Emotional Payments

Welcome to our session on emotional payments where we’ll be talking about how do you create experiences? for online buyers That they can actually enjoy And what to come back to and check out again in the future.

So today with me, I have Dastan from Marks and Spencers and Danny from Stored they’ve very kindly joined us to talk about this topic. And Dastan, if I can ask you to introduce yourself first and tell us a little bit about you, Marks and Spencers for those who don’t know, and then Danny if you could do the same for yourself and Stored.

My name is Dustin. I have a seven years of FinTech background now, almost year eight, if we’re being in the context of payments. And so currently at Martin Spencer working through payments technology consolidation, as well as its strategy of.

How the embedded finance would look like for Marks and Spencer and it’s future state, not the current state. Yeah, so I’m trying to look and work with our third party providers. So they are also on, on our side when we strategize.

Yeah, for those who don’t know, it’s a largest lead, one of the largest. And the number one brand in the UK. Danny,

yeah, so background is is very much similar in payments. I I spent about 11 years at a business called world first, which is a cross border payments business.

the interesting thing about World First is that we were acquired by a very well known business called Alipay is probably the name that is better known by, but the Ant Group. So I was part of the exec team that led the integrations between the World First business and and some of those connected entities in China.

think for me, that was probably a light bulb moment because spent a lot of time looking at. Perhaps the the advancements that have been made in the east, particularly with regards to payments and what we would describe as contextual commerce and how brands and consumers interact with each other on those experiences are true on the channel experiences.

That, for me, led me to the next stage of my career, which was to set up the business that is stored which we found it at the very end of last year. And I suppose we would describe ourselves as a contextual payments platform. And what I mean by that is merchants often take payment within the confines of quite rigid structure.

So in physical stores or on e commerce websites and those payment experiences don’t necessarily reflect the journeys or the context for where the customers come before. And actually for us, that’s really interesting. And we allow merchants to effectively spin up micro payment experiences in a matter of minutes that meet those needs.

Thanks guys. I want to set up the premise for today because commerce as it stands today is good and fine and working well online as well as in in the bricks and mortar store.

And we’ve seen a shift post pandemic,

Marker

from more traditional bricks and mortar businesses to those looking to be online digital first stores. And now we are trying to look beyond that experience of just the digital store and one channel to actually, stores that can provide a great experience and not just a transactional checkout experience that an experience that actually inspires the customer to come back to transact again through a great buying experience, which was potentially possible in a bricks and mortar store before.

But how do we create great, buying experiences through our digital channels and how do we, and therefore, how do we connect with the buyer and create an emotional connection? And so they are, we’ll enjoy checking out again a question for you both and maybe I’ll come to you, Dastan first.

But what is a good buying experience? How do you define that over at M& S? What do you talk about? What do you personally think about? the offline experiences compared to other peers within that range of retail, brick and mortar, I think M& S is doing quite good, but the online one, I think there are so much thing to improve going forward.

And the people shopping habits changed as well as there is the overall interaction within the digital space have changed a lot within the last three years. And it puts a lot of pressure on expectations. And M& S had a very. Traditional mindset in terms of how this transactions is seen and what we’re seeing now is that the wallet transactions are just skyrocketing and an aggressive way for the last.

I can see that. And but other than that there is no post transaction interaction with customers, basically. So it’s, as you’ve said, it’s very transactional and then, but the value proposition disappears after it. So basically you take the money and then there is no relationship post transaction.

And as a person who worked on a lot of. financial products. I think there are so much every retailer can work on it. And it entails a lot of embedded financing, but not only being around the money, but it’s just a customer experience and how they can. Basically retain that customer’s attention was in that space.

I think that’s not just about payments person dealing with that. It should come from the company’s strategy of how to create a loyalty basically out of that, because once you’ve done your dopamine rush on tick tock paying someone, you stay on tick tock, right? You don’t leave tick tock.

And because you’re competing your attention with TikTok, you should be competing with TikTok, not with John Lewis, basically. Yeah, I like that. That’s a good segue, actually. Especially with what some of the things that Danny is doing over at stored if you want to talk about social sales new channels and influencer sales, Danny what, if you’re re imagining the future, what is a good buying experience look like for you?

Or what do you think it should look like for all of us? I suppose the short answer is it’s a successful one, right?

