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Disruptive tech providers, new banking regulations, obscure deadlines and thresholds – these are challenges we face with clients every day. What many others still fail to see though, is that in an age of accelerating change, having a clear vendor negotiation strategy - and executing it well - is becoming more critical to bank and credit union executives than ever before.

To help spare others from costly lessons learned, here is a list of our best and most often given advice for preparing for a negotiation - or renegotiation. With our experts’ combined experience in the field, and $2.4 billion proof points behind us, these are SRM’s eight rules of engagement for effective vendor management.

January’s release of the 2019 Payments Study from the Federal Reserve reveals that American purchasing behavior is evolving at full force, especially in debit and credit card use. Every three years, the Fed releases a comprehensive study on usage trends for noncash payment instruments. This most recent data shows the persistence of several longstanding trends – and some are gaining speed.

One year ago, almost to the day, Fiserv surprised the payments world by announcing its acquisition of First Data, setting off a wave of payments consolidation that by midyear had narrowed a list of six leading processors and bank service providers down to three. Following this flurry of activity, it was widely assumed that FIS, Global Payments and Fiserv would be occupied with integration tasks for the foreseeable future, potentially leaving payments M&A destined for a short breather. But wait – there’s more.

Each year, SRM interviews a subset of bank and credit union clients to get their perspective on key industry trends rising to the top of their strategic to-do lists. With another decade having drawn to a close, January 2020 serves as a nice vantage point to take things in through a wider lens.

Protecting Share, or Poking the Bear?

I asked a good friend of our firm, Ginger Schmeltzer, owner and principal of GDS Advisors, to comment on the recent announcement that PNC was blocking its customers from using their accounts to fund Venmo transactions. Ginger’s take echoed a number of comments made around the industry concerning the news.

One of the hottest topics in banking – for financial institutions as well as third-party providers – is data sharing. Banks and credit unions possess terabytes of such information; many organizations that are not financial institutions covet access to this data to increase the value they bring to consumers.  This value could manifest in many ways, from a simpler customer experience to providing personalized offerings that anticipate the user’s need. 

Will the United States see a recession in 2020? While the economist and political pundits disagree about the when and why, the overwhelming majority of them agree that our current period of expansion cannot last forever. The last time a significant number of the “experts” believed that the “good days” would last indefinitely, the world experienced an economic meltdown unmatched since The Great Depression.   

One of the notable trends to watch out for in 2020 is that financial institutions are becoming more and more comfortable partnering with fintechs, rather than seeing them as competition. Indeed, to keep pace with the tech innovations driving our society, banks and credit unions wishing to attract and retain consumers must do business with an ever-growing number of vendors – many at various stages of development corporately. This fact of life in the digital age has led to a proliferation of contract types and terms. 

Las Vegas played host to another Money 20/20 the last week of October, this year’s theme being, "Journey to the Future of Money." Payments experts and influencers from the likes of eBay, Uber, Amazon and Mastercard took the stage to share their predictions on how the movement of money is changing, and to offer advice for how we can all respond.

A colleague of mine recently attended the BankAI conference in Chicago. One of the most interesting presentations, according to him, involved a Midwestern credit union sharing details of its chatbot rollout fueled by the artificial intelligence (AI) tools of a fintech partner.

What set the story apart from the pack was the credit union’s size, a shade under $300 million in assets. It’s often assumed that AI projects are the domain of the largest financial institutions; certainly, their efforts gain the most attention. Bank of America continues to tout the mass adoption of its Erica virtual assistant, and Wells Fargo, Capital One and JPMorgan Chase have spearheaded high profile AI rollouts as well.