TRANSACT 16: Wednesday Keynotes Chart Out a Roadmap for Seamless Payments

Las Vegas, Nevada – Last week, the payments community gathered at the Mandalay Bay to invent the future of payments. On the morning of Wednesday, April 20th, Jacqueline Reses of Square, Guy Chiarello and Dan Charron of First Data, and Bill Ready of PayPal delivered a series of powerful keynotes. These industry leaders shared how their companies are evolving beyond their core payments business and redefining their relationships with their merchant customers. Faced with the increasing demands of merchants and consumers alike, these impressive keynoters dove into how they’re keeping up with and exceeding their customers’ expectations.

Jacqueline Reses took the stage for an informal fireside chat with ETA CEO Jason Oxman to discuss how her business unit, Square Capital, fits into the Square narrative. Square Capital emerged to fill a clear gap in the lending market – catering to small businesses which need relatively small, short-term loans that traditional lenders can’t always provide. Because Square will only lend to its existing customers (for now), it already has all the transaction data it needs to make a sophisticated decision about a merchant’s creditworthiness. And so far, the investment is paying off – 90% of Square merchant customers who take out a loan from Square Capital will take out another one. Square Capital is one major component of Jacqueline’s responsibilities. She’s also in charge of human resources and recruiting as Square’s People Lead. After all, her job is to grow the business – and a business can’t grow without human capital. For her, the most important factor is ensuring a good fit between the prospective employee and Square’s culture. For Jacqueline, finding disruptive thinkers was critical to growing Square Capital.

As President and EVP for Global Business Solutions at First Data, Guy Chiarello and Dan Charron are leading the charge to bring innovative payments solutions to their merchant customers. Live from the TRANSACT keynote stage, they announced the launch of Clover Online Store, a comprehensive online commerce solution for small businesses that manages website design, virtual shopping carts, and much more. To illustrate the impact of First Data’s single service Clover platform, Guy and Dan brought two key partners onstage – Fenella Kim of Reliance Star Payment Services, a merchant services provider, and Josh McCarter of Booker, a single platform for small businesses in the service industry (which, of course, is integrated with Clover). The message was clear – payments have to be automatic, invisible, and seamlessly integrated with every other aspect of a merchant’s business. A business owner doesn’t want to think about omnichannel, inventory management, or sales analytics – they expect technology to do it for them.

Bill Ready of PayPal has long stayed ahead of the curve. As CEO of Braintree, he knew that mobile payments would be the future – and now, mobile is the primary computing device. As Bill put it, “there are more mobile devices on this planet than there are human beings.” But innovation in payments is not about the form factor. Retailers and consumers don’t necessarily want mobile wallets, or Bitcoin – they want a seamless, convenient experience. Merchants want to get payments out of the way so that they can focus on growing their business. Bill highlighted the vast, untapped market for our industry – with 85% of the world’s transactions still cash-based, there’s an enormous opportunity to expand our reach. As he explained, growth will only happen through partnerships. Even PayPal can’t do it all, but they can partner with companies like Facebook, Vodafone, and even Apple Pay and Android Pay – all ostensible competitors – to bring their customers the services they want in a single product.

So there you have it: the future of payments. We’re already living in a world in which payments are deeply integrated with technology and all other aspects of running a business. In fact, the very idea of payments processing as a standalone service belongs in the past millennium. Wednesday’s keynotes reminded us that we’re living in a new, exciting world.