Incremental Innovation – Evolving in a Changing Payments Landscape

Rapidly Changing Payments Landscape

Payments are experiencing many evolving trends which are disrupting and reshaping the payments landscape. The highly competitive financial industry is faced with a level of constant change which h​as forced organizations to adapt at a pace which has never been seen in their history.

Consumer sophistication and payments convenience expectations are evolving at record levels. Payment channels are increasingly leveraging new technological advances and consumers are eagerly adopting alternative payment instruments other than cards.

Organizations are facing increased competition where speed to market drives market share. Highly agile non-traditional organizations are bringing innovative payment solutions into the market which threaten traditional financial organizations and force collaboration with new and innovative payment channels.

At the heart of the problem is many traditional payments organizations are faced with aging legacy systems where rapid and cost-effective adaptation is not easily accomplished. However, there is one underlying theme all organizations must face:

In order to compete you must adapt…

Pick the Right Strategy

The key to rapid and cost-effective adaptation is a solution which empowers organizations to quickly enable responsive and innovative solutions to address ever increasing payments market pressures. But the migration of complex legacy systems often seems quite daunting and organizations frequently struggle with how to proceed with such complicated replacement strategies.

Some market pundits recommend a complete technology rip-and-replace to solve the legacy system issues and shortcomings. This approach frequently results in multi-year projects, higher cost, and a greater level of risk to an organization’s core business by adopting an all-or-nothing migration strategy.

Incremental Innovation is a more realistic approach. Identify key pain points which need the most immediate attention while maintaining the longer-term vision for a full technology replacement. Addressing immediate pain points through strategic technology replacement allows organizations to see incremental successes through more manageable phases. This allows organizations to gradually replace their complex legacy systems while protecting and enhancing their businesses.

Evolving Through Incremental Innovation

The key to incremental innovation is to choose a replacement solution which will solve the immediate pain points while providing a platform which may replace all the complex requirements of the legacy system over time.

Financial institutions should adopt incremental innovation strategies with the goal of deploying future-proof solutions which allow them to expand technical capabilities to meet the ever-growing demand for evolving consumer-centric solutions. Euronet’s REN Innovation Ecosystem is a modern, future-proof, and flexible solution which allows organizations to adapt as the payments landscape evolves.​