Paymentology introduces new Business Development Director
Katrina Beckwith recently joined Paymentology as Business Development Director - Issuing, UK & Europe, commenting ‘I am delighted to join Paymentology as a Business Development Director with responsibility for the UK and Europe. I am passionate about payments and sales and love the idea of selling services that will make a real positive difference to our clients’ businesses.’
‘As Director of Business Development for the UK and Europe, I love nothing more than to help my prospective clients to deliver value to their businesses and benefits to their end customers. Typically, this involves finding ways to remove the burden of legacy systems, that can often stifle innovation and inhibit self-sufficiency. I like to help them to benefit from a different approach, the Paymentology way’.
The role is to work with banks and fintechs who are embarking on their digital transformation, and to enable them to quickly and easily issue and process credit, debit and prepaid products with unprecedented flexibility and innovation.
On the position she said, ‘As Retail Banks merge and grow through acquisition, the end result can be quite messy, with a collection of disparate platforms and systems that are not interconnected. This usually means that having a holistic view of the end consumer base is impossible to achieve. Ultimately this affects customer service, which end up being disjointed, and clunky, based on only siloed customer data being available. The banks’ focus on achieving excellent customer service is further hampered by their own challenges with keeping up with scheme mandates, and regulatory requirements, such as PSD2. Ultimately customer service and product innovation play second fiddle to keeping the various systems running and not incurring any degradation to the current service.’
‘As we the consumer become more and more dependent upon our mobile phones, we take it for granted that our banks will be able to deliver an excellent customer experience via an app on our phones too. Just as Amazon is now the new benchmark for ‘click and buy’ so too are the neo banks’ mobile apps becoming the defacto standard for mobile banking. I believe that customer service will be judged by the digital services that a bank can offer its consumers, and that being able to offer innovative, and flexible products will be of paramount importance.’
Questioned on whether banks are ready for the Paymentology solution, she added, ‘Putting it a different way, I think that we definitely hear more about banks that are customer-centric, through positive word of mouth, and this will in turn lead to greater customer acquisition and less attrition rates. Conversely if a bank is not adopting a customer-centric approach they may lose customers and lack a competitive advantage.’
‘We enable our clients to benefit from our best of breed technology that puts the control for launching innovative new card products in their hands. We enable our clients to use data to influence their engagement with their consumers, thereby driving up customer engagement, and minimising risk. For example, if a consumer has just purchased a flight, then our client can use that knowledge to offer insurance, at the point of purchase of the flight, making the offer timely and targeted, and thereby more likely to be taken up. In terms of flexibility with our AI rules engine our clients can build their own rules meaning that they take control of their customer engagement without a dependency on their processor. They have the control to create rules based on any Visa or Mastercard ISO component. Its flexibility can be used by our clients to offer a tailored service to their customers, and thereby improve the overall customer experience. ‘