Technology

Here’s Why Payment Considerations Are More Important Than Ever In Retail Marketing 5 1780

Between artificial intelligence, online shopping and mobile, retailers have a lot to contend with in 2017. And those that want to survive into the next era are going to have to make more room on their plates to prepare for it. Whether you’re a one-store operation or a global enterprise, the same rule applies. You need to cater to changing customer preferences if you’re going to stay in the game.

And one of the major game-changers beyond etailing and online presence is how people pay for your products. From handling cryptocurrency to loyalty and the omnichannel experience, payment processors are increasingly valuable when it comes to marketing. I sat down with Susanne Steidl, Chief Product Officer at payment processor, Wirecard, to find out how retailers can prepare for the future of payments. Here are three things to keep in mind.

Cryptocurrencies And The Global Economy

Unless you’re living under a rock, chances are you’ve heard about cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. You may have noticed companies hanging up a “Bitcoin accepted here” sign, including major retailers like Expedia and Shopify.

But while most of us can’t escape news of the tumultuous investment landscape surrounding Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, the majority of us still don’t know what cryptocurrency actually is, let alone how it’s going to impact our businesses. (If you’re like me, and you’re still trying to conceptualize the blockchain, this TED Talk might help.)

It’s important for retailers to understand the unique benefits of cryptocurrencies over conventional currencies, such as decreased fraud and bank fees. But when it comes to marketing, the potential benefits are even more intriguing.

 “The global spread of cryptocurrency may bring customers from new regions and a wider range of socioeconomic backgrounds,” says Ted Lanpher, co-founder of Pareto Network Ltd, an information network for cryptocurrency traders.
In short, savvy marketers are thinking ahead to what cryptocurrency might mean for the global economy and how to leverage globalization to tap into new markets.

Payment Processing And The Omnichannel Experience

When marketers think about the omnichannel experience, we often consider communication and engagement, with the payment experience as an afterthought. Still, it comes as no surprise that providing customers with a seamless transaction across channels can increase retention and satisfaction.

Many payment solutions today have built-in loyalty programs, and collect important data. By making payments a central component of the omnichannel strategy, retailers are rewarded with rich customer insights.

“Payment solutions are the next frontier of loyalty programs because they’re so data rich,” says Jon Wolfe, the founder and CEO of House Advantage, which recently launched an omichannel solution that leverages customer data on behaviors and transactions to provide real-time rewards across digital and brick-and-mortar sites.

 “You get to understand the customer beyond their habits in one place – you get data that tells the stories of their lifestyles, how they live, and from that are able to up the value of currencies like points into rewards they actually want to use,” says Wolfe.

Incorporating payment solutions into an omnichannel strategy has been particularly difficult for brick-and-mortar retailers, who often don’t know who their customers are in-store.

“If you really look at the situation, most [physical] retailers have separate systems for ecommerce and POS,” says Steidl. “By combining that for the first time, they have a common pool of data to illuminate who customers are, regardless of where a purchase takes place.”

By treating in-store purchases as you would online, customers receive targeted and customized treatment. With the right data from their payments processor, retailers can create relevant offers at the point of sale and beyond and enhance the overall customer experience.

The Future Of Voice And AI In Payments

Just as we’re seeing a rise in importance of voice and AI online and in customer searches, that technology will soon wind up in payments. Why? Because anything that saves consumers time is big business and that’s ultimately what voice and virtual assistants do.

“Whatever adds value to the customer experience is something that will gain traction,” Steidl confirms. “In specific situations I can imagine that voice can play a role because it’s so much more convenient for consumers. The technology will combine everything that’s available – whatever makes it easier for customers – this is where we’ll see developments.”

Essentially, retailers can can get a foothold on changing payment technology now and brace themselves for the future by selecting the right payments processor. They need to offer their customers preferred payment options and ensure that evolving currencies like Bitcoin are in their sights. When they understand the tie between payment processing and loyalty they can extend omnichannel to payments and enhance the customer experience at every point of contact.

This article was originally published on August 8, 2017 in Forbes.

