Media-Insert Communications

Why App Developers, Merchants and Payments Providers Need to Converge to Grow and Thrive

From the outset the Covid-19 pandemic offered new digital and commercial opportunities to physical businesses to become e-commerce enterprises, to boost or maintain their sales during the world’s various lockdowns. Work from home orders required a dramatic and seismic shift in thinking, with many organisations achieving the ability to continue to operate through apps and e-commerce websites. Revenues for established big e-commerce brands, such as Amazon, also increased significantly.

Statista says the UK is one of the most advanced e-commerce markets in Europe. Before the crisis, the UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS) reported the country’s e-commerce revenue equated to £693bn (USD)

With Stay-At-Home and Work-from-Home orders, due to the various lockdowns, e-commerce accelerated in March 2020, as online shopping behaviours changed. Statista researcher, D. Tighe, found in his report, ‘Changes in online buying among UK consumers since COVID-19 2020-2021’ that 40% of shoppers said they had shopped more online, compared to before the pandemic. “By February 2021, however, this percentage had grown to approximately 75 percent. Similarly, offline shopping has decreased over the analysed period,” he writes...

Discover how app developers, merchants and payments providers can grow and thrive, read the complete article. 

Client: Trudy Darwin Communications for Bango Plc. Published by Digitalisation World in June/July 2022. 

How to Power Mobile Commerce with Unique Data-driven Insights

The Covid-19 pandemic created a seismic shift in shopping habits in favour of e-commerce and m-commerce – buying retail goods and services online to the tune of more than $4.9 trillion USD worldwide. Daniela Coppola writes in her ‘E-commerce worldwide - statistics & facts’ report for Statista of 23rd February 2022 that e-commerce has therefore “become an indispensable part of the global retail framework.”

Retail has seen a significant industrial transformation since the mid-1990s with the advent of the internet, and since then the industry has continued become increasingly digitalised in line with modern life, whereby most worldwide consumer transactions are completed either online or by using digital forms of payments at the expense of cash.

Coppola reveals: “The number of digital buyers keeps climbing every year. In 2020, over two billion people purchased goods or services online, and during the same year, e-retail sales surpassed 4.2 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide.” This upward trend is expected to continue unabated, with e-commerce forecast to reach 24.5% market share of total global retail sales by 2025.

Bango (AIM: BGO, OTCQX: BGOPF) – a company that is listed on the London Stock Exchange, and a provider of unique purchase behaviour technology – says the market is growing at a rate of at least 15% per year, and so the overall macro trend is that people are spending more money online. From a market perspective, many sectors have seen market growth. A key area is the packaging of content in the form of subscriptions, such as gaming. “Where people might have once bought games on a case by case basis, they are now paying for subscriptions e.g. Xbox Game Pass,” says Anil Malhotra, CMO and Co-Founder of Bango.

Power mobile commerce insights, read the complete article. 

Client: Trudy Darwin Communications for Bango Plc. Author: Graham Jarvis. Published in June 2022. 

 

Changing Payments: Growing Mobile Commerce Opportunities Post-pandemic

During the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, ecommerce has accelerated right across the globe – to the extent that Econsultancy.com believes it’s a trend that’s hard to ignore. This is particularly since consumers shopped with increased frequency online out of necessity, writes Graham Jarvis.

Read the complete article. 

Client: Trudy Darwin Communications for Bango Plc. Published by Telemedia Online on 27th June 2022. 

How to overcome the Insurance Industry’s main challenges

Spixii examines how to address the main challenges for insurance businesses to deliver better customer experiences, increased customer loyalty, greater process and operational efficiency, and greater profitability to gain a competitive advantage with Conversational Self-Serve Technology.

To become competitive, to attract and retain customers, insurance businesses have to do more to address customer pain points. With conversational self-serve technology insurers can address them in sales, customer service, and claims.

From a business intelligence perspective, they are primarily about the sharing of information with the insurer via, for example, email. Customers are also frustrated by long waiting times, and by the quality or speed of an insurer’s response to their queries. As customer calls, or messages increase, customer waiting, and insurer response times can often get worse – leading to a poor customer experience.

One answer is to use technology to implement a SaaS platform for insurance that enables self-serve and CPA. It is also important to ensure that not too many questions are asked of the customer, and to make sure that the processes aren’t too long, complex, and arduous. Insurers need to, for example, offer a quote in a way that informs each customer according to their needs to enable them to make the right decision and this necessitates showing the right information to each customer. This approach is aligned with the Financial Conduct Authority's guidelines.

Providing the right information can often be complex because filling in forms can be confusing. For example, a customer may not understand a term. “So, it’s important to have additional support available to enable the customer or prospect to ask questions and to chat with a human being,” advises Million - – CEO and Co-Founder of Spixii.

Filling in forms can create a fractured experience when it leads to a customer making a phone call, or to starting a conversation in a web live chat, and then to that customer being stuck on the phone or waiting for a live chat for clarification. He therefore suggests that the ability to self-serve, “using a chatbot, can help to educate the customer and to make the decision to buy a product, or resolve a query immediately, in a seamless experience and with confidence.”

Overcome the insurance industry's main challenges, read the complete blog on Spixii's website. 

Client: Spixii. Pubished circa June/July 2022. 

