COMPASS PLUS TECHNOLOGIES
IN A WORLD WHERE YOU CAN BE ANYTHING, BE FLEXIBLE Bethan Cowper , VP, strategy & business transformation
When a bank, payment service provider or fintech assesses their technological requirements, it is safe to assume that these will be completely different. We make an educated assumption that what is right for one, isn’t right for the others. When we segment businesses like this, we are essentially taking a step back and viewing the transformation of payments companies from generation to generation. We have watched the landscape evolve from being bank-led to being customer-driven, however, we ultimately forget one critical factor: it can only ever evolve as far as the latest technological advances allow, regardless of vision. Arguably, the technological restraints of today are far less binding than those of yesteryear, yet many businesses do still run on technology that is well into the age range for a human mid-life crisis. To deal with evolution, whether to build, buy or transform your systems is a crucial topic. It is fair to say that in the payments space, every decision has a price: always monetary, sometimes business critical, resource-dependant and certainly weighted by the amount of vendor dependence.
A well-established brick and mortar bank may have the resources, but not the inclination to uproot their entire payments platform to begin the very expensive and arduous task of starting anew, with fresh risks and uncertainties – the CTO might just like to get to their retirement as smoothly as possible and let the next in line clean up after them. Better the devil you know, than the devil you don’t after all. This could absolutely be the correct approach, once all options have been weighed and measured, resources analysed, all areas of the business fully investigated, and all options costed up and explored. A startup fintech may not have the resources to run a fully-fledged, all- singing, all-dancing payments platform,
nor the money to buy one. Build might be the only option to maintain their differentiation and competitive edge, regardless of time, effort and hard lessons learnt along the way. There is no right answer, especially for those who sit in the middle, with all levels of differing requirements and priorities. What is more important, to differentiate or to offer standard products and services well, to establish trust or to disrupt? This is certainly dependant on the values, strategies and vision of each individual business. However, there is something everyone wants. To have the luxury of flexibility and adaptability. Now, used in this context, the immediate reaction is, ‘ah
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THE PAYMENTS POWER 50
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