And I think for a merchant, how do you define success? Ultimately it results in a successful, purchase and sell to end customer. But for the customer, I think actually a successful or a good buying experience is one that leaves a feeling and a good and positive feeling for the customer.

And that’s, this point around emotion that we talk about. The act of making a payment or buying or spending money doesn’t always necessarily come with positive emotions. However, the good feeling does come from the satisfaction of buying the product that I want and need.

The challenge to that is that quite often, unfortunately. The buying experience presented to the customer can stand in the way of that positive feeling. So things like, disconnected journeys, lack of context for the journey that I’ve just taken complicated buying process, overburdensome checkout experience, all of those things

provide a sort of like depreciating sense of satisfaction for the purchase that I’ve just undertaken. So great buying experience for me. It’s like relatively simple. It has context for the journey and experience that I’ve come here from and to, it adds value to me as a customer. And ultimately it reduces the path of friction from, me and this excitement that I feel about buying this product and actually, making that successful purchase. Dastan said two key things for me, which is one, really a goal of any.

Retailer anyone is to create loyalty with that customer right so that it moves away from a one time purchase to a loyal customer that wants to return and keep spending so how do you create loyalty number one and then number two. You, if you’re M& S, for example, you may be competing with another retailer in your space and looking at what they’re doing, but actually you’re competing for someone’s time and someone’s time is being spent, let’s say on TikTok or they’ve purchased something on TikTok.

And so you need to be creating with their attention span for whatever is TikTok. Cause as Dastan said, if you go and buy something on TikTok, once you finish your purchase, you probably can just. Continue scrolling and doing whatever you’re doing on TikTok and you’re back. And I thought that was really interesting.

A couple of points because, um, loyalty and customer attention are really our goals here, but how do we do that? We need to create some kind of emotional attachment with the buyer. And we do that by creating great experiences. Yeah, look, there’s two interesting things there, right?

One is that, obviously, the relationship with the customer isn’t always a direct one. It might be that, Marks and Spencers, as an example, are creating their own content, but that might be content that’s being shared by, any number of different people. Some of those people, Marks and Spencers might have a relationship with, or like some understanding of, but, many of…

Those instances they will have no visibility off. And it’s a challenge, right? To try and manage that because customers are becoming increasingly complex. And actually what that’s leading to is like differences in buying behavior. So quite often now, which means a lot of consumers and actually, particularly with social media, they haven’t consciously opted into shop.

So the way that we want to get consumer Oh. Or manage that relationship with the retailer. It’s very different to how we would have done that 20 years ago. When we want to engage in a browsing experience, we want to look around the website, we want to look around the store. Now we expect things like intuitive, impulsive, instant purchase.

And those things contribute to like how good we feel about that experience and the likelihood of whether we’ll return or not, particularly through social channels and or, other forms of like digital media. So yeah, I can completely agree. Yeah, those. Those positive moments and taking someone from like this point of consideration and excitement through to cool, get this product can be really long winded, can be really complex and challenging and the more that retailers can do to make that an emotional or exciting or frictionless experience, the more chance you’ve got of a repeat purchase.

So Dastan, what are you guys over an M& S considering today to improve that buying experience or even like the end part of that journey with payments?

You’ve mentioned what you have today versus what you might personally think about the future. But what do you got, are you guys doing anything in particular to improve the buying experience or the payment journey today? Yeah. There are multiple teams who look after from different parts of basically engagement within that, let’s say.

Larger payment part, so proposing a bit of embedded finance proposition in terms of to have, to create this a small financial instrument basically within the , within the Marks and Spence. Online universe, basically. So it’s not like a regulated space, but you still would have a feeling of a bit of a financial interaction.

So that’s a very elementary thing you can do at this stage. Because I think the whole retail industry is so outdated with their thing anyway. So it, it applies to anyone. The you go to any website on the retailer. It’s the same website is 1999. I mean Nothing changed.

Basically you go you put your in the basket and check out the same thing for the last 25 years It’s nothing changed. So and then you have the on the other side, so I think Truly is to create this expectation from yourself That you want to merge into this seamless customer experience.

So that they wouldn’t care that you are they are at MNS because the experience is so good as in TikTok, because the moment they come to you, John Lewis, or, and then they start all these frictions, they think, Oh my God, this is Vanessa. I recognize you. So we want that not to happen. I think that’s the strategy.

So the moment you come to the app, because it’s 45, 50 percent now of all shopping for closing home, that’s, that’s a good place to experiment. And I think we are doing some things, but still lots of to go. So I think. It’s all about how you want to position yourself against the other players, basically.

