The payments landscape is ever-changing, and advancements in technology are accelerating its evolution.

Don’t get left behind. With help from FIS® money movement expert, Chris Como, explore the trends and innovations that are shaping the future of financial transactions for businesses and consumers.

1. What are your payments clients’ priorities?

A top priority is to simplify payments technology and make everything uniform and easy. That means stripping away all complexities of interacting with payments networks and simplifying the way platforms work. Regional and community banks are also keen to embrace new payment methods and technologies. Credit clients are especially interested in buy now, pay later (BNPL), which continues to be a focus for us.

2. How can regional and community banks improve payment processes and services?

Banks should look for a unified user interface for back-office teams and real-time monitoring tools that work across different platforms. This will make technology easier to use.

Regional and community banks also need to strike a balance between retaining older customers and attracting a new generation. And for growth, it’s increasingly critical to offer Generation Z consumers more innovative new ways to pay.

3. Why is fraud still a big problem in payments?

E-commerce can be susceptible to fraud. And the more motivated and creative fraudsters become, the more challenges our clients face. By shifting to the EMV standard, which secured card-present transactions, the card industry helped fraud rates drop in the physical world. But the rise of card-not-present e-commerce has made fraudsters more advanced and sophisticated in the digital world.

4. How can regional and community banks help reduce card-not-present fraud?

Keep an eye on your data. The key is to look at every digital transaction and block it if it looks odd. Banks should analyze data and use the information to proactively make the best decisions to protect cardholders and account holders, which is not easy.

As well as access to data, you need deep expertise. For security, consider deploying neural network models for decisioning and testing opportunities to use artificial intelligence.

5. How much control does your fraud prevention tech give?

Flexibility is the key. Look for a partner that can do as little or as much as you need them to do. You may want to outsource your fraud management completely or run solutions internally with your own fraud prevention strategies. Every situation is different.

6. As embedded finance grows, what’s the future of card payments?

For fintechs, most use cases for embedded finance rely on using a card. Customers want to embed the ability to open accounts and make transactions, and debit and credit cards are core to that.

Seek a card payments solution that will provide the back-end infrastructure that powers new partnerships with banks and fintechs.

7. How can regional and community banks succeed – or compete – with embedded finance?

Find the right partner. If you want to play in the embedded finance space, it’s critical to partner with a provider that enables the underlying technology. But if you don't, you still need technology that helps you create the best experiences for your customers. So, essentially, you must choose a technology partner that enables embedded finance or empowers you to compete effectively with it.

8. What motivates financial institutions to embrace new technologies?

Efficiency and innovation. Typically, clients first think about switching to a new solution because they want to improve efficiency and reduce costs. But there’s also a hunger for innovation and new development: Clients and prospects want leading-edge solutions built fast. Another motivation is the need to modernize, especially in core banking, where clients are looking to not only increase efficiency, but also to access more sophisticated features.

9. What type of card payment platform should you choose?

Ideally, regional and community banks should choose a card payments solution that features a single global platform. Many providers can run multiple platforms, which means they must split their time across them all to stay current. So, if a client wants to offer BNPL on one platform, there is a risk it could only be possible on one of the others.

10. What other trends should you look out for in the card space?

Continually high interest rates and funding costs could result in credit cycle changes, which might make credit losses more serious for card providers. It’s going to be important for financial institutions to become as efficient as possible and make sure they are in tight control and monitoring their credit losses.

Drive change with FIS.

Are you ready to transform your card payment operations with innovative technology? Learn how. Contact us