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The Bottom Line

The global supply chain has drawn more mainstream attention over the past year than in generations – or perhaps ever. Supply chain issues have affected everything from shipping container shortages to automobile production to gaming consoles to, believe it or not, credit and debit cards.

A critical factor in most of the items previously mentioned is an ongoing shortage of silicon chips. Such chips are a building block for virtually all electronic products enjoyed by consumers worldwide.

We believe this supply risk should be on the radar of every financial institution, given the importance of keeping customers equipped with active payment cards. With effective planning, issuers can minimize the potential impact on their organizations.

In mid-March, when Americans were beginning to absorb the notion of shelter-in-place orders, SRM reached out to our financial institution clients to get a snapshot of their mindset regarding approaches to meeting consumer needs in the age of the pandemic. The findings of that initial survey can be found here. 

To refresh this view and learn how time in the “now normal” was impacting banks and credit unions, a second survey was planned in late June. Of course, by the time the second survey was ready to go into the field, COVID-19 was re-asserting itself across the United States. We retooled the study to accommodate the circumstances, revisiting some of the questions from the March survey and drilling down into digital transformation and payments.