We don’t want to solve our M& S problems and proposing more frictions for our customers. It’s horrible, right? So we want to… Remove that and get this smoothness more into the whole experience. Still a lot of things to do, but I think we’re just scratching the ground. Yeah.

Yeah, it’s interesting. We’ve all going back to the sort of genesis of digital commerce. We’ve basically put a bricks and mortar store online, we’ve put radio on TV. We’ve put the TV, we’ve put TV on the internet. Like it’s, we’re still using those old models.

And there needs to be a revolution more than a sort of evolution. Really. Danny, tell us a little bit about we’ve been talking about social and social selling in terms of how things are moving and moving towards that. Can you tell us a little bit about. Some of the ideas that you guys have got with social selling and influences and effectively the relationship that Consumers create with those influencers and the opportunity that sits there.

Yeah, sure. I think so I think what we’re seeing is that the relationship between the brand and the customer perhaps is changing and shifting and the what you’re seeing with social media in particular, the sort of the influencer culture that exists today is that loyalty. Today is quite often to a personality or an individual as opposed to a brand.

That makes sense. I might follow somebody online that has similar a similar value set to me. They might have similar tastes. They might enjoy similar experiences. And whatever they talk about, I might well be interested in, right? For me as somebody that’s consuming that media, it’s not necessarily about brand loyalty, but it’s about common interests.

And I think brands obviously recognize that, and I think tapping into that is key to any, successful online or digital e commerce. Business today, I think, how do you make that it’s I think that stands point. Like, how do you make that frictionless is, the challenge because I can consume something on Instagram that looks, feels exciting, cool, fresh, funky.

And then I hear this traditional e commerce site for a brand that perhaps. Some negative sentiment or connotations around their traditional online experience, and that puts barriers up straight away. So I think what we’re really focused on is, like, how do we allow brands and, influencers, content creators, online, personalities to, to co sell products.

So how do I ensure that I’m not taking you from like this experience here that is very much about me and my experiences and everything that I’m talking about straight into this environment, which is completely in conflict with everything I’ve just told you. It has to be a way that journey can continue that makes it to some extent.

Connected. And that’s what we’re really focused on. Yeah, we were allowing and working with brands today that effectively are allowing content creators to spin up. Almost like micro sites or micro payment experiences for the products that they sell so that, when I come into this next page, I can see the content creator wearing those products.

I can see them experiencing those products, but ultimately, I can buy those products and to tap check out from the retailer that’s selling those products. And we want to make that as simple and as easy and as frictionless as possible and allow both sides to benefit. It’s a really interesting by journey now to how we just from how we discover products to how we end up checking out. Sadly we end up checking out through a subpar e commerce experience.

But but yeah it’s. Things are changing in terms of how people find out about products. And as you say, that, that advertisement, whether it’s more traditional through an influencer brand can create great appetite for the thing that they’ve seen. And then the rest of the experience just doesn’t marry up.

And you’ve potentially got influencers that are doing some of that loyalty. As Dastan mentioned on the retailer’s behalf, but the retailer isn’t actually equipping those influencers or other channels to do loyalty well or in a joined up way for sure. I don’t know, Dastan, have you got any thoughts on that or?

I think, I agree with Danny, I think a couple of points is a lot of e commerce or whatever the experience we have now, it’s all engineering driven, all this IT guys sitting behind in the dungeons, driving, I don’t know, nothing against the coding guys, but this is mostly those guys are driving, not the consumer comfort, and then And then we’re trying to adopt to those Oh, this is what we coded.

Just take it. So when we ask the customers, what do you want? We, the customer doesn’t know what they want because they don’t know the limitless possibilities of the IT, but then and we ask them, what do you want? And they give what they think it is possible, right? Because they don’t know that In the IT world, everything is possible basically on like we have AWS, which you can do amazing things for Azure, but they don’t know about it.

So we ask them and then what they think Oh, this is probably because they’ve seen the worst experiences in their life. And then they think something around that should be maybe fine. So they start suboptimizing basically. So what we’ve created is a suboptimal experiences. And then you have this, these guys coming from everywhere, like Tik Toks, Shane and some parts of Instagram as well.

These are disruptors because they went freaky wild. So that’s why you have different like planets of. People living. So what I was trying to say is we still like the retail part is very static. So it’s 1998, 1999. Also, there is no interaction. So you launch a very expensive.

