Preparing Your Business for Blockchain

We’re always excited to share our knowledge about the payments landscape and the potential impact of emerging trends and technologies. Case in point: a recent Entrepreneur article written by Jim Pratt, SVP and general manager of our virtual payments group, that discusses three ways business owners can prepare for blockchain and digital payments.

There’s a lot of buzz – and confusion – surrounding blockchain and bitcoin and what the technology will mean for companies of all sizes. The results of our recent Payments Pulse survey of 500 CFOs illustrate both the opportunities and challenges businesses are facing:

• 61% are extremely confident in their understanding of blockchain
• 50% expect blockchain will change their accounts payable operations
• However, only 6 of the 500 survey respondents had a concrete idea of how blockchain will make their business more competitive

Three Ways to Get Ready

To help businesses get ready for the digital payments landscape of the future, Pratt’s article offers three tips:

1. Understand new technologies and the purpose(s) they aim to serve.

Best way to do this? Stay current on technology that impacts your business and be sure your staff is keeping up-to-date as well.

2. Listen to suppliers and start conversations with industry peers about current/future business needs.

Pratt encourages business leaders to engage with their peers whenever possible, and to keep in mind their entire supply chain in order to identify those already adopting emerging processes and technologies.

3. Look for outside vendors that may be able to fill in areas where your organization might not have strength.

Tackling some technologies may be difficult to scale for a business unless they partner with a specialized vendor.

“There are a lot of factors that can influence a business’s engagement in the digital payments world, and at the end of the day, customer experience will likely be the key influencer in selecting a payments platform. In fact, our survey found that overall customer and user experience, at 71 percent, outweighed technical aspects like reporting analytics and speed of reconciliation as most influential,” observed Pratt.

Pratt’s full article includes more detail on each of these tips, as well as links to background articles on topics ranging from blockchain technology to the future of payments.