We’re headed toward a not-too-distant future when every retailer can act like a FinTech.
As i2c President Jim McCarthy told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster, every firm should consider doing so — adopting Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) platforms to offer financial products to their end customers, in context, across digital channels and on demand.
We’ve been here before, in a way. All manner of traditional merchants has been doing this for years, if not decades. Walmart, to give but one example, had Woodforest National Bank housed in its stores; Kroger has had retail terminals and ATMs in its own brick-and-mortar locations.
But as McCarthy noted: “Nothing was ever fully integrated or easy.”
Those somewhat segmented experiences, housed within brick-and-mortar settings, can take a cue from the evolution of retail itself through the past decade and a half. Commerce emerged from its roots of checkout-laned, hard-wired green screens and terminals to a more fluid experience — one that that includes self-service kiosks and in-store devices that let consumers check out in the aisles once…
