All posts by Peggy Olson

Blog Contributor Peggy Bekavac Olson is the payments industry’s go-to marketing expert. She is president and CEO of Strategic Marketing, providing fractional CMO and marketing department services for financial services and electronic payments companies. Previously, Olson was Vice President of Marketing and Communications for TSYS (now Global Payments).
Alacriti Blog

How Credit Unions Can Turn Indirect One-and-Done Members Into Direct Members

The current car-buying market hasn’t been this hot for a long time. Fortunately, credit unions have been steadily increasing indirect lending through car dealers to grow their loan portfolios and membership bases. However, converting indirect members into engaged members with deeper banking relationships is no easy task. A plethora of products and services are available for indirect members to benefit from, but why are so few taking advantage of what credit unions have to offer? It may have something to do with the member experience. 

The payments arena presents a huge opportunity to gain competitive advantage. Today’s consumers want flexible, convenient, simple, and innovative ways to pay, and they want the places where they shop and bank to provide new payment options and technologies. Indirect members typically already have a “primary financial institution” (PFI) relationship with banks that may have more money to invest in the latest and greatest technologies offering ease and convenience. So, what can, and should, credit unions do to tackle this problem head-on?

Digital EBPP Capabilities to the Rescue

An electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) solution can deliver bills faster and encourage on-time payments. Some key digital EBPP features providing flexibility, convenience, and frictionless simplicity to indirect credit union members, include:

  • More Payment Options – ACH; credit, debit and prepaid cards; direct debit bank transfers; and eWallets like Apple Pay, PayPal, Venmo, and Zelle give indirect members the ability to pay in the way that makes the most sense for their individual financial situations versus the clunky process of paying by check. 

  • One-Time Online Guest Payments – Indirect members can make payments without enrolling in an online portal with a hosted webpage or opening an account that comes with online banking. 

  • Autopay Programs – Autopay automatically schedules and deducts monthly payments from indirect member’s credit or debit cards or bank accounts on due dates, ensuring late fees are not assessed. Indirect members can easily set up autopay via a quick and easy online enrollment process. 

  • Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Payments – Although not so new, automated IVR systems enable indirect members to make one-time payments from smartphones and tablets quickly and easily.

  • Pay by Text – By leveraging the power of SMS text messaging, credit unions can deliver highly-personalized payments experience to indirect members by allowing them to select how many days in advance they want to receive bill-ready alerts and the digital payment option they want to use to pay. Upon receiving a bill-ready alert, indirect members simply reply with a “PAY” command text to initiate a payment from the funding source previously established. A payment confirmation text is sent back to the member’s device indicating the transaction has been completed.

  • Chatbot Support and Payments – Credit union customer service agents can communicate with indirect members about their bills and accept payments via Facebook Messenger, Amazon Alexa, and Google Assistant with chatbot capabilities. Customers can receive bill-ready payment-related notifications and reminders once accounts are linked. 

And, of course, these experiences can be made available to direct credit union members as well. 

The Bottom Line: Besides accelerating cash flow and streamlining operations, credit unions that offer robust and innovative EBPP capabilities have a tremendous opportunity to deepen member relationships. Turning indirect, one-and-done members into long-term, direct members. 

Updated from a blog originally published April 30, 2020.

When indirect members love the loan experience, it can lead to opening new accounts or loans as direct members. Learn about Maximizing the Member Experience Through Payments in the webinar featuring Alabama Credit Union. 

Today’s legacy and siloed banking technology infrastructure limit financial institutions’ ability to rapidly innovate. It’s time to look at money movement in a new way. Alacriti’s Orbipay Unified Money Movement Services does just that. Whether it’s real-time payments, digital disbursements, or bill pay, our cloud-based platform enables banks and credit unions to quickly and seamlessly deliver modern digital payments and money movement experiences. To speak to an Alacriti payments expert, please call us at (908) 791-2916 or email info@alacriti.com.

Alacriti Blog

Offering More Payment Channels Improves the Customer Experience

Customer experience is the result of interactions between you and your customers over the duration of your relationship. Offering convenience and flexibility around the payment channels your customers use enhances their experience, which leads to increased loyalty and retention, plus increases the likelihood you’ll get paid. It also helps your business remain competitive, reduce costs, and stimulate cash flow. 

