By: Marie-Elise Droga, SVP, Head of Global Fintech Partnerships at Visa
For every way that money is being touched, traced, moved, or exchanged, there is a team of bright entrepreneurs somewhere in the world reimagining the user experience. From seed-stage ventures to established players, fintechs are touching every aspect of the global economy.
At Visa, we see our work with fintechs as one of our greatest opportunities—and we’re focused on supporting this community of builders and entrepreneurs. These are tumultuous times—for the largest fintechs and those who are just getting started—and we’re staying close to partners across the ecosystem to understand how they’re assessing the landscape and pivoting in response.
Here’s what we’re seeing and hearing from fintechs across the ecosystem.
- Diversification in all things: Fintechs, banks, VCs, and enablers are focused on diversification – in their partnerships, how they look at treasury or vendor management, their portfolio investments. The events of the last few months have been an awakening for the industry, and organizations are being vocal about conducting deeper risk assessments of their portfolios and diversifying as needed. It’s clear that the industry is eager to move forward and stay focused on innovation and opportunity.
- Fintechs expand their focus: We’re seeing a shift in fintechs: from focusing exclusively on consumer-driven solutions, to supporting a range of end users– from SMBs to mid-market and enterprise players. Businesses of all sizes are feeling the crunch of economic uncertainty and looking to build more resilient organizations to keep up with the rapidly evolving digital landscape. Fintechs offer solutions that aim to create better money movement capabilities, including domestic and cross border transactions, leveraging near term applications of AI for new customer insights or doubling down on modern risk and compliance approaches. At Visa, we remain focused on helping our clients and partners connect with the fintechs in our ecosystem to help enhance money movement experiences.
- Real time money movement: It’s no surprise that fintechs are increasingly focused on real-time payments as users seek faster and more convenient options. Real-time payments offer near-instantaneous transfer of funds, allowing users to send and receive money without the delays and fees associated with traditional payment methods quickly and securely. At Visa we believe these systems are important for money movement and we’ve been partnering with the ecosystem to help digitize real-time payments around the world through Visa Direct and by offering Value Added Services as an overlay on RTP networks.
- Collaboration across the ecosystem: Banks and fintechs are finding new ways to collaborate with the shared goal of creating unique customer experiences. With a bank’s innate understanding of the financial ecosystem, and a fintech’s pulse on the changing digital ecosystem, working together opens the possibility for greater payments innovations.
- Zeroing in on B2B: By many measures, B2B payments have lagged behind consumer payments in terms of speed and convenience. One key challenge is the need to build robust infrastructure that can handle the complex needs of B2B transactions. Unlike consumer payments, B2B payments often involve multiple parties, large amounts of money, and complex invoicing processes. In terms of opportunities, embedded finance potentially presents a promising approach to breaking down barriers to B2B payments.
- All Eyes on Generative AI: We’ve seen many use cases for generative AI across different fields, like image and video generation, text writing and music composition. For the fintech world, generative AI could have the potential to revolutionize the way payments are made and processed. It could potentially create personalized payment experiences for customers based on their transaction histories, preferences, and behaviors. It could potentially also be used to automate fraud detection and prevention by learning from patterns and anomalies in transaction data. Although we’re a long way from generative AI having a significant impact on financial services, it’s important that all players in the ecosystem understand how AI can be leveraged as a potential tool.
Innovation and collaboration across the financial services ecosystem continues to expand, Visa is proud to work with our clients and partners to help create more efficient ways to pay and be paid. Learn more at Visa.com.