Delivering intuitive, secure, personalized, and frictionless user experiences has long been table stakes in digital commerce, well before the era of COVID-19.
As businesses harness the revolutionary power of digital technologies, they have pursued large-scale change to adapt to evolving consumer preferences (some more successfully than others, but that’s a blog for another day).
Digital transformation is a term we hear repeatedly, and it looks different for each organization, but essentially, it’s about utilizing technology and data to digitize, automate, innovate and improve processes and the customer experience across an entire business.
As I said, this was already well underway but then came 2020 and no industry escaped the disruption of the coronavirus outbreak, which has had an indelible impact on business performance, operations, and revenue. Regardless of whether the impact of COVID has been very positive or very challenging, it has forced organizations globally to reevaluate and reorient strategies to adapt.
As lockdowns and pandemic-related restrictions continue to change daily life, this raises the question of how we can balance a dramatic shift to digital and the benefits it brings, while ensuring business continuity and innovation both during and post-COVID, and protecting everyone against fraud.
No one could have predicted the dramatic digital pivot that has taken place over the last year. Indeed, within weeks of the COVID outbreak,cash usage in the U.K. dropped by around 50%. Digital solutions including delivery applications, contactless payments, mobile commerce, online and mobile banking have become essential components of a touchless customer experience in the era of social distancing. It’s no longer just about an enhanced and superior customer experience, it’s also about health, safety and survival.
In stores, businesses have benefited from contactless payments enabling faster throughput and reduced need for consumers to touch payment terminals (therefore requiring greater cleaning, which degrades the hardware much faster). Mastercard reported a 40% increase in contactless payments - including tap-to-pay and mobile pay - during the first quarter of the year as the global pandemic worsened. Digital has also become an essential sales channel for many B2C brands. Where brick and mortar stores have been required to close, digital commerce enables continuity of customer relationships and revenue. This channel also provides brands with rich customer data, which can be used to enhance and personalize the customer experience, typically resulting in greater levels of engagement and uplifts in revenue.
Regardless of whether businesses are operating in developed or less-developed economies, these times of crisis have leveled the playing field in the sense that all businesses are facing similar issues. Access to products and supplies, maintaining customer relationships, accelerating sales for some and declining sales for others, health and hygiene are just a few of the unique challenges brought about by COVID.
Many businesses in physical environments have had to swiftly implement changes to reduce safety risks for staff and customers, such as contactless payments, mobile ordering and delivery options. But with these changes come a host of other benefits of digitization,such as faster transactions, and reduced human error at the point-of-sale.
The reliance on technology, however, can also expose organizations and consumers to certain vulnerabilities. In particular, the risks of fraud and cybercrime have dramatically increased since the onset of the pandemic as scammers have taken advantage of digital technologies to target both businesses and individuals.
According to McKinsey, new levels of sophistication in the activities of fraudsters have placed more pressure on companies that have been previously slow to go digital, bringing “into sharp relief how vulnerable companies really are”, and damaging the financial health of small and large businesses. In fact, the Bottomline 2020 Business Payments Barometer reveals that only one in 10 small businesses across the UK report recovering more than 50% of losses due to fraud.
But take these stats with a grain of salt. While it is important to be aware of the risks and challenges this new business landscape brings, it’s equally important to have a lens firmly across your own business, industry and audience, and to identify the changes you can make internally to mitigate risk as well as improve your customer experience. Where can you make some quick wins? Do you have the right skill sets internally to achieve what you need to achieve? What technology is out there that will enable your business goals? There are tech companies like MYPINPAD that are making huge strides in software development, which will transform businesses globally.
Almost a year into the vast digital migration, the line between business success and failure remains fragile. However, an ongoing transition towards greater digitization will be the difference between survival and the alternative.
There is a wide range of initiatives businesses can implement to weather this storm. Secure digital consumer authentication is crucial to the ongoing success and security of not only financial products but also identification and verification across a range of different industry verticals. Shifting the authentication of consumers securely onto mobile devices enables businesses to completely reshape their customer experiences. By bringing together a more seamless, frictionless customer experience, accessibility, privacy, security and access to consumer data, businesses are able to drive digital transformation across day-to-day activities.
Against this backdrop, software with stronger security standards continues to play an ever more vital role in supporting society, protecting consumers and businesses from the increase in risks that rapid digitization brings. Essentially, opening up universal payments and authentication methods that feel familiar, for both online and face-to-face transactions, will be key to unlocking a world of possibilities when it comes to redefining how businesses engage with consumers.
