Who's Who in Payments?

By Pat Allen

BAI profiling guide offers help to those seeking payments consulting or other solutions providers.

Rarely a week passes without a new pronouncement about banks' shrinking role in the payments business. Given a unique mix of legacy, business infrastructure and customer base, how does the individual financial services organization consume the macro forecasts and extrapolate them into actionable plans and strategies?

There is a distance to cover between theory and application, and the typical financial institution will inevitably need help in charting a plan that assures it will continue to make money on payments products. No matter how large an organization or how deep its resources, today's issues require working through enterprise-wide challenges with multiple layers of complexity.

All of which begs the question: When is it time to draw on the intellectual capital of an outside source, and who do you call?

Your choices include firms with 100-plus payments professionals and five-person boutiques. Available expertise ranges from widely available strategy consulting on checking products to the more arcane payroll card consulting services. There are some organizations that focus on payments exclusively, others for whom it's a piece of what they do. Payments staff size, business mix and areas of expertise are among the dimensions that could be used when seeking to match your needs with payments consultants.

As a start to providing an objective basis for financial services organizations to better understand their choices of intellectual capital providers, BAI in May released a special Banking Strategies report: Who's Who in Payments?/Intellectual Capital. A total of 16 firms gamely accepted the invitation to participate in what was a beta test.

If only because no such work like it exists, this profiling guide is a landmark effort. Earlier in the year, a BAI team created a framework to capture the answers to basic questions that a prospective client would want to know about a potential partner. The profiling guide sought to present firms according to their involvement in the following areas — and according to the extent of their involvement both today and their planned involvement in the future:

• Intellectual Capital Focus Areas
• Types of Market Research Offered
• Services versus Products
• Types of Services Offered
• Types of Financial Institutions Served
• Payments Products and Services
• Payments Staffing
• Levels of Expertise - Checks
• Levels of Expertise - Cards
• Levels of Expertise - Online Services
• Levels of Expertise - Other Services

Individual firm profiles include narrative descriptions, some of which provide rich detail on the firm's value proposition. The exhibits presenting all firms' responses (such as the table on this page) are aggregates of their individual responses.

This is the first in a series of guides to be produced this year. Subsequent guides will present products and services choices in the Cards, Checking, Online Banking and Emerging Payments categories. For more information or to provide suggestions on BAI's payments provider profiling project, please visit www.bai.org/payments.

Ms. Allen is managing editor of Banking Strategies.

Copyright © 2004 by Banking Strategies, published by BAI.

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