Even at age seven, I always said shopping mattered. I just didn’t know why. Thanks to covering progressions in digital wallets, I have discovered why: money, money and more money.
With payment players thirsting for ways to pressure consumers to use their smartphones as wallets, almost all parties have discovered that the way to influence consumers to ease off their plastic payment behavior has nothing to do with payments. Rather, consumers will change their behavior to digital wallets when there are shopping incentives attached.
That was the big story that emerged from last week’s virtual mobile banking and payments event by Bank Systems & Technology.
“It’s not about the payment; it’s about commerce,” said Rick Oglesby, a senior analyst with Aite Group.
Oglesby was in good company with his belief.
“Shopping will be the next thing,” said Jeff Dennes, SVP and Chief Digital Officer at Huntington National Bank.
Beyond the importance of enhancing commerce, a few other points caught our ears during the event. Here are six nuggets for banks that are innovating:
- Banks will soon see more traffic hitting their mobile channels than their online channels, a paradigm shift that Huntington’s Dennes expects to hit “quite quickly;”
- The branch of the future will look very different than today, as the physical branch will become reinvigorated with technology;
- Digital natives, those who have grown up on mobile technology, will depend on businesses offering smartphone-only ways to interact. With that in mind, banks must design for the mobile experience, which means they must limit the number of clicks it takes for a consumer to complete an action;
- Though fintech players don’t expect outsiders like Apple and Google to take a chunk away from their payment revenue, banks are worried that outside players will erode some of their branding exposure when digital wallets become mainstream. At least in plastic, a card is branded with a bank’s name;
- Before digital wallets are realities in the U.S., merchants must know why they should update their POS systems. In other words, selling merchants first on digital wallets matters; and
- Tablets are objects of desire, not objects of necessity.