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Doing Digital Forum, set to take place in Yerevan on April 5, will bring together leading worldwide experts to explore the latest trends and future developments in digital transformation, a topic of critical importance in today's rapidly evolving digital landscape. The Forum's founder and organizer is SPRING PR Company, and the co-organizer is Ameriabank. Forum's keynote speaker is Chris Skinner, a renowned fintech digital transformation global expert. As a leading financial services company, Visa is an innovation partner of the DDF. Armenpress talked to Diana Kiguradze, Visa Country Manager in the Caucasus, about their insights into the digital transformation agenda worldwide, the company's views on the future of payments and plastic cards, and their expectations for the upcoming event.
Why is it important today to advance the digital transformation agenda worldwide?
Digital transformation is both, a driving force of progress, but also an answer to many challenges we are facing today. It connects and brings the world together, helps businesses to be more effective and governments to improve performance; it saves resources and give us lots of data to understand better what happens around us. It gives people access to resources, products and services that make life more convenient or just fun. Visa has been a global promoter and enabler of digital payments for more than 60 years, uplifting everyone everywhere. Electronic money and payments are vital part of cashless and paperless economy. Sometimes we even say that we all live and work in a “phygital” (physical + digital) world. Especially for younger generations, as they don’t even know what the world was like before invention of Internet, smartphones, apps.
Referring to digital acceleration, we cannot avoid impacts of pandemic environment since the COVID-19 pandemic outburst; digital transformation has been accelerating across all sectors in the whole world. Developed e-com, delivery and contactless payments were crucial factors that ensured businesses’ survival during the crisis and helped people to have access to services and goods during strict lockdowns. And even now, as most countries gradually return to normality with restrictions lifted and physical stores and offices reopened, society sustains these new digital habits adopted during lockdown. In a way we are speaking about digital evolution. With each new challenge we adapt and become even stronger.
Cashless future is our strategic direction, and we are working to enable it every day for everyone. Currently we observe certain trends, that can shape the payment industry in the coming years. First, we are happy to see that payment around the globe go contactless. Second, it is growth of embedded finance: with innovations making once complex and expensive banking infrastructure easy and accessible, companies adding different financial services and products to their offers improving customer experience. We are talking about real time payments in apps and messengers, BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later) products; recurring payments and subscriptions, etc. Digital and crypto currencies will also grow, and open banking will be driving innovations and changes in banking and payments.
We also see growing trend of ‘super apps’ that serve as one universal platform where consumers can get many different services, make purchases, communicate and play, not leaving those applications.
In its turn, to meet the ever-changing customer needs, we will continue to evolve Visa to be a network of networks and being the best way to pay and be paid. We are trusted by more than 3 billion of cardholders, millions of merchants, thousands of financial institutions worldwide.
The process of digitalization is accelerating with a mind-boggling speed now, and changes that took five years a decade ago are now happening much faster. We live in the era of “phygital”, where technology is used to bridge the digital world with the physical world and provide a unique interactive experience to the user. Visa seeks to provide the most comfortable payment solutions to customers – whether they prefer just to tap a card or pay with a smartphone or another gadget.
We constantly work with our partner banks in Armenia to drive digital payments, as we see year after year, more people opt for simpler and more convenient ways to pay and be paid. According to Visa data, 8 out of 10 transactions in Armenia are contactless. These figures indicate an upward trend in the country's cashless economy development and the population's willingness to further evolve in this direction. As a result, cash digitization in Armenia can be considered a current key trend. We expect that the digital shift will continue, e-commerce will expand further, which will eventually accelerate online transactions.
On the top of that, moving towards a digital future is a mutual process: Visa develops technologies, businesses implement them, and customers enjoy them, and by such joint efforts we accelerate the advancement of cashless economy.
And I truly believe that soon there will be no need for plastic cards, as even now cardholders more and more using virtual ones, adding them to digital wallets, so they can pay using, for instance, Apple Pay or G Pay.
