Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) officials said the organization’s Bancard division has launched an interactive tool to help community bank clients create a custom digital payments strategy.
“Once considered only a transaction on a deposit account, payments have become a focal point of the customer relationship and a critical component of a bank’s strategy and revenue stream,” Tina Giorgio, ICBA Bancard president and CEO, said. “As community banks evolve to meet their customers’ diverse payments needs, a digital payments strategy can help align disparate initiatives—creating a roadmap that feeds into a bank’s overall strategic plan and expedites its execution.”
Officials noted the ICBA Bancard Digital Payments Strategy Tool and GuideSM was designed in partnership with Aite Group, offers a responsive Q&A assessment questionnaire that provides a custom approach to help community banks evaluate their market position to identify key environmental factors, such as the size of their institution and the number of customers and branches and take stock of existing offerings and identify gaps through a series of questions designed to assess their current digital payments product offerings and their plans for near-term changes.
The product also encourages assessment of current and future customer needs based on a deeper dive into existing customers and an analysis of targeted customer groups; and the creation of a realistic roadmap using a model to identify where they fall on the digital payments development spectrum, with recommended steps to continue building their digital payments infrastructure.