IR is providing purpose-built solutions for Payments industry; IR Transact simplifies complexity of managing your Payments

Last month we referenced IR’s branding of its major product groups, a rebranding of its solution suites with names that reflect company’s primary focus areas; IR Collaborate, IR Transact and IR Infrastructure. We also noted that while the labels may have changed, the core objective remains the same – to simplify the complexity of these mission critical environments making them easier to manage while ensuring a level of resilience we have come to expect from IR.

It has been a remarkable journey for IR that continues to reinforce how flexible and all-encompassing the basic Prognosis platform has proved to be. This platform has readily lent itself to the support of monitoring and management of a diverse variety of sources including those very few of us even thought about pre-pandemic. Who could have imagined the explosive growth of products like TEAMS and ZOOM? Support for both of them is now a part of IR Collaborate!

However, it is IR Transact that is perhaps of more significance to this community where NonStop systems continue to be deployed in support of mission-critical payments solutions.  A traditional mainstay of NonStop systems globally, there is an increased interest in purpose-built monitoring and management platforms as demand to know more about all that transpires on these platforms becomes paramount. Those businesses running modern payments platforms have to continually stay abreast of developing trends otherwise their role in the payments ecosystem could become compromised.

On January 1, 2021, PYMNTS.COM (a digital media company focused on Payments) published the report Tracking The Trends That Shaped 2020’s The Digital-First Economy Among its many conclusions were observations the NonStop and Payments communities could readily support. When looking at consumers there was no reluctance on the part of the publication to call out just how much the world of payments changed between January 1, 2020 and today. Among the many key findings by PYMNTS.COM were the following:

The consumers who shopped for anything from groceries to sporting goods to cars in December of 2019 are completely different from the ones who shop today. Not only have they been stung by an unprecedented pandemic and consequential lockdown, they’ve been made aware of – and have started using – different ways to conduct their shopping journeys, pay for their goods and even take possession of them.

Our shopper will use her card-on-file with her supermarket … but when (they) had to make a run to the physical store our shopper would use a contactless method of payment.

Our shopper thinks digital-first and isn’t going back … dependence on connected devices, the ecosystems (they) connect to, and the integrated payments experiences they enable have blurred the lines between the physical and now digital-first worlds.

More than 85 percent of digital-first consumers – those who have done less in the physical world and more in the digital world for the same activity – say they’ll keep all or most of those digital habits. What started as a necessity has become a way of life.

It is this last observation that is the least surprising. Our history with IT has been about finding things that work and then sticking with them. Most of us know where we were when we first interacted with an ATM but perhaps even more surprising is how the turnover in technology has seen once stalwarts of our interaction with financial institutions become relegated to little more than a footnote within the history of IT.

However, perhaps most important of all is that there is now an awareness that transactions can be initiated anywhere, anytime and from anyplace. Popularity of just a single item can lead to unexpected transaction spikes with little advance notice even as there has been an acceleration in usage of previously introduced technologies. It may not have needed a global pandemic to encourage greater global usage of contactless methods of payments but it’s hard to dispute just how rapid a rise in usage has taken place as a result.

On January 12, 2021, IR posted The changing world of payments: 2021 outlook where Jason Krebs, a Senior Product Manager at IR, reflected on just how far we have come in twelve months. A reference to this post was first provided in last month’s January 2021 issue of NonStop Insider. “2020 – a year of learning,” was how Krebs began his post before making this observation:

In the last twelve turbulent months, the payments industry worldwide has undergone a metamorphosis. Globally, businesses are moving away from cash and adopting touchless and online payments methods as the way forward. While COVID-19 has accelerated the adoption of new payments approaches and technology, it’s consumer behavior that has been the major driver.

Two items he then addresses should come as no surprise to either the NonStop community or those working with Payments:

Without deploying the tools to gather insights for customer communication, businesses will miss the opportunity to create a better service, and ultimately lose the customer.

Improving experience from a customers’ perspective, will provide increased satisfaction, boost sales, expand relationships, and increase retention.

Followed by:

The focus on technology was already happening prior to the pandemic. But with extended periods of social distancing, remote working, and the other challenges of staying afloat during the crisis, the adoption of new technology to facilitate digital banking has sped up even more.

Many businesses are finding it necessary to invest in new tech infrastructures, or upgrade their old systems to keep pace with ever-increasing demands in the world of payments.

Experience together with focus on technology. This is perhaps the single most important aspect of what IR brings to the discussion. Looking to keep the customer experience better such that your payments offerings remain relevant, then it might very well come down to your choice of monitoring and management platform. IR Transact is very much focused on the customer bringing with the experience and technology required to remain competitive even as those communities being supported have become far more tech savvy with all that they have learnt in 2020.

To replay the webinar that Krebs, together with Stuart Matthewman, IR Global Head of Marketing Communications, provided December 9, 2020, check out the IR web site:

https://www.ir.com/webinars/2021-payments-trends-to-watch

Should you have any questions or would like to learn more, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your IR sales team. We look forward to addressing any topic that may be of interest to you and your enterprise.
Kevin Johnson,
VP Sales – Payments Performance Monitoring
www.ir.com