Today In Data: Trade Finance Gaps, Brand Texting And Loyalty Spending Habits

Today in PYMNTS data, trade finance gaps left by traditional banks are highlighting deeper underlying issues, millennials are texting more than ever — sometimes with the brands they love — loyalty program customers report they change their spending for well-run rewards offerings, digital checkout speeds impact buyer behavior in eCommerce and Google is trying to achieve the holy grail of payments.

Here are the numbers:

$1.5 trillion | Value of the trade finance gap left by traditional banks, a staggering figure released last year in research by the Asian Development Bank. Trade finance is viewed as essential to businesses, especially smaller firms, that participate in the global economy and expand across borders. As with other forms of financing, alternative lenders have stepped into the space to fill the gap — but a gap remains, highlighting the limitations of alternative lending’s proliferation in recent years.

70 percent | Percentage of surveyed millennials who report they send text messages at least once per day, according to the results of a recent Gallup poll. Phone apps on millennials’ phones are among the most neglected of brands’ connection efforts in terms of priority, usually ranked somewhere between the fifth and tenth most common use for a device. Texting, on the other hand, tends to dominate millennial communication efforts, making it a potential go-to for brands looking to reach consumers.

66 percent | Portion of loyalty program consumers who said they changed their spending habits to get more points and, as a result, it’s possible members of well-run loyalty programs could be persuaded to spend more per visit. Modern loyalty programs can collect customer information, like the number of times they visit a particular location, and can break that data down by day or month for further analysis. They can also track customer spending and average bill sizes and increase customer lifetime value and return on investment (ROI).

15 percent | Increase in top-performing websites’ checkout process speeds by removing 10 percent of the average number of clicks to completion, according to the Checkout Conversion Index. Moving consumers through the checkout process that much quicker could boost merchants’ bottom lines, as underperforming at checkouts costs merchants more than $200 million a year in lost revenue opportunities, according to PYMNTS’ estimates.

12 | Number of years Google has had to learn about the digital payments experience and to embrace valuable lessons about mobile commerce. According to Pali Bhat, Google Payment Corp’s CEO, enabling easy, secure payments for anyone, anywhere in the digital or physical world — using a single account — is the “holy grail” of payments — something Google is hoping to achieve through its recently released Google Pay offering.