At Chargent, we are completely focused on Salesforce payments – and a critical component of that is studying payment trends so that we can deliver features and enable compliance that allows our customers to meet the demands of their business.
This year was particularly interesting for making payment predictions. The Washington Post called 2023 “the first year of the post-pandemic era”, and research firms like Forrester predicted that after three years of rapid change, the payments market was ready to focus on fundamentals and ride out a forecasted recession.
We’re here to help you separate the signal from the noise, with a closer look at the payment trends that matter for the year ahead – and guidance on how to position your organization for success.
Embedded Finance Rewards Consumers, Drives Savings
One major trend in the fintech space is a movement towards embedded finance – financial products offered by non-financial companies. Think of popular digital wallets like Apple Pay, and other tech-driven financial services.
At Chargent, this means continuing to prepare for the next evolution of frictionless payments – embedded payments. The fundamental idea underlying embedded payments is an overall improved experience that not only makes it easier for your customers to pay you, but better serves customers with seamless interactions, saves on merchant fees by enabling ACH transactions, and removes barriers to improve cash flow.
Chargent customers can soon expect to see our new Payment Methods feature, with the option to enable embedded payments in processes, in your Salesforce organization. We have rolled out Chargent Payment Methods to a pilot group of customers, and look forward to sharing those stories.
Compliance is Core to Your Business
3DS2 & SCA remain a major focus area for the payment industry. As intruders, hackers, and fraudsters get smarter, industry compliance tools are becoming more resilient. One example is Visa’s move forward with name-on-card mandates, to help issuers and merchants manage digital payments risk.
Chargent customers should make sure that they have updated to the latest version of Chargent, as each release includes tools that enable our customers to tailor their payment process to meet their compliance needs.
If you’d like to learn more about Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards, check out our guide to PCI compliance for Salesforce payment processing, and find out why a PCI DSS compliance plan is essential.
Open Banking, Open Market
At the Money 20/20 conference in October, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director CFPB Director Rohit Chopra announced the agency’s next steps toward open banking in the United States, “launch[ing] the process to activate a dormant authority under Section 1033 of the Consumer Financial Protection Act” aimed at bolstering consumer protections around access to their own personal data and financial information.
It is too soon to gauge the impact of this announcement and subsequent rule changes, but the potential for open banking APIs to drive data portability and innovation is exciting. We’re looking for early indicators of how the financial services industry will respond – will open banking increase competition as the CFPB intends, or will it lead to consolidation and decreased consumer choice?
Consumers Still Consuming
The questions on everyone’s mind this year: what’s going on with the economy and are we headed into a recession?
And as for the answers to those questions… a lot, and maybe? But with strong job growth and shrinking inflation, the bottom line remains that American consumers are still spending, and forward-thinking companies are planning accordingly. In the B2C sector, customers are demanding an increasing number of payment options, from contactless payments to Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) options.
60% of consumers have used a Buy Now, Pay Later service, with more than half of those users (58%) reporting that they prefer BNPL to credit card payments.
When the economic dust settles, organizations that have made smart, strategic investments in payment technology will be in the best position to provide their buyers with the payment options they prefer.
Bank-to-bank Payments Continue to Grow
For the better part of a decade, a macro trend in the payments industry has been the growth of account-to-account bank transactions. Driven by cost savings opportunities, a growing number of organizations – both consumer-facing and B2B – are encouraging their customers to pay by SEPA, ACH, and direct debit.
As real-time payments continue to become more mainstream globally, and bank payments become easier to use for both merchants and consumers, we anticipate that they will continue to slowly erode credit card payment dominance in digital commerce.
The Federal Reserve is set to launch its FedNow real-time payments service, currently in a pilot phase, sometime in 2023. We’ll be watching closely to see how this impacts the overall bank-to-bank payment space.
Still have questions about where the payments industry is headed this year and beyond? Our expert team would love to talk further – contact us to start a conversation.
