Finance

THE UK MUST ACCELERATE SUPPLY CHAIN PAYMENTS TO ENSURE VACCINE DISTRIBUTION

Paul Christensen is CEO of fintech Previse

From PPE production to staffing hospitals, the NHS has overcome a myriad of challenges in 2020. The healthcare industry now faces rising Covid cases and Brexit uncertainty while its suppliers experience mounting fiscal pressure. Distributing the Covid vaccine presents the greatest logistical challenge the UK has faced this century. Paul Christensen argues that the healthcare industry and government must take decisive action to secure the whole length of the vaccine supply chain.

If Britain successfully distributes the Covid vaccine, it will constitute the greatest feat the logistics, transport, and health industry will pull off this century. Plans are in place to secure the cold supply chain the Pfizer vaccine requires. St John Ambulance is training thousands of volunteers to administer the vaccine. The first vaccines are already being rolled out to the most vulnerable. However, discussion of the vaccine has neglected one of the most crucial elements of a swift distribution: ensuring accelerated payments for suppliers. Thousands of small firms are expected to play their part in distribution of the vaccine, while having to wait and chase months to get paid.

The face of international supply chains has changed dramatically since the beginning of the pandemic. The British logistics and transport industries have adapted to changing rules, local lockdowns, and shifts across all markets, all while staring down the barrel of either an eleventh-hour Brexit deal or no deal at all.

Regardless of what happens on the first of January, the logistics and transport industries will face new restrictions, which are likely to be overloaded with bureaucracy, all while dealing with the aftershocks of the second lockdown. We are already seeing overcrowding and processing delays at ports. Distributing and administering a vaccine at a national level was never going to be an easy task, but with so many factors to consider, the government and industry needs to do everything in its power to ensure a smooth, resilient supply chain. A key aspect of this is paying suppliers quickly.

Accelerated payment is essential for supplier agility

Traditional finance operations can take up to 120 days to pay invoices. This long-standing culture of long payment terms reduces supplier liquidity and limits opportunities for investment and growth. One of the simplest ways to protect vaccine distribution, avoid bottlenecks and enable supplier agility is to accelerate payment of invoices throughout the whole supply chain.

The problem of slow and late payments isn’t new, even before the pandemic late payments to suppliers amounted to over £23 billion, according to Pay.UK research. The Federation of Small Businesses found that 62% of small businesses have experienced either an increase in late payments and/or had payments frozen completely as a result of COVID-19. The government and NHS cannot afford for late payments or long payment terms to plague Britain’s vaccine supply chain if they want to ensure its successful and safe roll-out to those who need the vaccine most.

Technology enables instant payment

Both the government and the NHS, as well as industry, can adopt Day-1 payment policies for invoices in a way that would also be sustainable long-term for their own cash flow. The technology and processes exist to enable suppliers to access cash immediately without requiring the buyers to change or speed up their payment processes.

Machine learning makes it possible for both the private and public sectors to enable early payments, and benefit. Paying suppliers faster demonstrates a real commitment to sustainability and strengthens supply chains at minimal cost to the taxpayer. Every supplier deserves the opportunity to be paid on day-1.

Patients receiving the vaccine is the final result in a long chain where each step needs to perform flawlessly to ensure the vaccine is delivered. In order to do this, suppliers at each step need to have cash available when they need it to ensure they can perform their part. To create a sustainable vaccine supply chain, we need to take on the inertia that suppliers face when trying to get invoices paid. Increasing the strength of the supply chain as a whole will have a positive impact on every participant and enable a smooth and swift distribution.

From production and transport to the healthcare workers administering the vaccine, the whole supply chain requires fast payment. Now is the time for government, hospitals and industry to work together to provide financial security to the whole supply chain and secure the vaccine’s distribution throughout the UK.

Paul Christensen is CEO of fintech Previse, which uses machine learning to get suppliers’ invoices paid the moment they are received.

