Opportunities Abound in Emerging Financial Services
By i2c inc.
Read Time : 05 Min
Along with about 4,000 other delegates, i2c recently returned from the Money2020 conference which took place in Las Vegas October 6-10. We enjoyed a full calendar of meetings with clients, partners, and prospects in our hospitality suite. When we could break away from our hectic schedules and explore the show, it was evident that in just two years this show has become THE event for emerging payments and financial services.
This was my first year and as a marketing professional, my hat goes off to the organizers for a successful show in a great location. I love the soaring ceilings and flood of natural light in the Aria convention center, and being a part-time resident of Las Vegas, was glad to be home again.
Besides the ample opportunities for networking, the agenda was thoughtful and packed with lots of useful opinions and discussion. It was particularly great to see so many respected clients and partners of i2c on the agenda including executives from Payoneer, Approved Card, Meta, and Bancorp, among others.
With a conference covering so many aspects of a diverse ecosystem, it’s difficult for me to pinpoint just a few key takeaways from the show. Yet, as I reflect on our discussions with our partners and the sessions I attended, there were a number of things I thought I’d share with our readers in this post.
One thing was clear – today more than ever, the key to revenue is knowledge. Knowledge of the customer. Now I know that the term “big data” is one of the most over-hyped words of recent memory, but the ability to gather information about the consumer IS a boon for both retailers and prepaid issuers.
Prepaid is a highly personal engagement, where the consumer is more focused on the fund’s flow, as they can only use what has been loaded on the card. And with the added functionality of communicating personalized and relevant information and rewards in real-time, as i2c provides, you can continually engage with your customers to build and maintain strong, sustainable, and profitable relationships.
By combining customer payment, behavior, and demographic data with merchant-funded rewards you can engage with customers at a much deeper level than ever before. This all presents a unique opportunity for the expansion of prepaid – and one that will be a driving force in the coming years if the data is leveraged intelligently. We spoke about this in previous blogs on building customer trust.
Leveraging big data in meaningful ways for the consumer will build loyalty – and trust. This is why at i2c we stress using our tools to build knowledge of your customers. It’s really marketing 101.
There were also lots and lots of frank discussions about the adjustments that will be needed for financial institutions to address the new trends in spending, borrowing & saving and how these trends are challenging the current way of doing business.
This is a door opener for prepaid, but it was clear that for prepaid anyway, it will take flexible and nimble approaches to engage with consumers. It was gratifying to hear the words “flexible” and “nimble” repeated over and over, as they are our corporate mantra here at i2c! With the already existing opportunity for prepaid to the unbanked market and the rapidly growing opportunity to service the underbanked and even banked segments, I think financial institutions and others will come to embrace prepaid as a key financial tool in the future.
To this end, Suze Orman, a recently announced i2c client with her Approved Card, gave a very open presentation on serving this market in the future. She did a great job of talking to the vision of expanding mainstream prepaid systems to people who are underbanked and ill-served by existing financial institutions, payment methods, and tools.
And of course, it was not a surprise that mobile was front and center at Money2020. From mobile payments to mobile commerce to real-time mobile rewards and location-based target marketing, mCommerce was clearly on everyone’s mind. It was interesting to see the many competing approaches to reach consumers through mCommerce. As Steve Jobs said, “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them.
By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” For many years there was a lot of hype in mobile, as we tried to figure out what the customer wanted. But, while perhaps 10 years ago we were ahead of our time, the time has now arrived. One-third of adults in the US have a tablet device and two-thirds have a smartphone – and mCommerce is a growing reality.
It’s why i2c invested early and deep into mobile payments, loyalty, and marketing solutions integrated on one global platform. It was a smart bet – and our partners will reap the rewards as mCommerce continues to expand. So, many of the discussions at Money 2020 reinforced that vision.
If you were at the show, we would love to have you share your views on the key takeaways from this event.