Campaign. That’s a photo of someone on your website. That’s it. There is. That’s, but you have a influencer life doing things and then you have this, uh, a neural interaction with that person basically. So instead of the looking at the picture of someone Ryan Reynolds, or I don’t know Jake Gyllenhaal, whatever is that.

Is that, I think it’s so outdated. It’s, isn’t it like seventies when the, those Dior photos or all of that, it means we’re still in that era, but we don’t have this. So a lot of the, what we have now is it driven, which is horrible. And then we don’t give the customers, what do you really want? We can do anything for you.

And if they give us really the freaky imagination, what they want, I think we, we could have built some so much more, but it’s just laziness of. Of all the merchants or any developers basically in the IT world. So that, that is highly connected to the social sell because social selling while popular because they gave this.

Wild imagination to go rather than the traditional commerce players. Yeah, so that’s my, a bit of rant and I like, it’s a good sandbox. I was going to, I was going to make a point actually, cause I think it’s a, it’s an interesting one, which is yeah. Social commerce and particularly like influencers and content creators provide a big opportunity for retailers and brands to test new markets.

So I think what you see quite often is, a brand like Marks and Spencers, let’s not use Marks and Spencers, let’s use something Boohoo or whatever it is that’s, commonly using an influence strategy. They, they might be. Using or accessing particular communities or pockets of communities that they know to be relevant, but perhaps aren’t necessarily aligned with their core demographic.

And then the challenge that you then have is that my website is built in such a way that it is, it’s structured as a one for all experience, right? It represents my brand as it is today. It’s my core demographic of customers and everything that they believe. And know about my brand, but I’m going to this audience over here that perhaps isn’t quite so aligned with this image that I put online and then.

Challenges that I’ve spent all this time effort and energy trying to engage this community out here that then comes onto my website and see something that’s completely disconnected to perhaps what I expected before. A great example of a an equestrian brand that we’re working with who have aspirations and designs to become a broader sort of sports or leisure wear brand.

At the moment today, they are an equestrian brand and they’re working with influencers and content creators to drive traffic to the website. But the challenge that they have is that when the customer comes, they’re having seen a yoga mat or some yoga outfit on an influence or a content creator. They then land on an equestrian site that has horses on it.

And, that it’s like that instant disconnect of, OK I was expecting to see this, but I saw that. And I think that’s to say that there’s an example of extreme example. I think that happens. Across the board, almost university with every brand that’s trying to test new markets and demographic. There’s a lot of good stuff in there, one of the points that’s done brought up I guess around who’s really driving the innovation, is interesting to me because If we are genuinely to shift the experience of online commerce forward, then we really need to either imagine together or actually help the people that are making the tech imagine with us or do the imagining for them as well as the consumers, because.

A lot of retailers that I know of from small to large are thinking about their technology stacks. They’re thinking about moving to things like micro architecture and looking at how they can actually connect part of their order management to whatever and making their kind of operational tech lives easier.

And. If you ask them why they’re doing it, they’re ultimately they often say to improve the experience, not only for themselves, but fundamentally for the customer, which to me is laughable because ultimately you end up with an exactly the same site after they’ve spent a million bucks.

Recreating it all with some optimization that no one sees. And only a couple of people care about sure. It might save the business some money, but you end up with exactly the same shopping cart, put some products in it, check out as a consumer. I don’t care what happens. Behind the scenes, but we’ve got so much innovation and inverted commas in tech.

But we end up with the same buying experiences, the same, uh, consumer journeys basically. Yeah. The current I would say the whole building products for digital space is there, there is this so the 95, 95, 90 8% of the online products we have now is driven from.

From the industrial mindset when you like basically architecture, you have the building and you have constraints like physical constraints, and that’s the mindset, how it works now with people because they really used to build most of the physical buildings and then when it came to digital buildings.

We think the same way as physical, but in digital, you can do anything basically, but people still think in that the physical world, uh, frameworks, and then that, that translates into customer products, which is, which, which looks like, Oh I create this wireframes. And then I give it to my engineers and then build it.

And then we get the focus group and say, yeah, it looks good. Yes. And then we ship it. I get my bonus. Everyone is happy bye bye. That, that’s like a, still is this 1950s mentality. And then the current product management is about just sub optimizing tinkering around the same thing, not creating amazing experiences.

