This week featured insights from JOOR CEO Kristin Savilia on the necessity of experiential retail for luxury brands, discussions with One Inc CEO Ian Drysdale on the digital shift in the insurance industry driven by Gen Z expectations and warnings from Intellicheck CEO Bryan Lewis about the dangers of recent data breaches.
Even in the dog days of summer when vacations are plentiful, PYMNTS keeps the interview flywheel turning. We started the week (July 16) with an interview about Luxury Shopping with “Joor CEO: Luxury Shoppers Won’t Buy a $20,000 Coat Online.” As the luxury retail sector looks to strike a balance between digital accessibility and the more immersive, high-touch in-store experience, these upscale brands like Joor must create an omnichannel strategy that is much more experiential than that of its mass-market counterparts. Kristin Savilia CEO of JOOR, a wholesale platform for the luxury retail industry, told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster that luxury retailers need to offer an “experiential, exciting” retail journey to get consumers to shell out for their pricy products, and it is hard to do that online. “Don’t get caught up in one distribution model. Be at touch points that matter. Don’t fear wholesale. Just get it with the right partners who will honor your brand,” she told Webster. “This is an industry that always comes back, and people have to remember that. It’s about focusing on the right things and always using tough times to self-reflect and figure out what your business needs.”
We moved on to insurance later in the week with “Insurance Industry $500 Billion Digital Shift Driven by Gen Z Expectations,” and found that this digital revolution is primarily driven by changing demographics and consumer expectations. As One Inc CEO Ian Drysdale told Karen Webster for the latest installment of the “What’s Next In Payments” series, while baby boomers retire and millennials become the largest segment of society, insurance companies are grappling with how to serve a new generation of customers who expect seamless digital experiences. “We’re seeing the digitalization of insurance with a Gen Z and millennial focus. Everything being online — not only premiums, which might be a little bit more obvious, but also claims where we can close a claim completely over text message,” Drysdale said.
Fraud and online scams continue to proliferate and last week was no exception. In “Exclusive: Banks Explore Shared Data to Enhance Scam Detection Capabilities,” Dave Excell, founder of fraud prevention company Featurespace, said the prevalence of scams has continued to increase in 2024, driven by new tools available to fraudsters.
“Scammers aren’t regulated,” he told PYMNTS. “They don’t need to go through aspects of model governance that banks and financial institutions do from a regulatory perspective. So, we need to enable banks and payment companies to continue to innovate to keep us safe without having too much of the burden of some of the other potential regulatory hurdles that they may need to go through.”
Fraud also came up later in the week as we discussed the AT&T hack in “Intellicheck CEO: Fraudsters Using AT&T’s Call Log Breach to Build Consumer Profiles.” That’s why, with recent data breaches such the one affecting over 100 million AT&T customers, understanding what criminals can construe from stolen data, as well as embracing best practices for protecting sensitive information, is now table stakes for businesses. “If you think about what bad guys are doing, they are putting together a picture of us — and using that information to figure out new ways to trick us,” Bryan Lewis, CEO at Intellicheck, told PYMNTS. As Lewis explained, call logs, while not containing direct personally identifiable information (PII), can reveal a vast amount of data about an individual’s network, habits and daily routines. “They know who you called, how long you spoke to them, how often you pick them up, how often you texted them. So, they know your network,” he said.
We also covered the aftermath of the late term U.S. Supreme Court decisions that could impact the financial services industry. In “Will Supreme Court Rulings Keep Federal Regulators in Court?” we loved this quote: “I think anytime that longstanding laws are overturned, you’re going to see a step back and try to figure out what it means,” said Steven Brotman, associate at legal firm Locke Lord. “But I think it is important to know what this decision doesn’t do, and first and foremost, is that it doesn’t overrule any existing decisions. So, if there’s already been litigation and decisions on a statute that’s still binding, maybe someone challenges that very same statute or does something to bring it back into the fold. But as things stand now, it doesn’t change anything that’s already happened.”
In “Shop Talk: Grubhub’s Grocery VP Says ‘We’ll Catch Up Very Quickly’,” Craig Whitmer, vice president of new verticals at the Just Eat Takeway.com-owned on-demand delivery aggregator, discussed how the company’s nationwide grocery launch with Albertsons comes as part of a broader plan to become a key player in the space.
“The early results are incredibly positive for overall growth for a business, and it gets our core restaurant business, even stronger,” Whitmer said. “The thing is, we know what we need to do to get on par with our competitors. We’ve been almost later in this space than others have. But I feel confident we’ll catch up very, very quickly.”
As in every week, there was a lot of action around artificial intelligence (AI). In “AI’s Growing Role in Finance Brings Opportunity and Risk, House Panel Finds,” the House Financial Services Committee’s AI Working Group, established in January by Chairman Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., and Ranking Member Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), examined AI’s impact on finance through a series of roundtables with regulators, market participants and consumer advocates. In a report released Thursday (July 18), the group highlighted AI’s potential to expand access to credit, enhance fraud detection and improve customer service. However, it also warned of challenges around data privacy, potential bias in algorithmic decision-making and the need to ensure AI systems comply with existing laws.
“As consumers and businesses increasingly look to leverage AI, it is critical that lawmakers and regulators keep pace,” McHenry said in a news release. “This report represents a bipartisan effort to understand the benefits, and potential risks, of artificial intelligence in the financial services and housing industries. It also highlights the need for proper oversight and consumer protections that address the growing number of use cases for artificial intelligence.”
We’re going to leave you with “It’s the Network, Not the Rail: Ingo Payments’ Edwards Reflects on FedNow’s First Year” part of a series we’re publishing about the FedNow Service’s first anniversary. As Ingo Payments CEO Drew Edwards told us, as the real-time networks are in the early stages of coverage, “I’m a big believer in faster banking rails — and the combination of FedNow and RTP.” Instant payments, he said, “are going to happen, and they will impact everything.”
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