A Q & A with Ronnie Selinger, CEO, Nordis Technologies
Businesses today are communicating and transacting with several generations of consumers at once, and those consumers don’t all want to engage in the same way. Some still prefer traditional mail and checks. While others expect to communicate and pay digitally, from the channels and devices they use every day.
For billers, that makes it increasingly difficult to standardize around any single communication channel, payment method or technology. Nordis CEO Ronnie Selinger discusses why flexibility has become essential, how a platform approach can help businesses keep pace with changing payment and communication preferences and what that means for the future of the consumer experience.
Why is consumer choice becoming such an important issue for businesses?
Ronnie: Look at the different generations businesses are serving today. My dad still sits down and writes checks. I’m mostly online or using bank bill pay, although I still write some checks. My kids want nothing to do with checks. They want to do everything digitally.
And then you have everybody in between. Consumers want to communicate differently, and they want to transact differently. You have to be able to design an experience that gives people options for how they want to engage and pay.
That creates a challenge for businesses because you can’t assume there is one channel or one payment experience that is going to work for everyone.
How should businesses respond when those preferences keep changing?
Ronnie: That’s where platform flexibility becomes so important. Businesses shouldn’t have to continually chase the next technology or tie themselves to one particular solution.
The platform gives us the ability to make different communication and payment options available and continue evolving as technology and consumer preferences change. That’s really how we think about future-proofing the experience.
That’s why we built the communications side and the payments side on one platform. A consumer doesn’t think of those as two different things, so we shouldn’t either. Consumers expect multiple payment options, but the real value comes from a platform that brings communications and payments together and adapts to individual preferences.
What does “future-proofing” mean when it comes to payments?
Ronnie: It means you’re not building your payment strategy around one technology or one way of paying. You’re creating the flexibility to support different options as consumer preferences evolve.
That’s important because the way people want to pay is changing just like the way they want to communicate is changing. Our job is to continue looking at those technologies and figuring out how to make them available through the platform so our customers don’t have to continually rethink their entire process.
Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal and Venmo are examples of the types of payment options the platform is built to support. The point isn’t that one of those will become the answer for everybody. It’s having the flexibility to support the choices consumers want.
How does ExpressoPay One-Click™ fit into that strategy?
Ronnie: ExpressoPay One-Click is a good example of what the platform can enable. The magic isn’t necessarily one click itself. It’s how you get to that one click. The platform is orchestrating everything that needs to happen to give the consumer that experience.
The experience we’re creating is simple: no login, one tap.
Instead of asking a consumer to receive a bill, go somewhere else and work through a series of steps to pay it, we’re bringing the payment experience to them.
That simplicity matters for the consumer, but it matters for the business too. We’re looking at both sides: How do we help our customers drive more payments and get paid faster? And how do we make the experience easier for the consumer?
Does the same idea extend beyond collecting payments?
Ronnie: Absolutely. We also see an opportunity to apply the same thinking when businesses need to send money back to consumers.
Today, we send a lot of checks for things like refunds and rebates. But consumers have preferences for how they want to receive money just as they have preferences for how they want to pay.
Our vision for electronic disbursements is to give consumers choices for how they receive those funds and build the workflow around that preference. We’re still working through the logistics, but conceptually it fits perfectly with what we’re building.
Where do communications fit into all of this?
Ronnie: Communications and payments are part of the same consumer journey. There’s a reason you’re communicating with someone. You might be sending a bill, delivering information or returning money and there’s an action you want that consumer to take.
The opportunity is to connect those experiences rather than treating print, email, text and payments as separate activities. That’s another reason the platform matters. It gives us a foundation to bring those activities together while still giving consumers choices in how they want to engage.
What’s the bigger vision for Expresso®?
Ronnie: Ultimately, we want to help our customers better understand the consumer journey including what they’re receiving, what channel it’s coming through, how they’re responding and whether that engagement is driving the desired action.
Historically, a lot of that information has been decentralized. A business might use one company for print and mail, another for email, another for text and another for payments. When those activities are disconnected, it becomes much harder to see the whole story.
Bringing more of that experience together in one workflow, through Expresso, gives us the foundation to help customers make better decisions about how they engage their consumers.
Longer term, we see an opportunity to use the data across that journey to help customers understand what works best for different consumers. Because that’s really the point: there isn’t one answer for everybody.
The businesses that are going to be best positioned for what comes next are the ones with the flexibility to meet consumers where they are today and continue adapting as those preferences change.
Contact us today for more information.
