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Industry: Retail

Online Retailers Using Embedded Finance With Provenir: J.D. Power, TreviPay, Valuedynamx and Galileo

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Online Retailers Using Embedded Finance With Provenir:
J.D. Power, TreviPay, Valuedynamx and Galileo

EY estimates that the market size of global embedded finance will grow from $264 billion in 2021 to $606 billion as early as 2025. With the space set to dramatically disrupt the financial sector worldwide, The Fintech Times spoke to industry experts, including Kathy Stares, Executive Vice President, North America for Provenir, to understand the benefits of embedded finance for online retailers. Check out what Kathy and her industry peers had to say.

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The Ultimate Guide to Decision Engines

What is a decision engine and how does it help your business processes?

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Welcome Home: The Benefits of Unified Access to AI-Powered Decisioning + Data

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Welcome Home: The Benefits of Unified Access to AI-Powered Decisioning + Data

What if your decisioning technology came with the same benefits as a smart home system?

Are you working with multiple products, vendors and UIs in order to make decisions? What if you could have a single user interface to manage all of your technology solutions and save you from a disjointed, incomplete view of the credit risk lifecycle?

Check out our latest eBook and discover how one unified solution for data and AI-powered decisioning can change the way you think about your risk strategy. And bring you to the forefront of tech innovation, just like today’s smart homes.

Learn how unified access offers:

  • Built-in controls to manage risk, security and identity
  • Preconfigured data integrations to get you up and running quickly and easily
  • Flexibility to expand as your needs evolve
  • Automation to improve efficiency and power better user experiences

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The Ultimate Guide to Decision Engines

What is a decision engine and how does it help your business processes?

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Webinar: Optimizing Collections with Advanced Decisioning Solutions

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Don’t Keep Customers Waiting Make Risk Decisions in Seconds

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Don’t Keep Customers Waiting
Make Risk Decisions in Seconds

Provenir for Retail Financing

Today, consumers are used to simple and fast digital interactions with instant banking and one-click shopping from their mobile phones. This expectation for speedy online service now extends to more complex interactions like loans. Whether you are a telecommunications company offering loans for mobile phones or a rent-to-own store which provides loans for furnishings, your clients demand a quick risk decision.

Provenir can help you deliver a timely, hassle-free credit or loan experience. Using the Provenir Risk Decisioning Platform, it’s easy to automate your credit and lending processes, making them as efficient as possible while minimizing risk and staying compliant. You can substantially cut the time and cost for creating and maintaining complex credit and risk decisioning solutions to:

  • Make decisions in seconds/milliseconds. Take advantage of instant, straight-through processing for credit and lending requests and automated next-best-action recommendations for requests requiring further underwriting analysis.
  • Integrate to structured and unstructured data sources in hours. Pre-built adapters automatically consolidate information from virtually any enterprise and third-party data source.
  • Operationalize risk models in minutes. Provenir is model-agnostic so that you can use any model or scorecard developed in industry-standard tools such SAS, R, Excel and Python within your decisioning processes.
  • Be completely independent from your IT organization or Provenir. Simple to use visual tools let you rapidly create, test and deploy automated risk analysis and decisioning processes for immediate response to changing regulations, market conditions, customer profiles, business opportunities and competitive challenges.
  • Accelerate deployment with the Provenir Cloud. A highly secure cloud computing environment offers flexible options for domain setup, managed services, deployments and scalability.

Rent-A-Center Implements Provenir Cloud to Better Serve Growing Customer Base

“The Provenir platform’s scalability and rich functionality provide significant value to Rent-A-Center’s growth plans and transformation,” said Mark Denman, EVP of Acceptance Now at Rent-a-Center. “By implementing Provenir Cloud to process customer lease applications, we will increase speed, improve delivery and provide our customers better, faster access to our products and services.”

Rent-A-Center provides furniture, electronics, computers and household appliances under rent-to-own agreements. It is publicly listed with more than 3,500 stores in the US, Canada, Mexico and Puerto Rico and revenues totaling $3.28 billion in 2015.

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Lewis Group Makes Risk Decisions in Seconds Using the Provenir Platform

The Provenir Risk Decisioning Platform has significantly cut the time required to implement and change decisioning policies. “Provenir’s built-in repository and change management system makes entertaining such requests almost a pleasure,” says Willie Van Zyl, Senior Solutions Analyst at Lewis. For example, it took less than half a day to integrate a new SAS dataset and retrieve an indicator used to print a special promotional message on a customer’s statement. Previously, such a change would have taken more than a week and costs would have outweighed the benefit.

In stores, the Provenir platform enables the majority of application credit decisions to be made in just a few seconds once the required information is captured. Borderline applications are automatically referred to underwriters for further analysis. The credit maintenance solution aggregates data and automatically evaluates each customer’s credit performance, allowing Lewis to quickly identify at-risk customers as well as additional opportunities to extend credit.

Lewis is a leading African retailer selling household furniture and electrical appliances through the brands of Lewis, Best Home and Electric and Beares. Lewis has 716 stores across all metropolitan areas with a strong presence in rural South Africa.

