INNOVATION & TRANSFORMATION: CLOUD High performance: Only one technology can adequately manage spikes in transaction demand, says ACI’s Bill Farris
The pandemic tested Cloud’s metal to the limit, paving the way for innovation, including increased consumer checkout choice. While acquirers battle to maintain their share of a stormy market, Bill Farris of ACI Worldwide sees blue skies ahead Cloud was the lifeline that allowed businesses to survive the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, facilitating homeworking, video conferencing, collaboration and the rapid scaling of IT systems. And now, as tremors in the global supply chain make further disruption seemingly an ongoing fact of life, payments will continue to grow and develop on Cloud infrastructure, says Bill Farris of payments solutions software provider ACI Worldwide. Harris, who heads ACI Worldwide’s acquiring product line, gives an example of the societal behaviour changes Cloud is helping to facilitate. “Let me use restaurant takeout as a stress-testing example,” he says. “Five years ago, it was probably pretty common for me, when I was getting takeout for the family for dinner, to show up at a restaurant, order from their menu, pay by card, through a terminal, wait for my food, then bring it home. These days, I’m ordering through a mobile app, on the restaurant’s website. I might be calling ffnews.com
them and giving my credit card number over the phone, and, when I show up, I’m just picking up my food and leaving. “So, a lot of different use cases have changed, including the flow of how merchants are taking both the order and the payment from their customers, and these changes are going to stay with us long term.” Much has been written about the changes in consumer behaviour that pandemic lockdowns ushered in, but they also affected corporate thinking. COVID proved that Cloud solutions were both resilient and stable, and could provide a platform for continued innovation. And Farris adds that the rapid shift in consumer expectations prompted by the pandemic, is also impacting on roles in the payments delivery chain. “Resilience and stability are must-haves, so Cloud services are critical infrastructure for banks, acquirers and merchants,” he says. “But agility is also now a key factor, because acquirers are creating new payment experiences for customers to react to our fast-changing environment. And, without agility, it’s very difficult to
deliver these experiences as quickly as the market wants them. Cloud transformation makes all of that a lot easier; if done well, you can minimise the resources needed to deliver these new experiences.” And this is prompting additional Cloud investment across the financial services industry. A recent survey by global technology and management consultancy, Capco, and global IT, consulting and business process services company Wipro, called Cloud’s Transformation Of Financial Services, discovered that increased future revenues (62 per cent) and improved future profitability (52 per cent) are key drivers of Cloud deployment. The report re-examined financial services data collected by Wipro for its 2021 global survey Making Business Thrive: A Cloud Leader Roadmap for Achieving 10x ROI among C-suite executives representing banking, insurance and capital markets (including wealth advisory and asset management), to identify key trends and opportunities ahead, and shared insights about how financial services businesses can become Cloud leaders. Issue 11 | ThePaytechMagazine
11
