They Said That: Notable Quotables for the Week of August 5

While you were watching track and field, basketball, fencing and swimming we were keeping our usual close eye on the “faster, higher, stronger” world of payments, banking and the connected economy. And now that your eyes have had a bit of a workout with that compound sentence, here are some of the best quotes from our interviews during the week ending Aug. 9.

We started in the world of banking architecture. In “Galileo Says Wire Transfers Go Big and Go Digital With New APIs,” Galileo Financial Technologies Chief Product Officer David Feuer told PYMNTS that same-day, faster wire transfers are set to help transform a broad line of business and consumer use cases with real-time notifications. “While FedNow brings this real-time API nature” to transactions, “it’s still at the end of the day using Fedwire, which is terrific because as we build this wires functionality on top of Fedwire, we can add FedNow as an iterative feature set on top of it and not have to completely rebuild our connectivity to the Fed,” he said. “Creating a developer-friendly interface in front of Fedwire makes it much more easily consumable and quick because it’s bringing that speed of API to a system that wasn’t always API-enabled. Being able to provide APIs in front of it and getting that wire sent very quickly and settled very quickly really brings that physiological safety to the customer where they know the transaction has occurred and settled and is irrevocable.”

Then we shifted to digital healthcare. In an era where digital transformation is sweeping across industries, the healthcare sector finds itself grappling with the challenge of modernizing its payment systems. In “The Road to Digital Healthcare Payments Starts With a Few Cashless Steps, Says Bank of America,” Simon Abtalion, healthcare solutions executive at Bank of America, told us: “Historically, [as it relates to payment flows between patients, providers and payors,] healthcare has not been a leader in technology adoption nor deployment, and … for that reason, it’s been challenging to keep up with the evolving needs and expectations of patients.”

It was a big week for retailing interviews. Here we started with an interview with Grubhub’s Kiran Chandran, the aggregator’s vice president of product and design, who discussed how transparency will encourage shoppers to trade up. In “Grubhub VP Says in-App Wallet Could Boost Average Check,” we learned that the company announced earlier this month the launch of several new features, including an in-app digital wallet that shows consumers the credits they have available, such as gift cards and rewards benefits. “By seeing it first thing, users are able to better assess the credit they have available, which they then keep top of mind throughout the ordering process,” Chandran said. “For example, a user could open the app, see their available funds and be pleasantly surprised that they have more credit than they originally thought. This might encourage them to add a side to an entree or get a dessert or drink with their meal as well.”

We also landed an interview with Macy’s. In “Macy’s VP: Restructuring Aims to Elevate Customer Experience and Drive Growth,” PJ Singh, vice president of stores strategy and product management at Macy’s, discussed the company’s reorganization strategy. “It is rooted in investments and learnings that we’ve iterated over the past year, but more importantly, it’s a signal to our organization that is driving a major shift in culture,” Singh said. “We believe that a more engaged and inspired colleague community is vital before you go external and reach your customer. As a result, we are taking an inside-out approach to delivering customer experience and challenging ourselves on the things our customers have told us are points of friction.”

On the social commerce side of the house, in “QVC CEO Aims Social Commerce at Gen Z Parents,” Qurate Retail President and CEO David Rawlinson talked about how the live shopping brand’s Age of Possibility campaign, launched in the spring, has enabled it “to better serve the attractive demographic of women 50-plus,” collaborating with 50 celebrity women over the age of 50. The campaign has been successful at drawing digital engagement. “Since launch, we have experienced strong initial reaction to this campaign, with 38 billion earned media impressions, 330,000 new Facebook community members, a nearly 200% increase in the number of QVC social followers and more than 1 million visits to [the] QVC campaign website,” Rawlinson said. “We saw strong demand from Age-of-Possibility-related brands in Q2, with collective demand for the existing 12 brands up low-double-digits after the campaign launch.”

And as always, we end with fraud. “In Putting ‘Scam Dens’ Out of Business Means Using AI to Fight AI,” we learned that Featurespace has been investing in advanced algorithms to underpin fraud prevention efforts. Last year it launched TallierLTM, the world’s first large transaction model, which uses generative AI to improve fraud value detection by up to 71%. “What OpenAI did around language and words, we’ve created for the payments environment — modeling what genuine behaviors and transactions will look like,” said Featurespace Chief Operating Officer Tim Vanderham told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster. “When you think about the billions and billions of dollars that come from scams globally,” the money made from illicit gains overshadows the revenues of some of the largest businesses around the globe. “We have to make sure that we’re using advanced data algorithms and machine learning over this data to combat the fraud and to do everything we can to allow consumers to transact more freely.”