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December 12, 2016 • Issue 16:12:01

New payment products:
Go big or fail fast

By Dale S. Laszig and cloud-based technologies. Second, payments are now
interactive, requiring delivery systems to be dynamic and
T he payments industry has produced a long line conversational. Occasional tweaks and software patches,
of products, some more successful than others. in this environment, are no big deal.
In the past, product failures mostly fell into
two camps: those that rushed to market and Merchant level salespeople (MLSs) who have sold
promptly exploded, and those that lingered in the lab, bleeding-edge technologies to merchants bring a healthy
only to be tweaked, debugged and eventually abandoned. degree of flexibility to the new product game. They know
electronic transactions will always be a technology play,
In today's mature payments ecosystem, the fast and and like other sports, one that can improve with practice.
sloppy crowd has gained an advantage over slow-moving
blunderers for two reasons. First, the industry has moved For example, MLSs brought their prior experience and
away from heavy, proprietary systems into mobile, virtual knowledge to the U.S. EMV (Europay, Mastercard and
Visa) migration, helping merchants and consumers adjust
Contributed articles inside by: to chip card technology at the POS.

Brandes Elitch.........................................................................................28 Technology leaders who have pioneered digital payment
John Tucker..............................................................................................37 technologies have also learned from past successes and
Eugene Rome.. ........................................................................................42 failures. Failure is a normative concept in the tech world;
Jeff Fortney..............................................................................................44 many engineers see it as a natural part of testing. Even
Steve Duniec...........................................................................................46 Steve Jobs said, "You've got to be willing to fail, and crash
and burn … if you're afraid of failing, you won't get very
TOC on page 3 far."
STAR quality

Among their divergent designs and uses, the same basic
STAR qualities exist in most successful products:

• Solution: The product solves a problem.

• Target: It is introduced at the right time to the
right market.

• Architecture: It has a solid foundation with
enough flexibility to scale.

• Resilience: It has a strong team behind it with
unified vision and focus.

Following are examples of how these STAR qualities,
by their presence or absence, have affected payment
technology companies in their efforts to bring new
products to market.

Continued on page 34