How to unlock self-serve through Conversational Process Automation

To avoid any loss, automation needs to better serve the insurance customer and not become a barrier to communication with the insurance provider or broker. Done well, automation can be utilised to channel customers to the right place. Done badly, as can happen with Interactive Voice Response (IVR), customers can wait 20 or more minutes to then be connected with someone who’s not the expert they need to speak with, and so they end up being transferred to another person. Being pushed from pillar to post and having to wait on the phone for too long creates a bad experience.

To prevent this from happening it’s vital to set the level of expectations by asking customers the right questions, and make sure their waiting times are significantly reduced. They want to gain a quick resolution to their issues, whether that be through buying an insurance product or talking to someone to resolve a problem with their insurance policy. Customers want to be able to quickly and immediately access claims updates, and they want to find the answers to their questions.

Renaud Million - CEO and Founder of Spixii - says they will use other channels if their experience through one particular channel, such as IVR or even a chatbot is not good. At worst, they will jump ship to buy a competitor’s insurance products. To ensure this doesn’t happen, and to keep each customer happy, expectations have to be set appropriately.

At the end of the conversation, to ensure customer satisfaction is maintained and to allow for continuing improvements, the conversation should end with the question: “How likely are you to recommend us to others?” By setting expectations, and by connecting, even the approach behind IVR can be empowered to do what the end user wants to do.

Unlock 'self-serve' through Conversational Process Automation, read the complete blog on Spixii's website. 

Client: Spixii. Published circa: June/July 2022. 

When fintech meets healthcare

Business and technology journalist Graham Jarvis reports on how cryptocurrencies and blockchain can improve access to healthcare.

Client: Decentr. Published by Healthtech World on 8th September 2021. Author: Graham Jarvis.

FINTECH NEWS: When Fintech Meets Healthcare: How can cryptocurrencies and blockchain improve access to healthcare?

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology are used in a wide array of new applications – including in healthcare. Fintech start-ups are the catalyst for many of these recent market innovations – and they aren’t just focused on the banking and financial services sector. While finance is necessary for individuals and organisations of all sizes, both can struggle to access it. Yet recent advances in Fintech suggest this disparity can be addressed by capturing the market value of data and repurposing it as payable “currency”. This radically new decentralised finance (DeFi) concept is one that many, including healthcare administrators, are starting to take seriously.

With the COVID-19 pandemic showing how critical it is to have access to high-quality healthcare, and with access to it in some parts of the world falling short because of poverty and other factors, the likes of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) are currently exploring how the obstacles to healthcare access can be overcome in Dominique Vervoort et al’s BMJ Innovations article, “Blockchain, health disparities and global health”.

Vervoort and his co-authors Camila R Guetter and Alexander W Peters write: “Health disparities remain vast around the world and are perpetuated by error-prone information technology systems, administrative inefficiencies and wasteful global health spending. Blockchain technology, a novel, distributed peer-to-peer ledger technology, is increasingly used in various industries to disintermediate, improve efficiency and transparency and reduce costs; however, its use in healthcare and global health has remained limited.”

Improve access to healthcare, read the complete article. 

Client: Decentr. Published by Techbullion on 6th September 2021. Author: Graham Jarvis.

Trading floor: overcoming the dangers of personal mobile devices

Personal mobile devices have grown to be a nuisance and a huge security risk on trading floors and other restricted areas. In the financial sector, personal mobile device surveillance is often overlooked in favour of soft policies to achieve regulatory compliance and data security.

However, these aren’t enough to prevent material, non-public information breaches and market abuse with personal mobile devices. In 2021, stealing and leaking sensitive information is so easy and can be done in seconds, in addition to regular voice and video calls also via various messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram.

Find out how to overcome trading floor mobile device dangers, read the complete article. 

Client: Trudy Darwin Communications for Mobilewatch.

EVs are First Step in Auto Insurance Transformation

Despite a slump in car sales during the pandemic, ING Group expects care sales to rebound by 8% in 2021.

However, EV insurance premiums are typically higher than those of other cars, demonstrating that they are riskier for insurers than being bound by a policy for a comparable ICE vehicle. This is because EVs are more expensive to repair – few workshops are qualified to fix them, parts are costly and unibody construction techniques lead to more cars being written off following low-speed crashes.

Nonetheless, David Williams, managing director, underwriting and technical services at AXA, finds that there has been an increase in the take-up of EVs. It’s slow but it’s progressing. He adds: “If you want to buy an EV, it’s more expensive than the internal combustion engine version. This will change – when you build more of something, the price comes down.”

Read the complete article to find out more about why electric vehicles are the first step in auto insurance transformation. 

Client: InformaTech, published by TU Automotive on 12 May 2021. Author/Journalist: Graham Jarvis.

SD-WAN: Why Banks Need WAN Acceleration Overlays

The Covid-19 pandemic has created a push to speed up digital transformation. There has also been the move to the working from home environment and embracing hybrid working as a concept, whereby employees work from home as well as in branch or at the office. This has led to a transformation in data flows and changes in bank processes to adapt to less face-to-face contact with customers. All of this has inspired the upgrading of IT infrastructure with many banks deploying or upgrading their SD-WANs.

Find out why banks need to WAN Acceleration Overlays by reading the complete article

Client: Trudy Darwin Communications for Bridgeworks Ltd. Byline: David Trossell, CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks Ltd. Published: 12th May 2021 .