As TALKINGTECH’s General Manager for EMEA, I have the opportunity to help our clients - predominantly in the financial services, telecoms and utilities sectors - and their support teams to improve customer satisfaction and increase profitability by making it easy for their customers to pay bills promptly.

Recently I was keen to review the Payments UK, the industry association, initial report on its ‘World Class Payments’ project, which outlines the steps needed for our payments industry to remain world-class.

At TALKINGTECH, we welcome the report and what Payments UK is trying to achieve – essentially it’s published to help payment providers and regulators support competition and innovations so that we can all provide consumers with better services.  There is a clear recognition from Payments UK and UK industry as a whole that technology innovations are playing a hugely important role in how consumers and companies view payments of all kinds, something which we see evidence of every day. 

As Maurice Cleaves, Chief Executive of Payments UK aptly puts: “..[the] timing is right to review how changes (such as innovation, regulation and consumer preferences) can be used to enhance the payments experience for everyone’s benefit.”

Specifically, the report identifies 13 core capabilities within two categories: open access to the payments infrastructure and new features and services for customers.  Of those 13, Payments UK has highlighted four key priorities which they say should “offer the greatest potential benefit to customers”:

• Access to the payments infrastructure for those who offer payments to customers
• Confirmation of the payee before making a payment
• More control over outgoing payments for customers
• Enhanced data

In the report the third of the four priorities is about giving customers “more control over requested outgoing payments, enabling flexibility over the timing of their regular payments to fit with income and money management needs”.

We’re very pleased that this made the shortlist, because our experience over the years, in multiple markets, increasingly demonstrates that personalised payments (and the associated communications that go with them) can reduce customer churn, increase customer satisfaction and generate revenue more effectively.  Something as simple as tailoring a customer’s payment date can make be the difference between a customer who pays late on a regular basis to one that pays on time every month.

This third priority is also represented with an example of how things may work in the future….  It involves a customer checking her bank account and seeing a request by a water company to pay the latest bill, which includes enhanced data from that bill.  The customer checks she’s been paid by her employer and clicks once to pay the bill. 

We hope all stakeholders in the payments industry, be they clients, regulators and member organisations, service providers and financial institutions can support the goals in this report, so that we can all work hard to ensure that the above scenario, and many others, can become a reality very soon.