Product Development Automation, Collaboration Boost Payments Innovation

In a 24/7 world of digital commerce that spans the globe, payments velocity — and the velocity of innovation itself — is critical.

Aditya Mishra, vice president of product management at Plastiq, said that product teams can help improve financial services development — particularly when it comes to building payments into the mix. But to do so, those same development teams have to fine-tune what insights they seek to gather from customers, as well as what they do with the insights once they are in hand.

“Everything shifts when you put the lens of payments on [a situation],” he said, “especially with how rapidly things are changing.”

That’s especially true when it comes to shaking up the status quo.

Tweaking the Product Development Approach

Mishra said that product development teams need to tweak practices to better suit end users, so that the teams themselves are agile and forward looking.

He said that two dimensions govern how product team leverage consumer insights. On the one hand, there’s the constant exploration of the “next big problem” to solve. There’s always the potential to be blindsided by a new issue or consumer desire that takes a company by surprise — vigilance on the part of the enterprise and a constant flow of feedback can minimize that risk.

As for the second dimension, product teams must monitor the reception of services and products that have already been launched.

Mishra said that at any point, on any given day — specifically for payments teams — exploring and solving for new problems becomes critical. Thinking in systems, finding patterns and making sense of far-flung data points can also help uncover new use cases and solutions to various end users’ pain points.

Offering an example, he said that an enterprise focused on small- to medium-sized businesses might form a customer advisory board of, say, 15 companies across various business verticals.

“You can consistently work with them to evaluate and refine product decisions moving forward,” he told PYMNTS, to see what has been holding them back or what challenges they face when evaluating new payments technology.

It can be a challenge for development teams to grasp the problems as they’re narrated by end customers and tie them back to the solutions that exist.

Building Demand for Speed

Businesses that are mulling automation are evaluating tech stacks and are consistently finding issues with payments velocity.

“They expect funds to be transmitted within nanoseconds,” Mishra told PYMNTS. “But we are still laying the infrastructure for instant payments around the world. From an adoption curve standpoint, we are still very early in that life cycle.”

Along the way, it will take time to educate customer segments and bring them up to speed — literally — on real-time payments, he said.

Elsewhere, we’re seeing a movement toward the consumerization of B2B payments, which rests on personal efficiency and familiarity with a digital interface that mimics what we use in everyday life.

Smaller firms, in particular, are looking for friendlier, faster mobile interfaces. However, larger firms are more concerned with frictions that confront scalability, about audits and about a product’s robustness.

“Efficiency takes on a whole different flavor with larger firms,” Mishra said.

In the drive to “amp up” customer insights in the payments space, speed matters. Product teams are limited in terms of staffing and resources, and collaboration can be a boon.

Many product development teams can work with other staffers within the same organization to glean more insight, Mishra told PYMNTS — for example, from observing employees in the sales department.

Being right in front of one’s customer as someone tries to sell a product can yield otherwise-unattainable insights. Automation, in terms of data collection and analysis, can also speed product development, he said.

Letting the enterprise customer lead the conversation can also boost development, Mishra said, rather than simply asking how they like, or dislike, certain product or service features.

That level of customer-led discovery, he said, “offers the golden nuggets are hidden down deep in the life cycle … understanding workflows outside your product is a key sort of source of information.”