And we don’t 99 percent of. All the product managers in the world, they just are keepers of that thing. Why you exist anyway, if you can’t go a bit in that way, but that’s the mindset shift we need. And that’s why it’s, we have so many crazy people coming from these disruptive players, which go So quickly into the top because customers really love it.

They, that they think of, wow, this is possible actually. And why do you can’t do it? That’s the mentality, right? So we should change probably that. And then customers always right. And then they always want the best, but we don’t want to work. It’s just keep that old. Prop up the old models and keep them going.

Yeah, absolutely. Danny, what are merchants and buyers asking for you guys about? What are you, what are people you mentioned the equestrian brands, but what are people coming to you and asking for, like, how are they asking you to imagine the future for them? Are there any specific things across any markets?

Yeah we’re primarily focused on merchants in the UK at the moment. But I suppose it depends on which end of the spectrum you’re talking to. I think if you’re speaking to smaller businesses, aspirational entrepreneurs and merchants that are looking to get into commerce or e commerce, our argument, our view would be that the barriers to entry are still way too high.

And I think, you’ve seen over the course of the last, 10 years, Shopify have definitely, stolen the charge, particularly in that micro merchant segment. And I think I’ve done some great things to make it more accessible, but in most cases, it still requires a massive amount of time.

And experience or expertise to stand up a, an e commerce site that looks and feels credible. And I think for most people that still wasn’t something that, they could either afford or can dedicate the time to enter into a market that’s competitive with this. And I think, that it was, we’re firmly saying that I think the expectation is.

It’s changing and shifting and technology will evolve as such that businesses will expect and will be given the technology to stand up digital payments or e commerce experiences to sell products to their customers anywhere. Across any channel in a matter of minutes, but I think, this expectation you can spend two or three months putting together an e commerce site just won’t, it won’t exist in the future.

The second bit, I think if you’re thinking about larger merchants, the M& S’s of this world, so Dastan’s a, a big advocate of this and making. All the same noises. I think what larger merchants want is flexibility. It’s just the flexibility to be able to build and construct experiences for their customers that meet the customers where they find them, provide context, provide relevant value as part of those experiences, not just to convert them, but to truly engage with them on a slightly more meaningful level.

We talked about this point of a digital storefront or e commerce site being a digital representation of your physical store. It’s built for traditional behaviors. I come, I Google your web, your brand, I find your website, I have a look around, they put items in a basket, I buy them. But the reality is that kind of behavior, it’s a subset of consumers, right?

But it doesn’t really exist in the way that it used to. And maybe I’ll give you like two examples. And I think this is. Perhaps, talking, taking it more around, less digital, but like truly digital solutions and the expectation now, I think, for both merchants and for the customer that wherever I meet or find your products, I want to be able to interact with that in some way, shape or form.

And I want to be able to buy it wherever I find it. We’re speaking to two different, but both larger retailers that have some slightly, different needs. One of them is an interesting one because it plays on the social media concept, but they do a lot of work to promote products online by influencers.

But the byproducts of that is that every now and again, an item goes viral or a group of items go viral. And that happens. Consistently, and they know that it happens, but the nature of the beast is they never know what’s going to go viral until it goes viral. And it might happen overnight, right? It might happen overnight with everybody else asleep.

And then how do they react to that? How do they react to it in a physical environment is becoming really important. So for them, they’re looking at, okay, we’d love to empower our storage systems to create physical visual displays of those products that have gone viral yesterday evening. But I can’t go to my e commerce team and ask them to put together these pages or these structures, because.

To Dastan’s point, they’re busy, one, but also like the confines and the constraints of a traditional e commerce site don’t allow for it. So how do we allow people on the ground, marketers, people to create these experiences in a matter of minutes, put that behind a QR code within that link.

To allow people to interact with them, because the other point they have as a challenge is inventory. If a product goes viral overnight, I may not be able to stop my physical store to have the inventory there for people to consume it. I want to create this digital experience that allows people to opt in, see it, connect that digital momentum to my physical store.

And I want to buy that product and send it to my house. So it’s those kind of things.. That really, for us, is… It’s pretty interesting. And one more example, perhaps, where it’s, a physical merchant trying to capture the value or the benefits that you get from a digital experience, which is the increase in the market expenses.

We know this all too well. Consumers are coming into physical stores and they’re starting mobile journeys, right? We can’t stop it. It happens. But unfortunately, because merchants aren’t controlling or taking ownership of that process or experience, where do people go? They go to Google. So I can Google the product that I see in front of me.

I might be price searching, of course, but the chances are I’m also looking for information from the e commerce site for the merchant themselves. And the challenge you’ve got as soon as I enter Google is that I’m in a competitive scenario straight away. Equally, the information that I’m looking for, the website is not necessarily the right place to direct that customer.

So let’s say I’m looking for reviews or I’m looking for sustainability credentials. I direct a customer to the e commerce site, which has a load of pictures and a product description for the product that I can touch and feel in front of me. I don’t need any more pictures, but I might want to be taken straight to the information that matters.

And I want might want to have that option to buy that product there and then either in the store or again to send it to my house. And I think that point now is like physical is digital. There is no, you can’t opt out of it now. Everybody has a mobile phone. So as a physical retailer, you have to.

Understand the digital experience and take ownership of that. Yeah, absolutely. I’m amazed. Now, when you’re looking at that digital experience that you talk about the physical and the digital that you don’t see more QR codes on every single product in store, right? Because if I could just scan a QR code or something go immediately to that brand’s page for that product and find out everything I need to know about that.

That’s the start of my buyer journey. Okay. I’ve walked into a physical store and that potentially was the start, but I’m going to continue that journey online. And who cares like whether that person checks out online or in store. And to be honest, digital is better. It’s better if they check out digitally because you probably have a customer record for that transaction and that that experience.

So it would be better if they did check out digitally, but the store is a great. Place to create that experience. We’re just not marrying these two worlds together very well. Right now, which is crazy when there’s some simple things that we could do to make that happen. And actually then retain and retain that buying experience as opposed to them getting lost on Google or down a social rabbit hole, cause I do it all the time.

There is like a barcodes now at some merchants. So MNS has the barcode system where you go to app and then you scan any product from the closing. And you can basically check out within the app, but probably it’s quite I don’t know the statistics, but I don’t think there is a human wild habit to do that.

When you are in, in, in store, you want to touch it, but at the same time I think you have a new generation which is coming, which will probably use that scanning capabilities. I think… There are still frictions within this probably things. So it’s, you have to add to basket, check out, pay, and then maybe it’s out of stock.

So there are like so many other constraints if you just unpack the whole thing. So it’s just barely the elementary thing you’ve done. But I think we don’t go beyond of what is. What is really that of you just barcode and what’s after that? It’s a transactional, right?

Still you do, you choose the colors, size, boom, bye. So yeah nothing happens. Basically you jump straight to that transaction. Yeah. So it’s still that. Remodeling of the, of whatever you thought is good, but I think to Danny’s point is how you capture the attention value basically at that point, and my fear is.

That a lot of these things may come from other sources of players within the digital space, not retailers, apps, maybe, I don’t know. I’m not saying that it’s not going to work out for anyone, but there may be some other points of capturing that value or that attention or loyalty basically.

Because when you pay for that item. You think you’re capturing the value, but the value is not the money is there is like in like a Implicit value which is hidden right which is the loyalty That the other things which I think we are not capturing as a it’s anything like I go to Zara They have the horrible Scanning experience as well.

So I think that all the retailers are is still have long to go And but there are like other players which probably will come in the space and then create an AR combined within that space. And those going to drive the true capturing the full lifetime or the full value instead of just the money value.

If you what I mean. Yeah, absolutely. Off of eBay the other day. And like I generally search eBay for secondhand cheaper goods. But I thought what was really interesting was, I could actually Ask a question to the seller and he got back to me within, I think he got back to me within 15 minutes and we had a bit of a back and forth conversation.

That was the difference between me not buying it and actually me converting and buying the thing from him. And it was actually a new product that he was selling. But I thought that was really interesting because he didn’t make the product. He was selling someone else’s product, but he knew a lot about it.

He was really happy to have a conversation with me. Didn’t take too much from him. He probably did it on his mobile on the way to work. Who knows? But our digital experiences and our bricks and more experiences, it’s actually pretty hard to have that kind of rapport with the seller or even the brand themselves.

And that’s just a simple conversation that went on an eBay just to augment my experience. Like it made a difference. I ended up buying it. I’ve shortlisted this guy for his other products now And I thought you know rate him as a great seller, but to your points It’s like there’s so much implicit value that can be added and gained for all parties Jumping down because we’ve only got a few minutes left in our session it sounds like we need somewhat of a sort of revolution as opposed to an evolution that I mentioned earlier.

