The surge of payment technology during the pandemic resulted in new opportunities for many organizations including Global Payments, as CEO Jeff Sloan explained in a new interview with Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt in Fortune Magazine: What the pandemic really did… is it really accelerated the blurring of the lines between the virtual and the physical worlds. Now people think about their laptops, their iPads or cell phones, the same way they think about physically going into a store and they want complete flexibility, regardless of where they go one needs to be interoperable for the other.

So now there is no really more distinction between e-commerce and what we call omni-channel or acceptance in the virtual world as well as the physical world. We did $1. 45 billion of revenue in the omni-channel world, and I just described that, blending last year—that blending of the virtual and physical environment.

In addition to the increasingly digitalization of payments, the pandemic allowed for growth of alternatives like Buy Now Pay Later. The ability of companies to adapt during the pandemic created better outcomes for consumers, as Sloan explains: The second thing I’d say, is things like buy-now-pay-later or what we call BNPL, the proliferation of alternative payment means some of which are through your banks, and some of which are through newer players like an Affirm or a Klarna which actually are non banks. I don’t see that changing either.

In fact, in last year, 2021 Global Payments did over 2 billion by-now-pay-later transactions, and I’d say, that’s probably got 50%. So the idea that consumers can kind of pay the way they want, pay over the number of payments that they want, generally not get charged for paying in installments, we’re one of the biggest providers of that type of functionality. And that’s something obviously the pandemic accelerated.

Overview by Jordan Hirschfield, Director of Research at Mercator Advisory Group

By Jordan Hirschfield
Mar 24, 2022 00:00
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