Inside U.S. Bank’s Push to Simplify Global Payments in an Era of ‘Co-opetition’

In the digital age, it’s easier than ever to start a business, to build a commerce platform. But getting operations up and running is one thing; thriving is quite another.

What a business might look like — and what it needs from its payments and financial services providers — will look different from inception versus three years into its corporate journey. There’s no linear path to success.

Rob Seidman, head of U.S. Bank’s Avvance, told PYMNTS that FinTechs, payments processors and banks need to surface the right value-added tools at the right time to help enterprise clients grow, and so they have to evolve right alongside those clients.

“There’s demand from our customers for different, and unique services, added to what we provide traditionally,” he said in a conversation for the “What’s Next in Payments: The Changing Service Economy.”

The bank’s acquiring business is growing, he told PYMNTS, with a nod to his own firm, and global expansion of clients’ operations demands products geared toward foreign currency management. The rise of fraud in card-not-present transactions demands robust fraud defenses and identity management as digital wallets gain wider embrace. That’s especially true of Avvance, the point-of-sale lending solution offered by U.S. Bank, embedded into checkout flows, where the need for speedy transactions must be balanced against the need for security.

Pursuing the Holy Grail

“The holy grail is a frictionless experience for your customers,” he said, “and we’re all striving for great user experiences.”

For providers, competition is intense, but where once the lines had been drawn between banks and FinTechs, now there is a spirit of “co-opetition” that allows firms to choose the services and products they need, when they’re needed. There exists a plethora of platforms from which enterprises can choose, the data that can be accessed or how they embed everything from marketing to loyalty and rewards systems.

U.S. Bank, noted Seidman, has partnered with a variety of providers in its acquiring suite, along with the point-of-sale lending solution and other offerings that move beyond the demand deposit account (DDA). He likened the model to an “omnipresent solution” that exists through offerings that may or may not be owned by the bank.

“There’s a lot of specialization in FinTech tooling,” he said, “and so you see a constellation of FinTechs that have specific services, on behalf of larger FinTechs or other companies or other commerce platforms … we partner because it’s built into ‘tooling’ in other places that we operate.”

What Lies Ahead

Looking ahead, Seidman said there will be increased need and demand for tokenization — both for identity management and for payments. Wallets will continue to transform commerce, as stored wallets can house those identities as holders use them in their day-to-day lives as consumers or even in B2B scenarios.

Borderless commerce, he said, has spurred the need for simplicity in currency management.

“When you have volatility in the values of currencies,” he said, “it adds to what is ‘necessary’ to carry out successful cross-border payments and an overall payment strategy.”

Crypto is emerging as a viable option over the longer term, but no matter the payment method chosen, “it’s the right time to have the best set of rails and the most choice” to facilitate different consumer and commercial use cases — which then boosts the efficiency of transactions for small businesses and even individual remittances.

“Every segment is evolving quickly,” said Seidman, “and in the next three to five years, the introduction and normalization of AI into all aspects of banking, payments and acquiring will transform us … the immediacy of everything will drive the demand for how we evolve and what we offer to the market as well.”

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