Business is Personal

By Ben Jackson, IPA COO

​Individual considerations lie at the heart of many of the large trends shaping the payments industry.

That was the underlying theme of the presentations at the Travel Tags Educational Forum held in Minnesota this May.
I was asked to present on the big picture of payments and discussed many of the standard subjects, including artificial intelligence, open banking, fraud, and faster payments. Since the audience included closed-loop issuers, I also discussed how these topics intersected with gift cards.

My fellow presenters included both payments experts and people outside the industry, which provided a wide view of factors shaping the industry.

For instance, spending on gift cards provides insights into the larger economy. Gabriel Resendez, Darden Restaurants, and Steve Bradbery of Savvy, a stored value processing and analytics company, presented the trends in gift cards, and noted the U.S. retail gift card market was $226 billion in 2023, according to Javelin. Of those purchases, many are skewing toward basic categories like gas and grocery stores. This could be a sign that people are buying gift cards to help others or buying the cards to help themselves budget.

The forum also covered the ever-troubling topic of fraud. Homeland Security and the FBI both presented cases they have investigated, which showed some of the progress that has been made in fighting crime.  

In addition, the forum went a deeper into fraud with an interesting presentation on the psychology of people who commit fraud by Eric Grube, a professor at Concordia University, and Marcia Hagen, a professor at Metro State University. Many fraudsters are motivated by outside pressure like financial hardships, but others are motivated by a desire to learn how to manipulate the world around them. The professors noted that arrogance is common among fraudsters but is less predictive than correlative.

When it comes to preventing fraud, oversight is the most effective tool. Another effective tool is paying employees well and offering them opportunities for development. This way, employees won’t rationalize stealing from the company because they feel underappreciated.

A third big trend from the forum is that companies must pay attention to environmental concerns. Jack Peck of Blackhawk discussed how investors and business partners are increasingly factoring environmental considerations into their criteria for choosing which companies to invest in or hire.  Addressing those concerns will likely become part of every company’s strategy going forward. He shared the stage with Kim Shannon of Neenah Paper to show how it worked in practice with one of Blackhawk’s suppliers.

Looking forward, strategists will need to consider the ways that personal and global factors play into the big trends shaping the industry. Understanding that confluence will be key to building successful products and business models in a rapidly changing world.