“Omni-channel” has been one of those highly talked about “buzzwords” over the last decade since the term was first coined. Fast forward to 2022, and it’s more of a necessity than a buzzword.

Today, all businesses across industries are trying to optimize and ace their omnichannel strategies. The same is the case with payments, and rightly so, as it has already been known for over half a decade now that an average consumer is not just present over one or two touchpoints but much more. Digital penetration, the pandemic, younger tech-savvy audience, all these factors have only added to this omnichannel adoption. Given that understanding, it is only logical that companies, brands, and payment businesses at large optimize their presence across channels, integrate these channels systematically to provide a complete, holistic experience to their customers and improve acceptance, monitoring, and analysis of their business operations.

And that is mostly where most of the acquirers tend to struggle since, as the volume and the number of channels grow, managing a unified source of truth becomes challenging.

The Problem – Missing Unifying Link

Acquirers have been busy optimizing independent payment acceptance channels and ensuring a 100% customer experience. From providing a seamless online payment and checkout solution via the payment gateway to maintaining a robust in-store POS network, acquirer banks have ensured that a merchant is able to accept payments as per customer’s payment preference, and the bank can increase its online and offline distribution as well as revenue.

The problem with this approach so far has been the missing link to unify the customer data across touchpoints as well as a single source of truth for the banks for all its channels, primarily due to reasons like different managing systems and data formats, lack of proper data management solutions, complex internal systems, and lack of human capital.

Together, these obstacles often derail an acquirer’s omnichannel strategy.

The Solution – Bringing Synergies Between Channel Data

But it can be brought back on track and optimized with some simple steps. An effective omnichannel strategy is built on the synergy of two key elements:

• Data: A robust system of data collection and updation across channels, and in a format that is easy to interpret and integrate within the central system, is the primary and crucial step to setting up an omnichannel acquiring strategy.
• Platform: A single window of all customer and payment information, integrated with the bank systems to provide a single source of truth for each bank’s and merchant’s customers. A robust technological setup for fast sharing and processing of the data across all channels, especially between online and offline channels

Building Blocks of An Omni-Channel Acquiring Strategy

• A unified technical environment that allows efficient data collection, transfer, and communication between banking systems and payment channels (online and offline) allows a cleaner view of the customer journey and a better bifurcation of the customer segments.
• Data sets that help create right cohorts based on channels, industry, segments, region, etc. and deliver better insights to banks and merchants about the friction points and resource deployment.
• Optimize channel experience by providing the customer the choice to pay as per their preferred channel. For example, a better understanding of customer’s payment preference can help decide which form of checkout method to deploy at the store – be it unattended, multilane, pay anywhere in-store, or bill at a table, etc. – as well as monitor channel health viz-a-viz which are working vs the ones that are faulty and need a check.

A Unified Platform, Updated Customer Data, and an Optimized Last-Mile Payment Experience complete the omnichannel payment strategy for an acquirer!

FSS Omni-Channel Acquiring Platform helps banks achieve this in a short span and with the least operational friction. FSS leverages its extensive global experience in delivering omni-channel digital commerce solutions to help acquirers effectively respond to changing market needs, deepen merchant engagement and improve business performance. FSS Omni-Channel Acquiring Platform enables acquirers to accept, authenticate, route, switch and authorize traditional or alternative payment across multiple channels whether in-store, online, or mobile. As a unified platform, it delivers improved operational efficiencies, speed to market, increased security, and support for multiple payment product types.

To learn more, write to us at products@fsstech.com