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Tina Mulqueen is the founder of The Block Talk and the CEO of Kindred PR. She consults with blockchain projects on marketing and public relations strategy, helping clients to secure more than $10M in funding. She is a 2x Top 100 Women in Media honoree and was named one of the top young communications professionals by INC Magazine. She's an advocate for women in technology, and often speaks about the intersection of technology, media & marketing. She writes regularly for Entrepreneur, and has written for Forbes, Huffington Post, Today, Thrive Global, Elite Daily, New York Lifestyles Magazine, and more.

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These Entrepreneurs Are Building the Blank Canvas of the New Internet 5 2890

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

We need a new internet. This HTTP stuff is left over from the ‘90s. It’s corporate controlled in the post neutrality world, susceptible to government censorship, inaccessible to many with nearly half the world’s population still unable to connect. It increasingly needs a more streamlined makeover.

Or at least a little house cleaning. How many apps can we possibly have? How many passwords and accounts? How much content can we cram in here? What do we do with the ever growing graveyard of dead links, old MySpace accounts and cat memes, to say nothing of the emptying, generic cruise ship we call Facebook drifting steadily away from relevance? One possible answer: clean the slate. Start again. This time with something more efficient.

Imagining the Internet 2.0

By some indicators, blockchain could be the thing to supplant the internet as the de facto way we create, communicate and store data. But how will we see it widely implemented without it first becoming more user friendly to the layperson? SMBs and entrepreneurs don’t necessarily have a background in programming, nor have the skills to set their business up on the blockchain. Learning to program or hiring a team of blockchain devs isn’t always within reach to the average SMB, to say nothing of individual artisans or small nonprofits.

By contrast, consider how easy it is to start up a website. You can do it in a few hours, thanks to software platforms that make it easy. You get your URL from GoDaddy, a visual template from WordPress or SquareSpace, who also might bundle in your ecommerce space if you haven’t set that up with Shopify already. It’s because of these SaaS and PaaS third parties that we can web.

If we want to go blockchain, we’ll need a third parties like these to help facilitate it. So where are these platforms? Who’s building them?

The Deregulated Ecommerce Toolkit

Well, Eric Tippetts, for one. Tippetts expects the 2020s to see a shift to blockchain much like the 90s shift to the information superhighway and the 2010s shift to mobile. To speed things along, his company NASGO has created a toolkit called BlockBox, the goal of which is to be the ‘GoDaddy of blockchain’ so people and businesses can start building.

Through BlockBox, which Tippetts cocreated with a development team, you can find and secure a blockchain domain address, like you would with a URL, adapt your existing website for blockchain, and create a custom token. Instead of having to wrap your head around lines of code or hire a dev team, it just takes a couple minutes and a couple hundred bucks.

Tippetts describes NASGO itself as “a decentralized hosting environment that allows content to be seen in every part of the world, opening up blocked boundaries for communication and collaboration.” It also includes a platform for decentralized apps (DAPPS) that could compete with Apple and Google’s app stores.

Their website repeatedly emphasizes the deregulated nature of the product, ostensibly gearing their platform toward the “businesses, developers and consumers” of a sharing and open ecommerce.

A Platform for Public and Private Good

Amber Baldet’s company Clovyr has similar goals, but with a distinctly different tone. She wants people to use their DAPP platform to “build the systems we want to see in the world.”

Baldet left JP Morgan Chase, where she was hired to spearhead their out-of-character blockchain experiments, to found her startup. She recently testified before congress about blockchain regulation and the importance of protecting human rights and privacy early on, while the technology is still in its infancy.

She says that there needn’t be a divide between public and private interests when it comes to blockchain. “It’s very divided, the people that are building things for public chain and people that are building things for ‘permissioned’ or business enterprise kind of chains,” said Baldet in an interview with Fortune. She says that nomenclature isn’t helpful, “because it creates this kind of animosity where we’re saying that big business is on one side and the people or the proletariat are on the other side, when really it should just be about information residing where it makes sense and creating security boundaries that are logical.”

