Welcome To
The Bottom Line

It’s not surprising commerce continues to migrate to digital channels across all sectors and that the pandemic has pushed further the already speedy digital banking trend. In the FI world, consumers rely on their bank or credit union’s virtual branch to navigate real-life decisions.

A recent family trip to Florida’s gulf coast reminded me of how much importance customers put into “What it says on the website.” We visited an area decimated by Hurricane Michael the year prior; although it remains a beautiful destination, the storm’s impact was still evident. Some businesses only had websites left standing, as we soon came to learn.

Given the whirlwind of recent events, it seems like ages since January, when one of our payments experts Larry Pruss weighed in on Visa’s acquisition of Plaid, API aggregator for P2P players such as Venmo. He discussed what this combination could mean for banks and credit unions going forward, reinforcing two key points:  

1. Financial institutions are hungry for objective expert opinions on market developments; and 
2. The strategic moves of major industry vendors – not just their direct competitors – can have a major impact on their competitive position.     

In the months since the pandemic was announced, SRM’s experts have weighed in on the operational impacts of COVID-19. We also gathered perspectives from a cross-section of banks and credit unions through a survey conducted in the early days of shelter-in-place orders (results from survey 2 coming soon). Now that the bills have come due for April and May, we noticed some unusual emerging trends in the invoice tracking data.

Buckle up: we’re in for a ride. Regardless of your political persuasion, all signs point to an extended stretch of market volatility as we head into the 2020 election cycle, which by many measures is already hitting its stride. The 2020 budget season is playing out against this backdrop, with budget-setters up against even greater uncertainty than usual. The question looms, as the political barrage reaches new heights in 2020, how can banks and credit unions remain flexible to the economic variables?