And we’ve talked about some of the things that might be in that revolution. We’ve got some crazy people out there doing it already but it’s not in the mainstream. If you guys could. Leave merchants with one thing to think about.

What would you want them to go away and think about to actually improve this buying experience, improve this emotional connection with their customer base?, so I’ve created a junior banking like seven years ago when it was, I feel like it wasn’t a popular thing back then. So basically you sign up your kid to your banking account, mobile banking app, and then you limit.

So we limited the purchasing options. It’s just a. The drinks are so no alcohol and then you cannot take money from the ATM so you can see in track and that’s for the customer. But for us, you also create a sticky loyalty since the chance. There’s a very small egg, so by the time they grew up, they already know you so much and that’s like already wired into their brain.

That’s just like a very elementary loyalty you can do, but not, no one is doing it. I think like basically what we what we are working is for the current, like the demographics of. What you have, but you’re not targeting the just newly borns and how you’re going to basically sign them up.

And then because five year old is so much more literate than anyone else who is mobile and how you’re going to target them to be part of your like journey of change, but then you should be, you should have so much capability to cater for those who have half a second attention span. So I think the challenge is.

We are focused with the current generation. The current generation is already past, so we don’t it’s a goner, basically. You are, we should think about the ones coming up, which is the generation alpha, even not the generation Z. And So that, that is the biggest challenge how are you gonna create that for them?

Because I go to so many events and talks and people’s oh, yeah, he’s, oh, it’s unregulated. There’s so many challenges. It’s like they don’t want to accept that it’s coming. And then it’s better you accept that than saying, oh, this is something. We don’t want to see because you are ignorant, right?

You are concentrating on the what’s happening now with chat GPT, but this is just a one percent So what I’m trying to say is Instead of looking at what is chatGPT doing now, you should think what is really coming up. And then that’s the same with what these guys are growing up with expectations. The experience expectation is so high and it’s coming as a in a very fast paced way.

I think the challenge for all the retailers is… Is that your competitor is the tick tock the chains or whatever is that not your peers. And the other thing is is investing so much into your infrastructure of networks and all of that. That’s a huge thing. And I’ve worked on 5g and then there are like so many opportunities within that to build products specifically for this digital experience.

5g is designed for that and 6g is going to be even like on steroids basically so a lot of money needed and then a lot of will to understand to both solve the worlds. I think that’s the biggest challenge or I don’t know. Not challenge, but probably work should be done. Cool. So you’ve given us like 10 things there for people to take away, which is great.

But it, we know the gap is large, imagination, invest and invest in the future. . Danny. I think we’ve talked about this before, but to, to think about like the transaction on the payment as more than that, like the payment is like a, it’s like the successful outcome of a built relationship between buyer and seller.

I should feel, it should be filled with excitement. It should be filled with experience. That’s great. Thank You know, it should, there has to be a bit more to it than perhaps what we’re delivering today. I think as payments businesses, we focused a lot on like how we can support that, but it’s all been around, speed and security.

And that kind of just isn’t really good enough now. I think for merchants really to think about that next wave of like consumerism and how people’s people are interacting with their products. It has to be true on the channel, and I think there is a massive opportunity for brands that sort of embrace that and don’t fear it.

Things like mobile commerce in store is going to be really important. There are a lot of people that have seen that as a real challenge to their business model and something that they should almost push against. But ultimately it’s here. It’s here to stay. And the mobile device is a massive.

Potential segue and a bridge between those two experiences. Obviously, I think that, yeah, a lot of retailers have perhaps pushed against this idea that, yeah, we allow people to move between those journeys because, yeah, there is a fear by taking a customer in store into an online experience that they leave that experience, right?

But ultimately, it is here to say that the phone is a bridge. It’s a segue between one experience to another. And it’s the one thing that’s ever present in every buying decision you’ll ever make, yeah. Whether it’s on your desk or it’s in your pocket in a physical store or it, it’s in your pocket or your hand while you’re on a train, your mobile phone is ever present.

I think that mobile commerce and mobile payments are going to become increasingly important. . For me, what you were saying is the opportunity is there for brands in any vertical to ultimately own each one of those experiences, but not only own where they can’t own it and they’ve got a distribution network, it’s to actually leverage and influence that distribution network on their own behalf and create.