Building a Blank Canvas

In a way, the blockchain is a platform much like the internet itself, a canvas available for anybody to use, whatever their interests and intentions are.

So whatever direction the blockchain internet-nouveau of the future takes, if that’s really what we’re in for, people like Tippetts and Baldet are the architects of its structure. It’ll be up to the rest of to fill it up with content. Hopefully good content. Bring the memes, leave the corporate derelicts.

VEZT Wants You to be Able to Own Shares of Your Favorite Songs 6 2796

Mr. Cheeks has been producing music since the early 90s, under the mentorship of his late uncle, the legendary Gil Scott-Heron. He started with the Lost Boyz, won a Grammy for his work with Stephen Marley, and has released a handful of solo albums since.

Now, royalties for his singles will be available to his fans, thanks to the blockchain. Mr. Cheeks’ songs will be available on a platform that allows fans and investors to claim a slice of the rights to pop music they believe in. When the song is licensed for use, in advertising or film for example, you, the investor, get a cut.

It’s made possible through an app called VEZT, which is positioning itself to revolutionize the way music relates to money as the world’s “first music rights marketplace.” VEZT partnered with a long time Mr. Cheeks producer, Bink, to offer shares of the song “Lights, Camera, Action” which is currently available on the company’s website.

The Problem of Selling Music

Mixing music and markets is an old problem. How should musicians get paid? Who pays them? What about their support teams? How do we keep track of the flow of money and make sure everyone’s fairly compensated? Among the music world’s financial obstacles, one of the biggest issues is navigating licensing and royalties.

In Austin, for example, one of America’s most proficient music hubs, almost a third of musicians make less than minimum wage, and 70 percent are earning less than $10k per year on their work. That’s below the poverty line even for a household of one. It’s been like pulling teeth trying to get royalties from companies like Spotify, who generate income off their songs. Meanwhile even more expensive lawsuits pile up, or go completely unpursued from lack of funds, as marketers continue to ape good music with copyright infringing fakes. It’s a constant headache for musicians, producers and labels, and it makes it prohibitive to eke out a living in the music world.

Under VEZT’s model, royalties are simple. Music is intellectual property owned by the artist. The artist can sell a portion of those rights to fans, who become investors when they purchase a percentage of shares. Fans and musicians make an agreement to co-own the songs they both care so much about. If you love a song and want to see it do well, you invest. If it does well, you have a share in the artist’s success. Royalties are split based on percentage of ownership.

The concept comes from cofounders Robert Menendez, a former Wall St. financial trader/analyst, and Steve Stewart, an industry regular with entrepreneurial tendencies, whose accomplishments include ushering Stone Temple Pilots to fame in the early ‘90s and managing the band for a decade. They say they founded VEZT as part of a vision to “detangle a lot of the financial problems in the music industry, and connect fans more directly with the music they love.”

And now, they’ve expanded across the Pacific from VEZT’s headquarters in Los Angeles, and opened an office in South Korea.

‘The Perfect Environment’

“The fans of music in Korea are quite possibly the most enthusiastic and active fans on the planet,” says Stewart. “Combine this with a robust tech community and a government leading the way in adopting blockchain technologies and you have a perfect environment for VEZT.”

The ROK’s new legislation legitimizing crypto exchange, Dapps, and blockchain systems will take the peninsula farther into a brave new technological world, where many others have so far feared to tread. Combined with their now-world-famous maximalist pop industry, and it’s not hard to see why VEZT moved in.

Construction recently finished on their new 2500 square foot office in the Gangnam district of Seoul. VEZT has enlisted a host of professionals to their C-Suite, including veterans of major Korean record labels, Kpop producers, marketing and PR executives and, of course, tech experts.

Fixing Music With Blockchain

If their model works in Seoul and LA, VEZT could bring a more harmonious rhythm to an industry still trying to find its groove in the digital age. The world needs music, and musicians need to get paid. As with anything blockchain, cutting out some of the middlemen could be the Occam’s razor with the solution. When fans are directly invested in their music, everyone will want to see it succeed.

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