SWIFT community looks forward at West Coast Business Forum

Innovation, financial industry trends and product updates top conference agenda

Published on November 18, 2009


Head of West Coast Office, Chuck Wiley, welcomes attendees
“The Post-Crisis Global Payments Business: What’s Next?” This question was on the minds of many of the nearly 200 attendees of the SWIFT Business Forum – West Coast on 27 October in Pasadena, California, and on 29 October in San Francisco, California, and was debated during the Opening Plenary discussions at the two events.



Mike Helms, a Board member of Save the Redwoods League
Both events were hosted by Chuck Wiley, Head of the West Coast Office, who announced SWIFT’s Corporate Social Responsibility donation to Save the Redwoods League. During the San Francisco event, Wiley presented Mike Helms, a Board Member of Save the Redwoods League, with a USD 5,000 donation on behalf of SWIFT’s CSR committee. According to Helms, “The League is involved and responsible for saving 60% of all California Redwoods State Parks.”

David Pryce, Managing Director, SWIFT Americas, welcomed the attendees, gave an update on SWIFT’s developments on the West Coast, and outlined the company’s business priorities relating to its 2015 strategy.

The conference brought together SWIFT members in the banking, securities, trade and treasury industries from leading companies including: Union Bank, Capital Group, Pacific Western Bank, Intel and Occidental Petroleum. Customers participated in 10 work sessions on topics ranging from payments and workers’ remittances to securities and trade finance.

Payments Trends



Moderator Erin McCune addresses attendees
In her opening remarks, Erin McCune, Partner, Glenbrook Partners, outlined three trends influencing payments, citing mobile and social channels as increasingly popular ways to interact with the Web. “Consumer expectations of real-time, on-the-go interaction, information and services will dramatically change payments as we know them,” she said. A second key influencer is migration from paper to electronic transactions. McCune noted that the industry “has made significant in-roads, particularly with regard to consumer payments.” Yet business-to-business payments remain nearly three-quarters check. And the third trend, globalization, is “driven by an increasing desire and interest for cross-border transactions by consumers and businesses.”

Ronni Horrillo, Assistant Treasurer, Google, noted that one of the goals of Google is to pay anyone around the world the way they want to be paid. In turn, they can pay Google any way they want. According to Horrillo, Google seeks to localize the payment type country by country, which requires it to first understand why a region uses a particular payment type

“Social” mobility


Erin McCune remarked that Glenbrook anticipates that person-to-person transactions, although relatively low volume, are ideally suited to migrate to the social networks. “If you are already interacting with your friends and family online, why not chip in for pizza, or send money back home via Facebook?”
 
“I always think about how to connect people and make payments fast and secure. How do I pull together Facebook and Twitter and make it real?”
Louise Gorman, Managing Director and Product Executive, J.P. Morgan

Louise Gorman pointed to the importance of social payments.
“I always think about how to connect people and make payments fast and secure. How do I pull together Facebook and Twitter and make it real?”

“Social is a new channel for transmitting payments, and banks and other payment providers are testing how to best get involved,” said Mike Kennedy, Head of Enterprise Payments Strategy, Wells Fargo. “Social games are a good example as these games are growing rapidly, attracting many users and increasingly involve completing transactions in the games,” said Kennedy.

Turning mobile banking into the ‘Milky Way’ of payments

With regard to the future of mobile payments, many of the panellists had more questions than answers.

“We have a couple of galaxies of participants in the mobile banking space,” said Gorman. “The question is: How do we make it a Milky Way?”
“The financial services industry often worries about missing the boat on the ‘next big technology’ like mobile. Instead, the focus should be placed on superior business performance which is ultimately tied to how organizations manage IT.”
Gwenn Bézard, co-founder and research director, Aite Group

Keynote speaker, Gwenn Bézard, co-founder and research director, Aite Group, illuminated how the financial industry often worries about the wrong things and misses out on the real issues. He picked six situations—regulation, trust, fraud, technology, innovation, and competition—where he has seen that trend at play.

In the regulation realm, for instance, he noted that “banks and card networks have become so worried about potential interchange regulation and defending themselves, that they have become reluctant to tinker with the economics of commercial cards like
p-cards. Failing to innovate with the economics of p-cards has prevented the industry from making huge strides in commercial payments against checks and ACH.”

On the technology front, Bézard noted that, “The financial services industry often worries about missing the boat on the ‘next big technology’ like mobile. Instead, the focus should be placed on superior business performance which is ultimately tied to how organizations manage IT.”

Looking toward the future of the industry, David Pryce explained SWIFT’s plans to evolve its strategy to meet the needs of the community through to 2015. “Our goal is to evaluate how we can best support the challenges of our community, both globally and here on the West Coast, and increase our relevance innovatively and cost-effectively.”

Erin McCune, Partner, Glenbrook Partners, moderated the Opening Plenary, consisting of a distinguished panel of industry leaders, including:

  • Louise Gorman, Managing Director and Product Executive, J.P. Morgan
  • Ronni Horrillo, Assistant Treasurer, Google
  • Michael Kennedy, Head of Enterprise Payments Strategy, Wells Fargo
  • Nitin Kulshrestha, Director, Core payments Platform Products, PayPal