President, Payment Services
A top priority in recent years for Diane Offereins, head of payment services at Discover Financial Services, was laying the groundwork to broadly support contactless payments. Little did she realize how critical those moves would become in 2020.
When COVID-19 ignited demand for cleaner, touchless payments last year, Discover accelerated its ongoing rollout of contactless-capable credit cards. As quarantined consumers switched from in-store to online purchases, Offereins green-lit the use of Click-to-Pay, a standard enabling consumers to replace manual card-data entry with an automatic, more secure digital approach.
Last year Offereins also upgraded Discover’s Pulse debit network technology to accommodate growing volumes of pandemic-driven e-commerce debit transactions without requiring consumers to enter a PIN online. The change was a boon for merchants seeking lower-cost, streamlined, online debit-routing rails.
“We don’t expect these changes to slow down after the pandemic,” Offereins said, noting that persistent challenges for travel and cross-border transactions will require similar technical investment and improvisation.
Although 2020 was a tough year for the credit card industry, the payment services initiatives Offereins led produced a 29% increase in Pulse’s e-commerce transactions over 2019. Discover altogether notched more than 220% growth in contactless payment volume last year over the previous year, and the company’s global network volume rose to $417 billion in 2020 from $403 billion in 2019.
Those weren’t Discover’s only payment innovations. In 2020 Discover began working with Car IQ to develop automatic in-car payments for fleets including tolls, fuel, insurance and parking. And early this year Discover teamed up with Sezzle, a buy now/ pay later loan provider, to help extend installment loans increasingly popular with consumers to merchants.
But general economic headwinds caused by the pandemic required Offereins to reset some of her more aggressive five-year goals, finding more realistic milestones for the sake of staff morale.
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“Keeping an open mind and adapting business goals to better suit your employees and shifting marketplace are keys to being an effective leader,” Offereins said. “Saying ‘no’ can be equally important, if not more so, than saying ‘yes.’ ”
Offereins, whose career in financial services spans more than 40 years, also saw the benefits of working at home firsthand, and is now championing more flexible remote and hybrid work arrangements. “This flexibility will allow women, especially mothers and caregivers, even more opportunities within the banking system,” Offereins said.
She aims to pour these insights into other channels, including her involvement with the Committee of 200, where female global leaders work to expand opportunities for women in a range of industries, and the International Women’s Forum.
“The pandemic forced us to become more comfortable making decisions without knowing all of the data points,” Offereins said. “That caused us to be more flexible and understand we may need to adapt and change more frequently as we move forward.”