Finance

WHAT’S NEXT? PAYMENT TRENDS IN 2021

Philip McHugh, CEO at Paysafe

Undoubtedly COVID-19 is going to continue having an impact on us all at least for the next few months and maybe all of this year, but there are still reasons to be optimistic. The industry continues to evolve quickly, and that in mind, here’s five of our predictions to watch out for in payments in 2021:

1. New consumers to online change the digital payments landscape

As more consumers headed online during the first wave of COVID-19, businesses noticed that their customers were also paying differently. Three quarters (76%) of the businesses we recently asked for our Lost in Transaction research report series said that consumers were using different payment methods during the pandemic, with the increased use of digital wallets being the most common. Having more customers that were new to eCommerce, and customers now shopping regularly with businesses that they were not comfortable sharing their financial details with, were key reasons for this.

Consumers confirmed this was true. When we asked in April, 18% of consumers told us they shopped online for the first time during the pandemic. With 38% of consumers telling us they are planning to shop online more even when COVID-19 is no longer a factor in their lives, we should see this shift to alternative payments continue.

2. SCA will drive mass adoption of biometric authentication

Perhaps the first factor to shake up the payments industry in 2021 is going to have the greatest impact of any trend we will see in the coming year. That is because, after a series of extensions, the deadline for PSD2 Strong Customer Authentication is fast approaching. From December 31 2020 any transaction that isn’t verified by multi-factor authentication will be automatically declined.

One of the inevitable consequences of this is going to be a huge increase in the use of biometrics to verify payments. With the growth of mCommerce that we have seen before and during COVID-19, it seems very likely this will accelerate beyond predictions made at the initial SCA deadline in 2019. Juniper Research has already predicted that biometrics will be used for more than 18 billion transactions in 2021, with a value exceeding $210 billion in 2021.

3. A renewed focus on 5G

The importance of 5G and the growth of the IOT was another prediction we made for 2020. But while the impact of the pandemic has been to accelerate many of the trends we expected to see, perhaps one area where the pandemic has actually slowed adoption is the growth of 5G. With consumers spending so much time at home, appetite for personal 5G-enabled devices has been limited.

But at the same time, the need for the in-store shopping experience to be as frictionless as possible is now more important than ever. Almost half (46%) of businesses told us that they had lost sales in 2020 because their checkout times were too slow. So the use of 5G technology to overhaul the checkout will be back at the top of retailers’ agendas.

Almost half (47%) of stores told us that 5G will mean the end of the traditional checkout, and more than half (53%) believe that Amazon-Go style frictionless checkouts are the future of retail. Omnichannel experiences where consumers shop in a store and then pay via a digital checkout on a smartphone app are also on businesses’ radars.

4. A surge in subscription models

Almost one fifth (18%) of stores told us that they had launched a subscription services during the pandemic, and this is not only a result of business need but also customer demand. Overall, 27% of consumers told us that they were already planning to increase the number of subscriptions they had in the future, and this rose to 37% for consumers aged 18-34.

The growth will not be limited to digital either. Pret A Manger recently launched the first in-store coffee subscription service in the UK, and we expect to see similar models populating malls and independent stores soon.

Also, only the initial purchase of a subscription is subject to PSD2 multi-factor authentication. So for some businesses, launching a subscription service may be a way to reduce friction in the online checkout.

5. AI and machine learning as the cornerstone of fraud prevention

We’ve known about the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to financial services for years, but in many cases the industry has been slow to implement the technology. With the sophistication of financial crime increasing, and the growing concerns of consumers of being a victim of fraud, it is no surprise that adoption is now accelerating rapidly.

Banks have currently spent as much as $217bn on AI applications already, and in 2021 AI and machine learning based systems will be the standard in fraud prevention.

Finance

FIVE TRENDS THAT WILL IMPACT THE FINANCIAL SERVICES INDUSTRY IN 2021

Ian Johnson, Managing Director Europe at Marqeta

Coronavirus has shaken things up across all industries, and financial services is no different. This year, we are likely to see a much more risk averse industry, as fintechs and banks alike move into survival mode. Yet, this will also spur innovation. The shift away from cash will give a shot in the arm to digital payments, while lenders in particular will have to get creative to balance their risk against the need to dispense funds.

It’s likely to be an interesting, albeit bumpy, year. Here are five core trends that I see having a major impact in 2021.

