Connected commerce: from afterthought to strategic advantage

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1 Connected commerce: from afterthought to strategic advantage

2 EY s TMT Convergence Network helps clients invent connected commerceage customer experiences As if relentless digital disruption weren t challenging enough for technology, media and entertainment, and telecommunications (TMT) companies, the simple act of getting paid in return for valuable products and services is morphing at light speed. Connected commerce is rapidly fostering an age in which payments may appear to be fading into the background of increasingly mobile electronic transactions. But the truth is subtler: as payment friction approaches zero, digital payment possibilities are catalyzing the design of faster, easier, more convenient experiences and complete engagement of the customer. For TMT companies, this emerging age of connected commerce means important opportunities and threats. From music to movies, e-commerce to bricks-and-mortar, and theme parks to transport services, the definition of innovative customer experience now includes payments, whether enabled by general-purpose digital wallets, brand-specific apps, theme park RFID bracelets, commerce-enabled automobiles or even stickon one-click ordering buttons. Increasingly capable networks, smartphones and digital money are changing the nature of payment transactions. And that, in turn, is changing the nature of TMT customer experiences. 2 Connected commerce: from afterthought to strategic advantage

3 How is commerce connected? Let s count the ways Smartphones, connectivity and digitized money are combining to enable anytime, anywhere commerce between TMT companies and their customers. We call this emerging commerce model connected because: First, it s more connected to the customer experience. In the past, the commerce transaction wasn t even connected to the shopping experience. In physical stores, customers form a separate queue for cashiers when finished shopping; on the web, they go to separate carts and check out electronically. As customers carry mobile, always-available links to their entire personal finance infrastructures, more integrated payments experiences are possible. Integrated payment experiences let companies better connect to data about the extended customer experience, such as loyalty or reward functions, financial reporting, management functions, and delivery preferences. Analyzing these data pools provide opportunities to enhance the experience for each customer and enhance efficiency for the company. Done right, it creates a better brand connection between customer and provider. It can build a sturdier relationship in which engaging with customers is the most seamless and frictionless way to get them from I m thinking about to I have... in ways that don t necessarily feel like transactions. Simplicity isn t easy: Creating the simple commerce user experience can actually be anything but. And it requires combining the right human experience design with the right integrated back-end processing ecosystems. Speed is of the essence The right customer experience matters only if you get it to market fast. Accelerating velocity of change means speed is more critical than ever for successful execution. themes drive the TMT opportunity in connected commerce New and emerging technologies, from e-wallets to chatbot commerce, peer-to-peer payment networks and blockchain distributed ledgers, are driving TMT companies to respond to three key realities. Connected commerce innovators are increasingly not financial institutions. While payments continue to leverage financial industry infrastructure, those bringing innovation to market are often tech companies but, nearly as often, they come from every industry. What they share is a focus on providing the most convenient, integrated, lowest-friction customer experience. Connected commerce raises payments from afterthought to a strategic focus for customer experience design. Often, payments were largely treated as an afterthought irrelevant to customer experience design. But embedded as an integral element of a seamless customer experience, payments role becomes a catalyst for new customer experience design. Embedded payments are thus a new point of innovation and differentiation. Companies that successfully integrate commerce into the customer experience are finding they can increase the size and frequency of purchases, the speed and convenience of transactions and the loyalty of their customers. Connected commerce: from afterthought to strategic advantage 3

