American Express and Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) have described an increase in co-creative cooperation between financial institutions and merchants in the design of payments technology over the coming years.

Speaking at the October 2013 CeBit Future of Payments conference in Sydney, Nick Aronson, general manager of transaction banking, institutional banking and markets at CBA, revealed: "There has been quite a massive shift from the point-of-sale purchase being a place where the payment provider dictates to a merchant how to take a payment, to a place where we work very heavily with the merchant community to say, ‘what is it that you want the customer experience to be?’".

According to Aronson, drawing on merchants’ sales expertise can help generate systems designed to deliver a more customer-focused retail experience, and the bank has drawn on this knowledge to co-design the majority of its most recent payment devices, including the Albert, Pi, and Leo.

"We recognised very early on in our [Albert design] journey that dictating terms to our merchant customers about how they should take payments was not going to be a long-term proposition for success in the marketplace", he said.

Handing merchants greater power over the payment technologies they employ every day not only enables them to tailor the service they provide, but also to gather information about their customers.

Aronson said: "They [the merchants] want to get closer to the customer, so are actually collecting customer emails, Facebook profiles, and are looking at using that in subsequent marketing."

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American financial services company American Express (AmEx) also described a shift towards co-design as increasingly central to the development of its payment solutions.

Corinne Ng, vice president and general manager of international payment options Australia at AmEx international, cited as example the company’s collaboration with retail giant Walmart on the co-design and development of the so-called Bluebird card.

A rechargeable, prepaid alternative to debit, in under a year the venture saw 1m accounts opened and AU$1bn ($952,400,000) in transactions.

"Co-design and development is core; is fundamental", Ng said.

"With Walmart and the Bluebird project … we use technology to breathe life into the idea of financial inclusion."

On the merchants’ side, Kirstie Atkins is director of sales at Amalgamated Holdings, an entertainment, hospitality and leisure company, owner of Australian cinema multiplex Event Cinemas.

Commenting on the development, she said: "Internally, for us, it also makes things a lot smoother, because you have sales and marketing working hand in hand with e-comm and IT, which doesn’t happen that often."

 

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