Visa is global enabler of electronic commerce. We work with big merchants and retailers, with marketplaces, with logistic operators and providers of the content. We also support digitalization of small and medium business, so they can benefit from e-com and digital payments, expanding sales volumes and geography. In order to support acceptance development in small and medium size businesses, we introduced Visa Tap to Phone technology in Armenia last year, along with our partner banks. Visa Tap to Phone enables a business acceptance of contactless payments of any amount on an Android mobile phone or tablet in the same way their customers pay at a traditional payment terminal at the point-of-sale. Our intention is simple – we want both, consumers and businesses, to have access to simple, secure and reliable payments.
Following recent global trends, which accelerated during COVID-19 outbreak, new shopping habits that combine the physical and virtual and build on consumers' familiarity with e-commerce have been emerging. Many consumers choose a product in person, then purchase it online – or browse products in store and compare them to different options using their mobile device. Moreover, businesses that were able to adapt to digital platforms, on the other hand, thrived in general, while traditional retailers who had limited knowledge of online strategies struggled to survive.
The way we work with data and analytics help our client-banks and merchant to build stronger customized marketing and offers to consumers. We drive global and cross-border commerce, but also part of our strategy is supporting small local and authentic brands, making them successful and available to wider audience – and e-com really helps with that. In this regard, our team launched “World of Privileges” loyalty Program in Armenia last year. The platform provides exclusive offers and promotions from partner companies for all Visa Premium cardholders, including – Visa Gold, Visa Platinum, Visa Signature and Visa Infinite.
As growth of e-commerce is accelerating, fraudulent activities in digital space are gaining momentum too. As a global leader of payment industry, Visa undertook the mission to protect the digital movement of money. We developed Visa Secure, a program that helps ensure online payments are made by the rightful owner of the Visa account. We also actively apply tokenization technology Visa Token Service as one of the most effective tools to fight fraud. Tokenization allows to secure sensitive information, such as the 16-digit account number, by replacing it with a unique digital identifier, a token. However, it is also important to remember that the first line of defense against fraudsters is be educated on how to protect and detect us from threats coming from online.
As Visa’s vision is to be the best way to pay and be paid, for everyone everywhere, mean a huge responsibility for us that we accomplish through various strategic pillars. One of them is the development of e-commerce and solutions to protect our customers when they shop online. Our decisions to minimize frauds online, safeguard our consumers. We made major investments worldwide, such as $9 billion in fraud prevention and cybersecurity in the past five years.
Moreover, we work closely with Central Bank of Armenia to raise financial awareness of our consumers and teach them on how to avoid and detect fraud and social engineering scams. I would mention the latest payment security campaign, we’ve conducted with CBA.
Visa is working closely with the governments to advance digitalization of economies. We quickly adapt to changes: for example, when avoiding physical touch became a way to stop the spread of the disease, we partnered with state regulators in more than 50 countries across the world to raise contactless limits and enable customers to freely enjoy safe tap to pay transactions.
We share data insights on digital commerce trends to help shape public strategies and decision-making. We advise on legislation that affects payment sector and implement the strictest security standards and customer authentication technologies in compliance with the national or international legislation (f. e., EU’s Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) requirement). I would like to highlight partnerships with USAID Georgia, Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development of Georgia, Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine aiming at supporting digital transformation process, small and medium-sized businesses, and the digitization of their activities, improve financial ecosystem, extension of digital capabilities and access for citizens.
We invest our competence, technologies and knowledge to increase penetration of digital payments, helping economies, business and individuals to thrive. I think we always have the same goal with governments and regulators – building strong and inclusive cashless economy.
What are your expectations of joining Doing Digital Forum as an innovative partner? Why is it crucial to have such platforms on the ground?
Visa brings and drives innovations globally because the digital future is what we believe in and invest in. Partnering with the Doing Digital forum serves the same reason and more. We anticipate this event to bring novelty, value, and experience on a local level to boost the process of digital transformation in Armenia. Additionally, having such a platform strengthens partnerships and facilitates the establishment of new collaborations. We believe our role, as an international company, is to step in when it comes to fostering the growth of tech, business, and financial ecosystems, and create an exciting future together with our partners.