A payment channel is any location, place, or access point a customer might use to make a payment, or anywhere or any way that your business might accept a payment from them. 

Here’s a list of payment channels you may want to consider offering to your customers:  

  • Lockbox – Mail
  • Physical Location – Walk-In, Point-of-Sale (POS), Mobile Point-of-Sale (mPOS) or Self-Service Kiosk
  • Voice – Telephone Call Center CSR, Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
  • Digital – Online Web Portal, Email, Chatbot, Autopay/Recurring Billing, or Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
  • Mobile – Apps, Texts

In addition, offering more ways to pay or forms of payment to customers along with the channels listed above matters too as they are looking to pay with the methods they know and trust:

  • Cash
  • Checks
  • ACH
  • Credit, Debit, and Prepaid Cards
  • eWallets (e.g. Apple Pay, Android Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Square Cash, Venmo, Zelle, etc.)
  • Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL)
  • Cryptocurrency

Emerging payment options, such as BNPL, are gaining traction in the post-pandemic economy. BNPL allows consumers the convenience and purchasing power of credit—without the paperwork, qualifying red tape or high interest rates.  According to Cornerstone Advisors, retail purchases are projected to quadruple to $100 billion in 2021 compared to $24 billion in 2020. 

Consumer interest in cryptocurrency is also expanding—as both an investment vehicle and a payment option—though the vast majority of U.S. financial institutions remain reticent about issuing it. Again, according to Cornerstone Advisors, some 60 percent of current crypto owners would invest in crypto with their bank, and 68 percent would be interested in Bitcoin-based debit and credit rewards.

Today’s consumers are comfortable using multiple channels to pay interchangeably, and they expect to have a uniform customer experience across all the channels they access to facilitate simple, frictionless bill payments on a regular, ongoing basis. 

For example, you may have a customer use a debit card at a physical location accepted by a CSR or self-service kiosk as they begin their relationship with your business, but then they might switch to an online portal for a one-time ACH payment, and then set up autopay with a credit card as their relationship with you deepens.   

Whatever the case, consumers want options and control over the various aspects of how and when they pay. 

The Bottom Line: Do payment channels matter? The answer is yes. The more payment channels and methods you offer, the more likely your customers will pay their next bill, and the next, and the next, increasing their loyalty, satisfaction, and lifetime value to your business. 

Updated from a blog originally published February 25, 2020.

Learn more about what consumers expect in the webinar, Payments in 2022: What You Need to Know. 

Today’s legacy and siloed banking technology infrastructure limit financial institutions’ ability to rapidly innovate. It’s time to look at money movement in a new way. Alacriti’s Orbipay Unified Money Movement Services does just that. Whether it’s real-time payments, digital disbursements, or bill pay, our cloud-based platform enables banks and credit unions to quickly and seamlessly deliver modern digital payments and money movement experiences. To speak to an Alacriti payments expert, please call us at (908) 791-2916 or email info@alacriti.com.

Alacriti Blog

The Value of AWS Well-Architected Framework Reviews

The AWS Well-Architected Framework facilitates review and improvement of cloud-based architectures and creates a better understanding of the business impact of design decisions. 

The Framework addresses general design principles as well as specific best practices and guidance in five conceptual areas which are defined as Well-Architected pillars:

Operational Excellence – Ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures

Security– Ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies

Reliability – Ability of a system to recover from disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand and mitigate disruptions

Performance Efficiency – Ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements and to maintain that efficiency

Cost Optimization – Ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point

Icon images courtesy of AWS. 

The Well-Architected Framework offers a rich repository of documentation and code supporting these pillars, including general across-the-board design principles apply, design principles geared toward each specific pillar, AWS enabling services, lenses, and assessment tools. 

A periodic review of your AWS environment through the prism of the Well-Architected Framework can help your business maintain a secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure on AWS Cloud. Besides uncovering critical issues that need immediate remediation, the review compares current architecture to a defined baseline to identify areas that could or should be improved with recommendations for further action. The outcome is a set of actions that should improve the experience of a customer using the workload while optimizing operational costs.

