case then provide deep capabilities.”
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