Therefore, great end to end commerce experiences, which ultimately end in that customer checking out and buying a product from X brand, regardless of how they got there, but they had a great experience along the way because the retailer or the brand has thought about it and actually thought about who might be in the chain to influence that decision that buyer has gone through, can I just, one, one thing? Is, as a, it’s pure from pure payments perspective. So what we have in the online experience is that it’s a horrible payment experience. You may get stepped up for authentication because, oh my God, you are a dodgy person. And this is all created by this.

Old school banks card schemes PSPs, whatever these guys think they are caring about this thing, but you don’t go to MNS or June Lewis and feeling you get mugged or something like that. Or there’s someone trying to fraud you because you feel so safe there, right? This is an experience we give to customers in retail.

Like the, in the, in real world, but somehow in the in the digital world, we have this. paranoia of this frauds. It happens, but if anyone cannot create specifically this, the providers of the technology we are basically solving their problems for them, right? You, we go to out of app to go to banking app approve, blah, blah, blah.

I don’t care. I want everything so seamless, but we’re solving this banks problem. The 3ds provider problem, whatever is that. And as a customer, you don’t, I don’t want to solve it. Sorry. So that’s the other part of expectation. And whoever is going to do an amazing job within that space is going to be winner as well, because if you will provide this fraudless.

And then no frictionless then, and also your money is safe, then that’s the winner. And, but we still have this oh my God, why are you entering M& S and why are you going out from this store? It’s it’s, imagine this is the same in digital payment world as if everyone is like every third or every 10th even walking out from even Zara or any John Lewis or any star.

If you bought something, then it’s. It’s that we still have to solve and this is 25 year old process still doing the same thing. And yeah it’s, there are so much to do. That’s the basic things, basically. Yeah, and I think what’s interesting about that is… And this is a whole nother session.

So we’ll set up another webinar just to chat about that stuff, what’s interesting about that is it comes back to this point that we made around kind of imagination, ownership, and loyalty with the customer. So if you know the customer.

And you are validating the customer, um, in a really frictionless way. You can remove all the barriers for the end part of the process, which is the important part of the process, right? They, the statistic is that 20 percent of people leave the payment page. And they’re the guys who’ve gone through and put everything in the basket, gone through all the research, whatever, they get to the payment page and they go, Oh, this is just too hard or whatever.

There’s too much friction, but they’re your highest intent buyers. And so you’ve, you want to get rid of that so that you convert an extra 20%. But it comes down to, your customer. And it comes down to you creating experiences that are are good and safe for them, but it’s got to happen earlier.

And you’ve got to, you’ve got to create solutions that. are specific and identifiable with that particular customer. But it feels like we’re a long way from that. I don’t know anyone who’s working on that. I think the the social ones maybe have some good ideas, but I think there are, we will have new innovations coming as a new players within that space.

As an e commerce, it’s a, it’s still in its… I don’t know, pre dinosaur era, like even Shopify, Amazon it’s all old school. It’s all old school. I think like the ones that are going to change is going to be so seamless. It’s, it is I think we are, we will move into at one point when you send a hard emoji is going to be equal to five pounds or something like that.

Imagine that. So your emotion is money. It’s crazy, right? But I don’t want to go into my rebel app and then type five pounds, then you’ll have this kind of, yeah, we are already in this world. So we share so much in tip from you press like this heart or something around this. that would equal to money or if it’s going to be crypto money was in that space, but that’s what’s coming.

Basically not going into my cart and then CVV it’s sorry, it’s, this is not going to work. So that is my, like not a prediction, but that’s how it should be. I think if you want like this constant, because There is no other way to capture the attention. Yeah. And it certainly doesn’t, it’s interesting when you have an emotion, like in, if you imagine that a child came up to you and asked you for a, for some money and you gave them five pounds out of your wallet in the physical, which obviously nobody has five pounds in their wallet anymore.

There’s quite, there’s an, that is an enjoyable experience ’cause. You’ve seen a need or you’ve actually physically transacted with someone like in a physical space and having to go into your banking app and approve a payment just makes you hate the fact that you are having to pay someone some money, right?

It removes any joy from the experience whatsoever. Anyway, I’m going to go offline and have a massive argument with some open banking people now. But yeah, all right. Thanks guys. Thanks a lot. We will talk more payment specific things perhaps next time. But yeah, thanks Danny. Thanks Dastan.