Editorial Note: This is the second of a two-part series on Carat product developments, informing stakeholders on progress and milestones related to ongoing investment in the Carat global commerce platform.
In February, we laid out how our Carat product team executed on an ambitious product strategy a year ago, all with the basic goal of simplifying the complexities of commerce. In doing so, we were able to create value for clients by optimizing cost structures and making it easier for businesses to deliver new, engaging experiences to their customer base.
At Fiserv, our Carat product strategy is built with our clients in mind and informed with eyes on the future. That means understanding the pain points businesses are feeling now, while preparing them to address the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow.
Here’s a look at four omnichannel and eCommerce trends for 2024, and a glimpse at how we are evolving the Carat global commerce platform to address them with innovative solutions:
Enhancing payment experiences
As businesses look to enhance their commerce infrastructure, delivering new payment experiences that are transparent, convenient, and—most importantly—efficient, has become critical to success. A perfect example is how we help large retailers leverage SoftPOS to streamline checkout and build in-store efficiency. Consider a large music retailer that engages clients in a physical location to not only sell goods but provide services such as guitar lessons. This retailer is arming their staff with mobile payment options to remove friction as provide sell services and take payments in-store, simplifying checkout by bringing the payment experience to the point of engagement.
Checkout can also be simplified with new payment options, such as Pay by Bank, which is an ACH payment method that allows a customer to seamlessly connect their bank account to make a direct account-to-account payment within the checkout experience. Pay by Bank is becoming a preferred payment option for more consumers, especially as merchants reinvest savings from this lower cost payment method to incentivize their customers.
Additionally, we are now helping businesses remove friction by simplifying split-tender transactions, where loyalty points, stored-value and consumer payments can be combined and used in parallel by a consumer. More friction can be removed as these services become integrated with wallet experiences, which we’ll touch more on later.
Democratizing universal payment experiences
As omnichannel experiences become an expectation for consumers, more businesses are looking to deliver unified payments experiences to their customer. True omnichannel commerce requires a business to create interoperability between digital and physical interactions – delivering the end user with an experience that is consistent in-store, online, and everywhere in between. With that, a core goal of our team in 2024 is to focus on expanding access to Carat, so a wider range of businesses can enable new payment experiences.
Traditionally, advanced omnichannel experiences have been implemented by large brands with the infrastructure and resources to invest in costly solutions. In 2024, we’ll begin to democratize access to omnichannel commerce, which will allow more mid-sized and even smaller businesses to create unified payment experiences. The result will ultimately reduce costs for more businesses, speed their time to market with new capabilities, and provide more creative ways for them to engage with consumers..
Convergence of commerce and finance services
Next-generation commerce experiences can be enhanced by the delivery of financial services. We dove into this exciting space with our expansion of digital wallet capabilities in 2023, including leveraging a single ledger to create multiple stored value purses with a retailer’s wallet. This can include rebates or rewards points, or even health and wellness benefits. The values within each purse can be drawn down within a single transaction, creating the simplified split-tender transactions we mentioned earlier.
We’ll move deeper into embedded finance in 2024 by further connecting financial services to a retailer’s wallet. Defined as delivery of financial services through non-traditional channels, embedded finance will allow consumers to access credit, or build bank accounts via their favorite retailer’s digital environment.
Embedded finance is a critical step-forward in how our firm brings the full value of Fiserv to our clients. Through a single connection to our Carat platform, a client can now access the acquiring capabilities we provide to merchants, the financial solutions we deliver to thousands of banks globally, and credit issuing capabilities that power the world’s largest issuers. A single-entry point to Fiserv connects clients to the depth and breadth of our entire company.
Maximizing data and information
Data has become the oil that powers innovation. Whether it’s real-time cloud sharing to accelerate financial closes, fueling risk models to make more intelligence decisions, or augmenting customer and loyalty data with payments behaviors, businesses have more opportunity than ever to unlock value through insight.
At Carat, we’re investing heavily in data with our suite of Client experience products—and partnering closely with our clients on strategies for simplifying how they ingest new data and make decisions. This includes:
- Increasing payment performance by enabling better data sharing between merchants and issuers
- Delivering easy-to-consume insights within the Carat Control Center, allowing users to leverage conversational AI to query data and understand insights instantaneously
- Insights derived outside of a user’s own payments data, including share of wallet, payments performance benchmarks, and out-of-store customer behavior
Building new data capabilities makes it easier for businesses to view and understand the data coming into their business and positions a business to build for the future.
These ongoing investments build on the innovative capabilities the Carat team has brought to market for decades. And most of all, these investments will serve as the leading edge of innovation for years to come with a tech stack that is robust, yet simple. One that addresses pain points while expediting implementation. Configurable to meet businesses goals. And built with our clients in mind.
To learn more, contact a Carat expert today.
