Payments Innovation Now Focused on Speed, Transparency

When payments technology first started to emerge, perhaps the biggest concern was security. From regular mobile payments users to high-end corporate users, the objection on a great many lips was “will this be safe?” Years of development and nigh-constant advancements focused on security above just about everything else, and now the biggest objections have little to do with security. A TreasuryXpress study found that the big new concerns are transparency and speed.

This in turn led to some substantial changes in TreasuryXpress’ C2Treasury treasury management solution, this time focusing on transparency and speed. With the new updates, treasurers could get a better outlook on payments and their impact to the overall operation. Plus, the payments complete faster, which allows businesses to take advantage of the appropriate capital flows.

Under previous systems, payments would travel via enterprise resource planning systems, and then the system would route it through to the bank. Problems would crop up along the routing system and even upon reaching the bank itself. Naturally, businesses wanted to know what was going wrong, both within the system and when the payment immediately exited the system to arrive at the bank. Thus, C2Treasury stepped up to take care of it. In a similar fashion, speed was addressed, as problems within the system could be more readily spotted and solved to improve flow.

This actually has some parallel to the consumer-level mobile payments field; security was a huge objection to putting mobile payments to use, but with continuous development, security was mostly taken care of thanks to biometrics, two-factor authentication, and other tools. Thus, as security fell away, other issues rose to the fore to become the “big problems” of the day and work began to address these accordingly. Consumer-grade mobile payments are no different, starting to focus less on security and more on the customer experience, leading to things like mobile ordering for restaurants and loyalty programs all around.

Any system has its fair share of problems in it, and when one is fixed another will often rise to take its place. Continuous innovation is the only real response, and what we see in corporate payments is often echoed in mobile payments.