Well-Architected reviews help:

  • Identify pressing issues with cost, performance, reliability, operations, and security so they can be remediated quickly
  • Improve cloud usage of poorly architected implementations needing attention
  • Ensure workloads are always capable of running in a cost-optimized environment
  • Interpret the rapid flow of new AWS services, to tap those that immediately impact or address real business issues like cost and operational excellence
  • Provide the opportunity to discuss how modern infrastructures can be used to create market advantage by aligning business needs to company goals and strategies

Click here to access our latest webinar recording to learn more about the AWS Well-Architected Framework. You can also email AWSConsulting@alacriti.com to schedule a complimentary consultation call to discuss your cloud environment and development plans. 

Alacriti Blog

Hyper-Customization: What Does it Mean for EBPP?

When it comes to shopping, consumers have more power and choices than ever before. Advanced technologies and an avalanche of data powering hyper-customized buying experiences have empowered consumers so that they now can buy anything they want, from anywhere, at any time, and at the lowest possible price. To top it off, consumers now expect seamless, multichannel experiences, simple payment processes, fast delivery, easy returns, and intelligence around buying and payment preferences for future purchasing.

What does this mean for electronic bill presentment and payment? 

Increased availability of technology and data, as well as increasing consumer choices, are at play in the EBPP arena too. Consumers want secure payments that are easy-to-make, with personalized user experiences that offer a wide variety of payment options and choices.  

Most companies do a pretty good job of providing their customers with EBPP basics. But to position your organization at the forefront of the hyper-customization craze and enhance the customer experience, here are some things you should be thinking about relative to your EBPP offering:

  • Besides traditional cash, check, ACH, and card payments, consider a broad palette of payment options, such as eWallets like Apple Pay, PayPal, Venmo, and Zelle; Real-Time Payments (RTP®), direct bank debit, and push-payments like Visa Direct and Mastercard® Bill Pay Exchange.

  • Contemplate taking advantage of technology innovation to increase the payment channels your customers can use, including online portals, email, chat, text and mobile apps, as well as click & collect where consumers initiate payments online and actually make their payments at physical brick-and-mortar locations or self-service kiosks.

  • Look at offering account updater services to automatically receive cardholder data updates from issuers when cards are expired or replaced, removing your customers from an irritatingly needless interaction.

  • Consider adding personalized data into the payments process to deliver more relevant and secure payment information such as loan amount, current loan balance, current payment amount, number of remaining payments, installment payment plans, and more.

The Bottom Line: Hyper-customization is the next wave in EBPP customer engagement, providing organizations who embrace it the opportunity to soar. By offering feature-rich, frictionless, and hyper-customized experiences to facilitate payments using any acceptance option, through any channel, at any time, you will boost customer loyalty and retention, streamline operations, and accelerate cash flow. 

Alacriti Blog

Benefits of Cloud Computing with AWS

With technological change happening at a faster pace than at any time before, digital transformation leveraging cloud computing is key to maintaining a competitive edge.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) can help your business thrive. AWS is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. Offering over 175 fully-featured cloud services from data centers around the globe, organizations from large enterprises and governmental agencies to fast-growing startups, have easy access to IT services like processing, networking, storage, security and more. AWS helps them lower costs, become more agile and innovate faster to scale and grow. 

AWS is commonly used for:

  • Storing large amounts of data
  • Processing large datasets 
  • Handling peak loads for e-commerce websites
  • Hosting static websites
  • Hosting dynamic applications or websites with web, application and database tiers
  • And so much more

A 2018 IDC white paper titled, “Fostering Business and Organizational Transformation to Generate Business Value with Amazon Web Services” reveals AWS not only lowers the cost of providing IT services but changes how IT services are delivered and helps transform business operations so companies can better compete and address market needs and demands.