Lenders will seek improved visibility to combat delinquency

An economic downturn unfortunately means higher delinquency rates for lenders. But businesses – in particular, SMEs – need liquidity to survive, now more than ever. To balance risk with need, more lenders will focus on enabling visibility and control after a loan is dispensed. Instead of issuing funds to a bank account, loans will be dispensed to virtual cards or wallets, allowing lenders to track exactly how and where money is spent. This way, lenders only release funds as they are needed – rather than in one lump sum.

Ian Johnson

They also have the power to approve or reject payments in real-time, based on whether the request is aligned with the terms of the loan agreement. For instance, if a company has secured a loan for IT equipment, but attempts to spend it on office refreshments, the lender can make an instant decision to permit or deny the transaction based on geolocation and other transactional data. So, borrowers should ready themselves to be much more transparent if they want to secure loans in the future.

Embedded payments to become more commonplace

Embedded payments has been around a long time – just look at pioneers like Uber, where payments are so integral to the customer experience that it doesn’t even feel like you’re paying anymore. In the next year, we will see this expand, with a wider variety of organisations making payments a core element of their customer experience strategies. This trend will be coupled with a shift towards transparency and privacy, where people willingly exchange their data for an improved, personalised experience.

This is something consumers do readily in many areas of online life already – shopping, social media, and so on. In 2021, we will see more banking and payment services operating off the back of this same exchange. In return for data, customers will be given smoother, more tailored payment experiences.

Use of cash to drop below 15%, falling from 23% of all payments in 2019

The UK and Europe’s departure from cash will continue to evolve into next year. Physical cards will begin to give way to a rise in digital payment methods – virtual cards, digital wallets, and the likes of Apple Pay and Google Pay. Banks will need to prepare for this shift; hopefully learning their lesson from the early months of the pandemic, where 88% were overwhelmed by demand for online and mobile banking. This means modernising behind the scenes, using technology to improve and streamline payment processing. Time and money also need to be invested into educating and supporting businesses and individuals that going cashless could leave vulnerable, such as small merchants and elderly people. Until this has been addressed, going cashless risks leaving the most vulnerable in our society behind.

Back-end bank modernisation set to continue

Traditional banks recognise that they need to be able to innovate faster, particularly on the front-end, to compete with the new waves of digital banks and fintech entering the market. While we will see continued modernisation on the back-end, as they try to unpick the complex web of legacy systems they sit upon, I would not expect this issue to be fixed in a year. Instead of taking on the risk of full migration, many banks will ‘hollow out’ certain services – leaving core services in place that are too risky to move, whilst shifting newer services onto more modern platforms to avoid coding them into legacy systems.

This will create the building blocks to build a standalone digital bank within a bank, allowing them to modernise the entire stack and then incentivising customers to make the switch. An example of this approach is Goldman Sachs’ digital bank Marcus, which has debuted to strong demand – it’ll be interesting to see if others follow suit.

Alternative lenders will open up the market to support post-COVID-19 recovery

The process of securing a loan has always been quite painful – involving lots of self-reporting, paper statements and credit reports. And it could take days to find out if you were successful and then even longer to access the funds. Thankfully, it is looking like those days might be coming to an end with the emergence of a new breed of alternative lender focused on transforming specific niches of lending. Take SME lending, which has traditionally been regarded as high risk/low rewards and neglected by traditional lenders.

New alternative lenders, such as Capital on Tap, are changing the stakes. Using data and modern payment platforms, they are able to make loan decisions in minutes, not months. We are seeing the same in Point of Sale lending with companies like Klarna – now, you can apply for a POS loan and get approved in seconds. These companies will set the standard in terms of expectations around lending, forcing bigger lenders to follow suit and helping to transform the loan experience.

Fintechs to continue leading front-end innovation

Fintechs hold the monopoly on defining what ‘good’ looks like in terms of features. From money management tools, to saving incentives, fintechs have the agility to create new, attractive products with a speed and creativity that traditional banks simply cannot match. However, true success stories of fintechs paving the way to long term profitability are rare. Established, traditional banks still hold all the capital and most of the main checking accounts, making it harder for fintechs to really get ahead. This is likely to continue into 2021, but we are seeing signs of convergence, with fintechs acting as the front-end for customers while banks provide capital in the background.