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Ten Fintechs Using Alternative Data for Financial Inclusion

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RESOURCE LIBRARY

Webinar: Optimizing Collections with Advanced Decisioning Solutions

Webinar: Optimizing ...

Optimizing Collections with Advanced Decisioning Solutions Save My Seat Thursday December 5, 2024 2 pm ...
AFN webinar

Webinar: Mitigating ...

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Blog: Election Economics

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Roundtable: Banking 2030 - Are You Ready?

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Spreading the joy (and payments): How POS lending is heating up this winter

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Spreading the joy (and payments):
How POS lending is heating up this winter

The seasonal TV adverts have been launched, the countdown to Christmas has begun and many consumers are kicking into high-gear shopping mode! With Black Friday and Cyber Monday complete and the festive season almost upon us, online shopping volumes are set to continue to rocket. Initial figures show that spending in the UK hit over £4bn during the discount week; sales volumes are up 7% compared with last year, while sales value rose 16%.

It’s a time for tradition and gift-giving, yet there’s nothing traditional about how many consumers are choosing to pay.

The end of cash?

In the UK, the volume of debit card transactions overtook cash for the first time in 2017. The gap is set to widen, and it’s predicted that cash will be overtaken by credit cards by 2026 and only makeup 9% of all payments. But it’s the rise in popularity of installment payment methods that are creating waves, with customers looking for a way to spread out online purchase payments without using a credit card.

Younger consumers, wary of credit cards and seeking a more convenient, one-click checkout experience with less friction, are fuelling an increase in installment transactions, preferring to ‘Klarna’ it, over other traditional methods. In fact, Klarna has been so successful in its expansion across Europe that it now holds a 10% e-commerce market share in the region, and processes over 1 million transactions a day globally via 190,000 merchants and 60 million end-users.

Growing e-commerce market attracting new players to the payments industry

It’s not just the opportunity to jump on the growing demand for alternative financing options that’s attracting new firms to the payments industry, it’s also the potential offered by the rapidly growing e-commerce market. Online shopping spending across Europe is forecast to hit 621 billion euros by the end of this year; that’s a 13% uplift from 2018.

As a result, there’s an increasing list of ‘buy now pay later’ firms expanding their coverage of the market. Alongside Klarna, this now includes Afterpay, Laybuy, Laterpay, as well as Clearpay who already have 200,000 UK customers following their launch in June.

The concept is also gaining popularity across Asia Pacific, with Australia, Singapore, and China being the early adopters. Afterpay and Laybuy in Australia are offering convenient credit financing options for a large proportion of online shoppers. Hoolah from Singapore is offering such services by partnering with more than 50 merchants across furniture stores and high-end electronics, whilst Ant Financial offers a similar service on online purchases made via its Alibaba website.

A growing middle-class population, widespread smartphone adoption, and rising internet penetration are all set to drive the Asia Pacific e-commerce market to over USD 2tn by 2020. However, ASEAN with over 630 million inhabitants, more than 50% of the population remains unbanked, with no access to credit cards. Up to 70% of e-commerce consumers would abandon their carts after adding items to it, this poses a massive missed opportunity for retailers.

Credit cards still holding their own

But, don’t expect credit cards to disappear any time soon, in the UK alone, there were 3.2 billion payments made using credit cards in 2018, an increase of 4% over the previous year that reflects a more general growth in unsecured lending. Some of this growth can be attributed to the bounty of rewards available to card users that typically use their cards and pay off in full each month. But with more retailers adopting the buy now pay later and installment model, credit card issuers may need to get more creative and offer more than rate reductions, rewards or purchasing promotional periods to stay relevant in a world where consumers have more choice than ever before.

Taking the risk out of payments for merchants

One of the major benefits POS firms like Klarna offer to merchants is a simple payment option with zero risks. Platforms like Klarna and Clearpay assume all financial risk when lending to a customer, making them even more attractive to retailers. With the volume of applications and transactions set to increase across POS credit and card products, accurate, robust and fast risk decisioning remains crucial. So, what technology do POS lenders looking to grow in an increasingly competitive market need to have in place?

The technology to power instant decisions

To facilitate an exponential increase in e-commerce transactions, new entrants and existing players looking to expand their global reach need to deploy country-specific processes that deliver speed, credit risk accuracy, and a frictionless mobile-first customer-experience.

As POS firms grow, their risk technology and modeling rules need to be future-proofed and configurable to allow for fast customer and merchant onboarding and instant credit decisioning, allowing wide data access and integration to internal systems. Having the technology in place that delivers on functionality, flexibility and agility are paramount to enable the processing of hundreds of transactions per second, coping with periods of spiked activity such as Black Friday and converting previously abandoned cart purchases.

Reduce Time, Cost and Risk For Merchant Onboarding and Payment Processing

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Alexa, get me a gluten free carrot.

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Alexa, get me a gluten free carrot.

