2024 Thoughts: The payments experience

Tribe Payments continues its look ahead to next year and what we can expect to see in the payments space. In this article, Tribe MD Alex Reddish explores how tech-savvy, digital native customers are demanding more from their payments experience... So just how can merchants and banks keep up?

In a more hyper-personalised, hyper-contextualised market, customers expect a more relevant, more personal digital experience. They want merchants to offer pricing in their local currency and accept local payment methods. To provide this seamless checkout process, merchants need an acquirer with extensive knowledge of international markets and, more importantly, data on payment habits within those locales to help merchants boost their conversion rates and shopper growth.

The issue will be whether merchants have the right tools and partners to make these payment options a successful part of the customer experience. Too often, merchants struggle with a lack of visibility of payment methods and overall customer data and trends. Adding new payment methods and building better customer experiences is a huge opportunity for many merchants, but only if merchants can partner with the right acquirer who can deliver solutions for all these blind spots.

Too often, merchants struggle with a lack of visibility of payment methods and overall customer data and trends.

Banks will also need infrastructure to replicate the needs and wants of their end users. But several long-standing core banking systems are beginning to creak under the strain of adding new services. They can’t give the CX expected by increasingly tech-savvy and digitally native customers. This is where modular technology enables new services, products, compliance, verticals and new customer use cases.

The concept of 'everything as a service orchestration is currently in its infancy, but it has the potential to make a big impact. Tribe has previously examined XaaS, and the potential rise of agency-style companies that aggregate service-led fintechs and provide packages solutions for customers, which would further reduce friction, although whether it will remains up for debate.

Catch up on our other 2024 thoughts here: