Helping South African bank to keep up with digital innovation

The growth in non-cash payments has increased the revenue potential of the payment sector, making it one of the high-stakes sectors in financial services.

Until recently, banks were dominant but new players have successfully challenged this dominance. From MNOs to fintechs to third-party payment processors, increased technology has intensified competition. Improved speed, ease, security and cost of making payments are common in contactless payments to biometric authentication features, social-media payments and distributed ledger platforms.

Banks are faced with how best to respond to these developments. Genesis engaged with a large South African bank to create and maintain a market insights capability that would enable it to develop internal points of view on developments in the payments sector, allowing the bank to respond with appropriate short-term and medium-term strategies.

Genesis compiled a live database of developments within the payments sector and analysed them according to the payment flow, rail and theme. From this, we built a comprehensive as-is analysis of the payments space, identifying the ongoing technological developments as well as that of the competitors, both banks and other entities.

We formed our points of view on key issues that the bank needed to consider. These included, among others, the entry of Chinese payment giants into the South African market and innovations in the acceptance frontier. We outlined the main trends and analysed their impact, imminence and risk to the bank.

Our insights provided the bank with a comprehensive view of the trends and developments in the payments sector. Our recommendations included considerations for short-term tactical investments and also longer-term considerations of the direction of payments innovation.

Our insights were presented to the senior management and key stakeholders of the bank. These formed the basis for discussion on appropriate strategies the bank should take regarding its payment services and product offerings.