Merchants and consumers will influence the payment options and rails that banks make available, particularly as consumer appetite for “immediacy” and the rise of agentic commerce come to the fore, according to ACI Worldwide’s Craig Ramsey.
Speaking to Open Banking Expo, Ramsey, who is global head of account-to-account payments at ACI Worldwide, said that banks and financial institutions need to ask how merchants want to be paid and how consumers want to pay.
“Consumers will want everything immediately, they don’t care how much it costs, and the reason is because they are typically not exposed to the cost. It’s not actually free, they’ve had to pay for a network charge somewhere along the line,” he explained.
He offered an example of where an agentic commerce app has identified three different ways in which to pay for the same item. In this instance, the consumer will make their choice “based on the way of payment”.
Craig Ramsey, global head of account-to-account payments, ACI Worldwide
“I think the bank is the one that will have the last say in the matter as to how to move the money – it’s going to be the consumer and the merchant that will rule the day,” he added.
“For a bank, they need to make sure they have access to whatever rails their customer wants them to have access to, but the customer themselves won’t be the one naming them [the rails]. They’ll be asking for a service level, [or] they’ll be asking for a use case.
“That’s where that AI-based intelligent routing of a transaction will be making, not just decisions on who to buy from, but how to move money to the merchant.”
Ramsey said banks realise that where they can differentiate is in the experience they offer to their customers.
“They’re not going to differentiate on what the actual service level is with the clearing and settlement network because that’s a commodity, that’s a last-mile rail. That’s why the bank needs to make sure they have the right technology to manage all of those rails, however many there are,” he noted.
Card versus account-to-account payments
Speaking about the recent launch of a new payment scheme in the UK under the UK Payments Initiative (UKPI), Ramsey acknowledged that “the payments industry generally is incredibly collaborative”.
In June, UKPI, which is a consortium of banks and fintechs, unveiled a payment scheme to enable widespread adoption of Open Banking-enabled account-to-account (A2A) payments.
However, Ramsey told Open Banking Expo that while A2A payments are not going to replace card payments, he concedes that “our understanding of cards changes”.
“Take the card away and the card account still exists, so now you just need a token to get to the card,” he explained. “If that token on my phone wasn’t connected to a credit card or a debit card but it’s a direct account-to-account payment – which is what Wero is in Europe – now I’m happy to use my phone to make a payment but it’s coming account to account.”
For Ramsey, it is all about choice: “There will always be card choices, they may physically look different in the future, and there’ll always be account-to-account choices. That’s the path to a very successful payments ecosystem, is to have choice to match use cases.”
Further reading: ACI Worldwide integrates EPI’s Wero wallet solution to power instant payments in Europe