4 Connected commerce innovators set the bar To appreciate the potential to create business value from innovative, reimagined connected commerce customer experiences, consider Starbucks, which has embedded seamless commerce into their app-enabled customer experience. Mobile payment accounted for 27% of all US transactions in the first fiscal quarter of 2017, and the company announced plans to add voice ordering to its popular mobile-ordering app. 1 Or Amazon.com, which reimagined its web-embedded one-click ordering function in the physical world as Dash Buttons, and then reimagined those as virtual Dash Buttons that customers can now add to their Amazon home page to reorder products online without having to look them up or think about how to pay for them. 2 Amazon s Alexa goes further, making advantageous use of embedded payments by allowing you to simply speak an order out loud. 3 Another innovative example comes from theme parks, such as Disney s, which have introduced RFID payment bracelets. At Disney, the improved customer experience resulting from its MagicBand bracelet has been credited with improving visitors intent to return and intent to recommend metrics, while increasing spend per visitor. 4 The magnitude of the experience transformation opportunity changes as the form factor for payments goes from physical, to embedded digital, to virtually invisible as with RFID bracelets or potentially connected cars, notes Clarence Mitchell, EY Global TMT Strategy Leader. Finally, consider the potential scope: in China, mobile payment app Alipay and connected commerce messaging app WeChat together accounted for an estimated US$2.9 trillion in transaction value in 2016 a 20-fold increase in four years, according to the United Nations Better Than Cash Alliance. 5 Four approaches to TMT connected commerce opportunity For savvy TMT companies, connected commerce opportunities exemplified by the innovators described above generally fall into one or more of the following buckets. Creating a new end-to-end customer experience with connected commerce in the core. Improving an existing customer experience by reimagining it with integrated digital payments. Adding fast, direct-to-consumer, go-to-market options through commerce-enabled applications. Developing products, services or networks to play key business or functional roles within a connected commerce ecosystem. 1 Starbucks Mobile Orders Grow, But Not Enough To Lift Q1 Sales Above Expectations, Forbes.com, 26 January 2017, 2017 Forbes.com LLC. 2 Amazon launches virtual Dash buttons for even faster ordering, The Verge, 20 January 2017, 2017 Vox Media, Inc. 3 Voice Search and Alexa FAQ, Amazon.com, accessed 22 May 2017, at The Messy Business Of Reinventing Happiness, 15 April 2015, Fast Company, 2017 Mansueto Ventures, LLC. 5 Social Networks, e-commerce Platforms, and the Growth of Digital Payment Ecosystems in China: What it Means for Other Countries, United Nations Better Than Cash Alliance, 27 April Connected commerce: from afterthought to strategic advantage

5 Platformification of payments is creating the flexibility for the people who really know the customer to design and optimize solutions for the customer in other words, to create great customer experiences. Margaret Weichert EY US Payments Practice Leader Connected commerce offers all TMT companies the chance to develop superior customer experiences, including simpler, more seamless options to engage customers and remove friction across all channels, particularly when coupled with the insights provided by big data analytics. For example, gaming companies leverage data from connected apps to enhance sales and customer experience even on consoles, and in traditional channels. Tech companies will continue to build connected commerce infrastructure and applications, and pursue opportunities in emerging conversational and chatbot-enabled commerce. And more opportunities are on the horizon. Emerging open banking initiatives such as the European Union s Second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) requires banks provide open access to account data, potentially providing wireless and cable network operators a renewed opportunity to leverage existing relationships and robust billing infrastructure to provide mobile payments options, particularly in developing or underserved regions. TMT-connected commerce challenges Such opportunities threaten to render the traditional payment experience outdated and fast. It won t be long before people become unwilling to bother with disconnected, high-friction, less convenient payment mechanisms. What is more: in the current rapidly changing landscape, it won t do to connect your commerce, and be done. The key to competition in an omni-commerce, customer-centric world is to use connected commerce innovation to constantly do a better job serving customers with a continuous flow of materially improved value propositions, points out Margaret Weichert, who leads the US payments practice for EY. If you are not constantly upgrading customer experience, you will not stay competitive. Further, Just appending commerce to what you have today is not going to do the trick, adds EY s Mitchell. Connected commerce should be a catalyst for taking a broader look at your overall customer experience, and for kicking off a redesign that integrates the commerce transaction into the complete flow of how customers interact with your brand. An increasingly common approach for achieving continuous innovation with constantly falling payments friction is dedicated payments technology platforms that enable highly flexible and scalable back-end payments infrastructures. Leading companies have pursued this so-called platformification of payments via standards-based, often open source, iterative development models with common access and customer service capabilities. This gives their customer experience designers the freedom to continuously create new customer experiences, and supports extended ecosystems of payments partners. Connected commerce: from afterthought to strategic advantage 5

