Powering Modern Payments: How Omnichannel Orchestration Makes Everything Possible

Powering Modern Payments: A Conversation With NMI CSO Kate Hampton

Greg Myers: Welcome back to NMI Payment Playbook. This is the final episode of our three part series on how Gen Z and Millennials are influencing the payments ecosystem. 

Our special guest for this episode is Kate Hampton, NMI’s Chief Strategy Officer. Today, we’re going to be discussing omnichannel payments, the expectations consumers have around frictionless experiences and how payment orchestration makes everything possible.

Kate, to start, will you tell us about yourself and your background?

Kate Hampton: Certainly. So, I’m the Chief Strategy Officer here at NMI, where I oversee strategy and corporate development. I’ve been in payments for 18 years, specifically payments acceptance. I’ve worked at companies like Accelerated Payment Technologies, who were pioneers in integrated payments, Global Payments, and Entrata, a SaaS platform for property managers. At Entrata, we built out a PayFac-powered, industry-leading payment solution. Now, I lead strategy at NMI. 

The Importance of Omnichannel Payments

Myers: To kick off our discussion, can you give us a basic definition of omnichannel payments?

Hampton: Omnichannel payments describe the consistent, connected and seamless shopping experience across multiple channels. These channels can be in-person, mobile, online or unattended.

Myers: What are consumer expectations? What are their pain points when it comes to the shopping experience?

Hampton: If I had to boil it down, I’d say that they want to eliminate friction. Friction can come from a variety of things, like seeking information or decision making. For instance, as a cardholder going to make a purchase, I would be wondering if you take Apple Pay or only accept cards. Can I tap? Can I dip? Can I pay on an app? Or do I have to do everything at a register?

Consumers want optionality in everything — optionality and contextuality, which means seamlessly presenting them with the option that makes the most sense for them at that particular time.

Myers: Let’s talk about omnichannel and orchestration from the merchant perspective. Obviously, consumers want to pay the way they prefer with as little friction as possible. But what makes this challenging for merchants?

Hampton: Merchants are experts in things other than payments. They might make the best coffee in town, deliver the best pizza, or provide the best CPA advice in the country, but they’re not payment experts. That means merchants have to entrust their customer experience to someone who understands their customers and needs, and that’s a tricky thing to do. 

With more merchant accounts being issued through software versus traditional payments (like a payment terminal from your local bank), the message we’re getting is clear — the consumer experience is crucial to merchants. It’s an extension of their brand. 

For instance, the coffee shop wants to offer a certain experience for the person who comes in to get their daily latte. Meanwhile, the CPA advisor wants to ensure that when their customers come to get their taxes done, they can have a frictionless experience and not have to think too hard about the payment. These businesses want to focus on the service they provide while giving their end customers the best experience possible.

Myers: How do you talk with NMI customers about the topic of omnichannel? What advice would you give them?

Hampton: That’s an interesting question because the merchants, in this instance, are our customers’ customers. NMI serves ISOs, ISVs, SaaS providers, banks and other FinTech innovators. So, the advice I would give them is to remember that the consumer experience is important to merchants. That experience is an extension of their brand, and payments are a critical part of that journey.

Omnichannel is no longer a “nice to have” — it’s essential. When thinking about their omnichannel strategy, we advise our customers to stay ahead of the curve. Merchants are running a business and they want to have different ways to sell.

Entrusting that experience to a provider is a really big step, not just for the merchants themselves but also for our partners, because they look to us to help them weave together the right solution and give them enough flexibility to build what they need.

How Payments Orchestration Makes Everything Possible

Myers: Can you give us a definition of payment orchestration? How does it make modern payment experiences possible?

Hampton: Orchestration, in payments specifically, refers to the configuration and coordination across channels, payment types and methods, geographies or even specific customer use cases. The objective of orchestration is to take something complex and make it simple and intentional for the end user. It’s a means of creating a differentiated payment experience.

Myers: Why is orchestration so important when it comes to omnichannel payments?

Hampton: Omnichannel offers optionality. It’s the ingredient you use to design and curate the best experience for your customer. So, while omnichannel makes up the ingredients to provide frictionless payments, orchestration is what curates that experience. Orchestration is the means to a differentiated payment journey. 

Myers: What does good payments orchestration look like? What is its value?

Hampton: Ironically enough, great payments orchestration shouldn’t look like anything; it should be invisible. A sign of payments orchestration done right is when the consumer doesn’t have to think when making a payment because that experience was so intelligently and painstakingly curated for them. 

The value it provides is a broader topic, and it depends on the stakeholder. It can include anything from a superior payment experience and differentiation to future-proofing your business, reducing customer calls, you name it. 

For instance, the majority of SaaS platforms that curate differentiated payment experiences are actually orchestrators. They take the use case, analyze how product users will interact with it, and then weave together a solution that works for them. They orchestrate the payment experience that’s appropriate for their target market at the right time.

Myers: As we’re coming to the end of our show, would you connect the dots for everyone?

Hampton: Customer expectations, omnichannel and payments orchestration all go hand-in-hand. Consumers expect a curated experience. Payments orchestration is a means of curating that experience, while omnichannel offers optionality from which that experience can be curated. Orchestration, and by extension omnichannel, are so commonplace and expected that these values are non-negotiable anymore.

Tune in to the full episode here.