The future of payments isn’t payments… and more key insights from CardFlight Conference 2019

This week, CardFlight hosted nearly 100 payments industry professionals from CDE, Chase, ETA, First Citizens Bank, Google, Merchant E-Solutions, Payroc, Paysafe, Payscape, Talus Pay, Visa, Worldpay, and many others. We convened in New York City for a day full of insights, predictions, tactical tips, great conversations, and really good food.

In this post, we’ll share some key things we learned from a few of the sessions, including:

• The future of payments isn’t payments
• Global payment industry trends
• Google’s vision for Google Pay

The future of payments isn’t payments

This counterintuitive learning came from our panel discussion about how to best train sales teams to sell software-based payment solutions. One of Worldpay’s more effective sales strategies is to position their offering in solutions-oriented terms—as opposed to price-based. When their sales reps assume the role of a partner and highlight all the value (beyond payment acceptance) their products bring to the merchant, it ends up being a more persuasive tact that increases sales.

The solutions-oriented approach

Here are some specific ways your unique perspective as a payments professional can add value to small businesses of all types:

• Finance and accounting (reporting and taxes)
• Ways to improve operational efficiency (i.e. at the point-of-sale)
• Inventory/product management
• Suggestions for other software solutions that help automate/streamline manual small-business processes (such as accounting, employee scheduling, ecommerce)
• First-hand observations from other merchants you serve in the same vertical

Panel participants

• Dusty Gomez (Senior Leader of Core Product at Worldpay)
• Ed Mastrangelo (VP of Business Development at Merchant e-Solutions)
• Natalia Leonardis (VP of Business Development at CardFlight)

Global payment industry trends

Karim Ahmad is Chief Product Officer at Paysafe, a role that gives him a unique view into the global world of payments and developing trends. Here are some of our favorite takeaways from Karim’s fireside chat.

• Since the European credit card market has different interchange economics, issuers tend to compete more on the user experience than consumer rewards programs.
• This market dynamic means that digital wallets, budget trackers, etc. tend to be more sophisticated than the products available stateside
• The future of payments is device- and platform- agnostic. Consumers want a frictionless payment experience everywhere and no matter what card they’re using to fund their purchase.
• A big opportunity for acquirers is to simplify the small business experience and to provide them with fewer independent systems to manage.

CardFlight Conference also featured some terrific presentations from CardFlight employees — including a new product announcement we’re not quite ready to share publicly — and a review of the past year of our business (which you can read here).

Google’s vision for the future of payments

We were also joined by Tanuj Parikh, Strategic Partnerships Manager at Google Pay. He shared the company’s vision for the future of the web where all transactions, including payments, restaurant reservations, flights, and event tickets are all just a click or tap away via Google Pay.

They’re already rolling out many of these features, which Parikh said will help small businesses by making it easier to close a sale, and help consumers by removing much of the friction of web-based transactions: entering a credit card number multiple times, downloading another app, managing logins across services, etc.

For more on Google’s vision for the future of payment technology, go here.

Conclusion

We’re grateful for the opportunity to host so many great conversations among dynamic professionals in the payments industry. For more from the event, check out #CardFlightConference on LinkedIn and Twitter, and follow us there for more payments insights on the regular.

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