The Curious Cynic’s Guide to Amazon’s Whole Foods Acquisition

When Amazon announced its intention to purchase Whole Foods for $13.7 Billion, the internet collectively lost its breath. And, then the questions poured in. What do we do with all of those articles heralding the death of brick and mortar retail? What does this mean for [insert your industry here]? What’s going to happen to disposable income everywhere, and where will young professionals get their gluten free carrots?

In a retail climate where brick and mortar retailers are painfully clawing their way into ecommerce (only to close up shop months later), Amazon just turned the tables and made everyone re-think the in store experience. And, the speculations around Amazon’s game plan are more entertaining than HBO’s current line-up (Silicon Valley notwithstanding).

We’ve gathered some of the speculations and trends around the acquisition news to add our two cents.

Amazon is Breaking the Ecommerce Box

The truth is, Amazon is not the first e-tailer to take the plunge with real estate. Many startups have led the way.

In 2013, Warby Parker, an online eyewear retailer opened shop in Soho, across the street from the Apple store. On opening, founder Neil Blumenthal said “This is the convergence of e-commerce and bricks and mortar. The idea that it’s one or the other is ridiculous,” he says. “E-commerce as a term will become obsolete in five or six years.”

In 2015, BaubleBar, a “big-data-driven” jewelry startup opened its physical doors on Long Island. Co-founder Amy Jain explained, “We want to be wherever our girl is, whenever she wants to buy the product.”

In 2016, Bonobos, the largest internet-born menswear brand opened its first “Guideshop.” Guideshops operate as showrooms (fully stocked with cold beer), allowing customers to try the product before placing an online order with a guide. Founder, Andy Dunn said of its online origins, “I really thought stores were going away at that time.” He adds, “If you had 100 guideshops and 10 with stock that have the ability to be fulfillment centers to fill that same-day need? That kind of fascinates me.”

In 2016 MonPurse, personalized leather goods company famous for its 3D design experience opened its first “Mon Gallery” in Sydney. Founder Lana Hopkins said “Bricks and mortar aren’t dead. It was never dead. What it comes down to is: We need to make the experience super, super special for people. We need to remember that those people are us. We want something. We want more.”

These startups obviously differ from Amazon in reach, supply chain leverage, market share, the list goes on. But, they saw the writing on the wall and got physical back when Amazon was only dipping a pinky toe in retail.

Amazon is Getting into the Grocery Game

If we’ve learned anything about Amazon over years, it’s that things aren’t always what they seem. It’s also that everything is a data-driven experiment.

If CREC’s Retail Division VP, Rafael Romero, is onto something, it’s not just about groceries. “I don’t think that this will be the last of Amazon’s purchases,” said Rafael Romero, vice president of Florida-based real estate firm CREC’s retail division.  “They fully recognize that brick and mortar and online retailing is all retailing and you need both.”

Many have recalled Amazon’s recent launch of Amazon Go, a checkout-free shopping experience that was piloted in Seattle last year. And, it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine that Amazon just purchased 451 more locations to accelerate that program’s growth. But, if you’re thinking that this stops with milk and bread, you’re thinking small. While Wal-mart is busy buying its way into in the ecommerce game, imagine walking into an “Amazon Mart” on your friendly neighborhood corner and walking out after a “One-Click Checkout” experience.

Let’s not forget that Amazon just acquired a company full of retail minds in addition to a portfolio of retail locations. I wouldn’t underestimate what Amazon can do with that type of intellectual capital on its side.

Amazon Just Scooped Up High-end Distribution Locations

In most geographies, Amazon already offers same-day delivery. Through Prime Now, certain zip codes get groceries and other basic household goods delivered within two hours. Buying super classy grocery stores to use as distribution locations seems like wasted potential.

However, think about the lesson we learned from some of those startups. Bonobos has opened more than 30 stores, but they don’t actually stock inventory. That type of omnichannel experience seems unlikely in the Whole Foods scenario, but you can be sure that the omnichannel concept is being thrown around on a lot of Seattle-based conference calls these days.

Amazon in Taking Over the World

It seems that way. Amazon has one thing that big retail has been vying for, that is access to your phone. They didn’t even have to beg, plead, or launch a “loyalty program” to get it. That access likely makes them the most connected retailer in the world. It also gives them a huge opportunity to play with the integration of marketing and payments technologies with their in-store experience – a scenario that many retailers have been struggling to realize.

This is where many in our space are aiming their attention – the potential new standard of retail payments. What happens when your bank, your card issuer (oh, but the “card” is your phone), your retailer, and your logistics provider all wear the same logo?

The New Normal

Big news like this always stirs up the waters, but we’re in agreeance that this is largely unchartered territory. It tickles our ears because it’s amazing fodder for our imaginations, and for our dreams of the tech-enabled future. When the dust settles, you can guarantee that we’ll all be pulling out the organic, fair-trade popcorn as we watch the story unfold.

P.S. – Whole Foods CEO John Mackey did give a sneak peek into the big changes that are in store: “Things that I cannot talk about today and won’t be able to talk about until this deal closes.” Thanks for that, John.


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