IDC survey participants indicated that their AWS migration created substantial business benefits, including: 

  • 51% lower cost of operations 
  • 62% more efficient IT infrastructure staff 
  • 94% less unplanned downtime 
  • 25% higher developer productivity 
  • Three times more new features delivered annually
  • $36.5 million per year of additional revenue 
  • Six months to payback 
  • 637% five-year ROI

These benefits were achieved by: 

Freeing Up Financial and IT Resources – AWS creates more cost-effective IT environments by optimizing computing, storage and database costs, scaling to meet business demand without overprovisioning. Cost and human capital efficiencies were also achieved by moving away from dedicated, in-house infrastructure operations. Participants were able to shift the focus of their IT staffs to more higher-level activities and strategic business initiatives, rather than day-to-day routine support. They also realized substantial gains in application developer productivity with AWS.

Increasing Speed and Agility – Offering reliable and high-performing AWS applications leads to operational efficiencies via increased user productivity and fewer business disruptions. Gaining the agility to deliver cost-effective IT resources on an on-demand basis enabled participants to address business opportunities quickly to win more business and increase revenues.

Reducing Business Risk – AWS increases confidence in the security and resiliency of IT operations, with measurable positive impacts on business risk related to availability, security and regulatory compliance:

  • Ease of deploying clusters ensures performance with additional resources 
  • Reliable failover services maximize availability while diminishing outage impacts
  • Automated scaling prevents performance issues 
  • Multizone workload balancing capabilities distributes traffic more efficiently while increasing resiliency and reducing latency
  • Compliance with industry-specific regulations and mandates avoids noncompliance fines, penalties, and reputational damage

Some additional benefits of AWS, beyond what’s listed above, include: 

  • Better security options 
  • Increased productivity through automation 
  • New revenue streams through differentiated solutions 
  • Higher availability leading to improved user satisfaction 
  • Rapid experimentation and transformation in response to business changes and needs 
  • Faster innovation and time to market 
  • Reduced costs with better performance 
  • Open standards eliminate getting locked into one vendor 

The Bottom Line: Organizations adopting AWS can be more competitive, increase customer satisfaction, innovate faster, achieve greater productivity, enhance security, improve reliability and optimize costs.

Alacriti Blog

Adopting a Loan Payments Solution: Lessons Learned from Tech CU (Webinar Recap)

Making payment options easier for members is the goal of every credit union, especially the small, perhaps single-branch operations that might not have the research and development budgets of megabanks to remain at the forefront of the newest technology in the payments space. 

There are fintech vendors that specialize in providing cutting-edge payment technology to credit unions, among them Alacriti with its cloud-based software platform. Orbipay® EBPP is an electronic bill presentment and payment solution that gives credit union members the flexibility and convenience of making payments anywhere, any way and at any time of day or night. Members have the option to pay using their preferred payment method (credit, debit, check, ACH and more), giving them complete control over the payments process. Features such as autopay and a frictionless user interface help improve credit union cash flow and reduce loan delinquency.

San Jose, California-based Technology Credit Union (Tech CU) found Orbipay EBPP to be the perfect loan payments solution. 

WesPay featured Alacriti and Tech CU in their ongoing fintech webinar series held on December 16th. The companies discussed Tech CU’s selection process for their new loan payments solution, as well as the advantages of Orbipay EBPP, steps and time requirements in its implementation, and the results.

Here’s some background on Tech CU and key webinar takeaways. 

Tech CU supports the high-tech industry and its employee base in Silicon Valley, boasting more than $3 billion in assets with more than 120,000 members. True to its mission to deliver education and empower members to succeed financially, it chooses to partner with companies like Alacriti to provide innovative solutions.

Nathan Carman, Tech CU’s Assistant Vice President and Central Operations Manager for Payments, said a key to selecting Orbipay EBPP was that its platform is intuitive. Keeping the payment experience simple and straightforward is what Tech CU strives for. He likes that members are now able to pay their bills up to 6 p.m. on the due date with no fee charged for the service. He’s always on the lookout to partner with a fintech like Alacriti to keep Tech CU on the leading edge and to drive superior user experiences.

Both Carman and Ivy Widman, Senior Business Systems Analyst at Tech CU, lauded Alacriti for being agile, willing to collaborate to customize a solution to their needs, plus offer responsive, knowledgeable and pleasant customer support.