6 EY can help you thrive in the connected commerce era To help our clients thrive in the connected commerce era, EY has focused the New York center of our TMT Convergence Network on commerce and related customer experience design to support EY teams and clients throughout the globe. The TMT Convergence Network is an alignment of our global innovation and collaboration centers and a flexible TMT-specific infrastructure of people, capabilities and insights. It s connected both physically, and virtually, with an active community of practitioners, enterprises, entrepreneurs and EY collaborations. The TMT Convergence Network directly responds to your need for collaboration and speed in addressing a complex variety of disruptive business developments including connected commerce. Managing connected commerce complexity In the case of connected commerce, our New York center serves as a resource where we rapidly bring together the most relevant knowledge, skills, capabilities and experience across our organization to help clients tackle complicated connected commerce challenges across disciplines and continents. Located in one of the world s financial services capitals, the New York center has become a repository for EY s worldwide experience in connected commerce customer journey mapping, customer experience design, payments-related technologies and standards (including cloud-based payment centers) and cybersecurity. That repository is accessible from all our TMT Convergence Network centers throughout the globe. Supporting connected commerce collaboration We ve designed the TMT Convergence Network infrastructure to support collaboration across diverse communities or continents. Our connected commerce teams in New York can quickly know what works for a certain type of payment methodology in Southeast Asia and explore how to adapt that for a company in Houston. Other TMT Convergence Network centers around the world tap into New York to support connected commerce problem solving. 6 Connected commerce: from afterthought to strategic advantage

7 Connected commerce is about minimizing friction. Payments seem to fade into the background so the customer can go from thought to purchase seamlessly but they re still the critical bit that pays for all the rest. Clarence Mitchell EY Global TMT Strategy Leader Having the global view of things, and being able to tap into people in local markets who have direct knowledge, enables the TMT Convergence Network to help bridge the gap between enterprises, entrepreneurs and start-ups. We link clients with each other, with EY collaborations and with the diverse communities participating in our network, including entrepreneurs and start-up companies. And that collaboration can extend all the way through to your services development, including rapid-prototyping or piloting of applications and services. It s simple, but true: as TMT companies reduce payments friction, they tend to increase the frequency of customer transactions. Jeff MacMillan EY US Payments Practice Providing services The TMT Convergence Network s New York center for connected commerce is built from the ground up to quickly assemble the capabilities, insights and team members across physical and virtual networks, fit to address TMT clients connected commerce needs, all from a single source. It is designed to provide speed to insight and then speed to market. PCI compliance is a constantly rising floor, and can trip up TMT companies. Diogo Silva EY UK TMT Strategy & Customer Practice EY s connected commerce purpose EY has always strived to be the TMT go-to collaborator for producing business outcomes and to build a collaborative culture that succeeds by helping clients define the opportunity and realize their potential. The TMT Convergence Network s New York hub, and its connected commerce agenda, is one more way EY can provide adaptive services of lasting value to help solve your most complex business problems. It s another way EY helps to build a better working world. Connected commerce: from afterthought to strategic advantage 7

8 Contacts Clarence Mitchell TMT Strategy Leader Ernst & Young LLP Ioannis Melas Partner Ernst & Young UK William Sorba Manager Ernst & Young LLP Michael Pifko TMT Knowledge Leader Ernst & Young LLP EY Assurance Tax Transactions Advisory About EY EY is a global leader in assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services. The insights and quality services we deliver help build trust and confidence in the capital markets and in economies the world over. We develop outstanding leaders who team to deliver on our promises to all of our stakeholders. In so doing, we play a critical role in building a better working world for our people, for our clients and for our communities. EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients. For more information about our organization, please visit ey.com EYGM Limited. All Rights Reserved. EYG no Gbl BMC Agency ED None In line with EY s commitment to minimize its impact on the environment, this document has been printed on paper with a high recycled content. This material has been prepared for general informational purposes only and is not intended to be relied upon as accounting, tax or other professional advice. Please refer to your advisors for specific advice. ey.com