- Retailers are leveraging a variety of technology platforms to drive sales and stay relevant.
- Too many technology platforms can lead to data silos and poor customer experiences.
- An integrated financial technology platform enables 360-degree customer insights and AI innovation.
When customers order food, clothing, or other goods, they expect a seamless experience. To make that happen, merchants rely on behind-the-scenes processes and platforms to deliver quality customer service. From payments to analytics to loyalty programs, Software as a Service (SaaS) applications help businesses track and fulfill orders and deliveries.
In 2022, organizations worldwide used an average of 130 SaaS applications. But when it comes to financial technology, less is more. Too many technology platforms can make it difficult for companies to leverage data and AI for financial payments and customer management. Using multiple financial applications can create a variety of issues, including data silos, inconsistent customer experiences across platforms, and security issues.
Fortunately, companies can take steps to overcome these challenges. Here are four ways retailers can improve customer experience by moving to an integrated financial technology platform.
“To build a quality product, you need to move quickly. In the days of shrink-wrapped software, enterprise products had long development cycles and were released every few years. The cloud and the ability to upgrade software on a daily basis has changed all that.” – Gayathri Rajan, SVP of Product and Payments, Adyen
1. Create a single source of truth for customer transactions
Working with different systems and processes can easily lead to seller data becoming siloed.
“Data silos are nothing new, but they become particularly problematic when businesses want to leverage AI, which is heavily dependent on data,” said Gayatri Rajan, svp of product and payments at Adyen.
Creating a single source of truth that’s accurate, clean, and operationally ready can be difficult, but it’s a worthwhile investment for merchants everywhere. A unified financial platform provides visibility into not only customers’ purchases across channels, but also their behavior across the platform’s entire merchant ecosystem. Maintaining line of sight is crucial for fraud prevention, because machine learning models can detect fraud in real time and at scale. According to Rajan, Adyen identifies 600,000 potentially fraudulent transactions every day, saving merchants more than $30 billion in annual losses.
Adyen is integrating its machine models across its payments and fraud prevention products to provide a more comprehensive view of data and shopper interactions, which is difficult to achieve across multiple platforms. This unified view goes beyond fraud detection to help retailers convert high-quality shoppers into paying customers. When retailers have a complete picture of how customers engage with their brand, they can deliver more effective messaging in real time, including promotions, upsells, and cross-sells.
2. Provide a unified experience across channels
Data silos make it difficult to create omnichannel experiences, and customers often get different, fragmented experiences on each channel, limiting the customization and connections you can make to make them work together.
Some retailers are choosing to treat their online sales channels and brick-and-mortar stores as separate entities, according to Adyen’s 2024 Retail Report, which found that 18% of retailers use different payment providers for online and in-store transactions.
But retailers that adopt a unified approach to commerce will see positive revenue growth: The same report found that a unified approach led to growth 10% higher than the annual average through 2023.
With the help of AI, retailers can integrate these different channels. For example, AI can surface information about shoppers that retailers can use to improve customer service.
“When we process payment transactions on Adyen in-store terminals, we can identify shoppers based on their past purchase history,” says Rajan. “Let’s say a shopper used to buy online a lot, but is visiting a store for the first time. By providing this information to merchants, we can help them tailor the experience to their loyal customers.”
3. Minimize the attack surface
Every time an organization adopts a new type of technology, it increases its exposure to malicious actors, and it can be difficult and time-consuming for companies to complete risk assessments of platform providers and associated third-party vendors.
Businesses can mitigate this risk and save time by using an integrated financial technology platform. For example, the Adyen payments platform simplifies payment processing, data, and financial products through a single integration. Its technology is built entirely in-house, giving them full control over every part of their technology stack.
“Security is at the core of our product development,” Rajan says. “We make a conscious choice to avoid vendors and products that are routinely exploited by attackers, and instead leverage open source software that can make us stronger.”
However, as technology evolves, there are always new threats to consider.
One thing to consider is the recent proliferation of AI-powered SaaS vendors, which poses additional risks for retailers building out their back-end infrastructure. These risks include a lack of transparency, data privacy concerns, and the potential for error or bias. This is where the core principle of building in-house becomes especially important.
“We believe that security of financial products is essential and cannot be compromised,” Rajan said.
4. Race to innovate
Rajan and her team work hard to innovate quickly as financial technology platforms and the complexities that come with them evolve.
“To build a quality product, you need to move quickly,” she says. “In the days of shrink-wrapped software, enterprise products had long development cycles and were released every few years. The cloud and the ability to upgrade software on a daily basis has changed all that.”
In the age of AI, the marriage of quality and speed is more important than ever.
“Without continually upgrading our software and ensuring our AI models are continually learning with new data, we would quickly see an impact in quality and performance,” Rajan says. “The one thing we simply cannot afford is to be slow.”
Learn how Adyen can help your organization accelerate growth with integrated financial technology.
This post Insider Studio With Adyen.