Eric Ngan, Tech CU’s Vice President of Enterprise Applications and Integrations, pointed out that the Orbipay EBPP’s user interface provides a wealth of information about the member and their loan, including minimum payment due, payment due date, late charges, and payoff information. He was impressed that the interface is customizable, allowing features and functions to be easily added, changed or removed, and that Alacriti set up a test environment for Tech CU before it went live with Orbipay EBPP in February 2019.

Once live, Carman said Tech CU was able to process more loan payments digitally and faster while improving delinquency rates. Members were happy – especially those making payments with debit cards, and that the number of checks arriving in envelopes and phone payments diminished significantly enabling existing staff to be redeployed to other business activities. 

The Bottom Line: With Orbipay EBPP, Tech CU has been able to rapidly increase the number of digital payments they process while enhancing the borrower experience, improving cash flow, reducing delinquencies and streamlining operations. They are thrilled Orbipay EBPP supports the credit union’s mission of delivering experiences that wow their technology-based members. 

Alacriti Blog

Six Payments Trends to Watch in 2020

1. Payments Change is in Unbridled Overdrive

From digital disruption and pushing the envelope with rampant innovation to new regulatory compliance requirements and ongoing customer demands, businesses are being squeezed from all sides. Companies accepting and processing payments must anticipate what’s next and act boldly as the market rewards agility and punishes inaction.

2. The Rise of Cloud Computing and Amazon Web Services (AWS) 

Cloud computing using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process payments data, rather than a local server or a personal computer can be a real game-changer. AWS is the most successful cloud infrastructure company on the planet today. Key to AWS and cloud computing success in payments is innovation agility, on-demand scalability, and variable pay-as-you-go cost-effectiveness.  

3. Multichannel and Omnichannel are Evolving into Unified Commerce 

First came multichannel, then omnichannel and now unified commerce. No matter where payments happen (brick-and-mortar, mobile, online or unattended) or payment form used (check, ACH, debit, credit and more), the new business reality is to provide consistent, integrated customer experiences across the board. By aligning products and services, systems and customer interactions, deploying unified commerce provides superior payments experiences that satisfy today’s growing consumer expectations, while enabling companies to leverage data analytics to drive valuable customer behavior insights. 

4. Frictionless, Data-Rich Payment Experiences are Becoming a Consumer Expectation

Consumers want payments experiences that align not just with how they pay, but with moments of influence in their lives that revolve around real needs. They want Uber-like scenarios which make the process of paying almost completely disappear. And, as Accenture notes, Millennials and GenZers are especially interested in digital payments advisory and expense management services that provide better understanding and control of personal spending. Next-level customer experiences infused with rich and meaningful data, like delivering amount due and due date, previous amounts and dates paid, account balances and more while transacting, matter more than ever before. 

5. Real-Time Payments (RTP®) Finally Arrive

The advent of faster payments promises to transform commerce for both consumers and businesses. RTP serves as an alternative to batch or delayed payment options such as checks, credit card, debit card, and ACH transactions, with instant, 24/7 business-to-business (B2B), peer-to-peer (P2P), business-to-consumer (B2C) and consumer-to-business (C2B) transfers. Besides moving money swiftly and expediently, RTP makes ordinary financial tasks such as paying bills, issuing invoices, making payroll or settling claims to be easier, faster, safer and more satisfying. RTP enables businesses to manage cash flow on a second-to-second basis which frees up working capital, plus with access to extensive, tightly integrated data delivery capabilities, back-office processes can be streamlined saving time and money. RTP also helps make life less stressful for consumers on tight budgets.

6. Data Security & Privacy Regulation on the Rise

With the accelerating digital revolution, business use of personal information has exploded. And with the continuous onslaught of major data security breaches, consumers no longer fully trust companies to protect their personal data. Both consumers and governments are demanding greater transparency, accountability, protection, and control. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Europe’s tough new data privacy and security law came online mid-2018. Companies serving consumers in the European Union must now comply or face hefty fines. January 1, 2020 marks a significant milestone in the U.S. data privacy and security landscape. It’s the date in which the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) goes into effect. All companies serving California residents with at least $25 million in annual revenue must comply with CCPA requirements or face substantial fines. And if that isn’t enough, other states are lining up quickly with their own privacy legislation as so far, the federal government has failed to enact a nationwide data privacy law.