Special Series: The Omnicommerce Revolution with Yael Barak, VP of Product Management at Worldpay | Episode 322

In a world where digital innovation is constantly reshaping the commercial landscape, understanding the evolution of omnicommerce is essential for businesses and consumers alike.  Yael Barak, VP of Product Management at Worldpay, sheds light on this very transformation during this latest collaboration between the Leaders in Payments Podcast and Worldpay. 

The discussion begins with an exploration of omnicommerce and its nuanced existence in today's economy. The fusion of brick-and-mortar stores with e-commerce platforms has revolutionized consumer expectations, with businesses now required to meet their customers wherever they are. This seamless blend of physical and digital shopping experiences has given rise to a new economy that thrives on accessibility and convenience. As we delve deeper, Yael explains how Worldpay is at the forefront of this revolution, providing scalable payment solutions that cater to a diverse range of clients, from nimble local shops to expansive enterprise networks.

Yael also touches on the importance of understanding the varying needs of different verticals. For instance, mobile payment solutions that may be ideal for a contractor may not suit the needs of a restaurant that utilizes QR codes. It is this keen sense of specificity that has allowed Worldpay to craft payment solutions that resonate with individual merchant requirements, providing a frictionless purchasing process that enhances the customer experience.

As the digital age continues to advance, the line between physical and online commerce blurs even further, paving the way for an omnicommerce ecosystem that is as boundless as the technology that fuels it. Businesses that embrace this revolution, with guidance from industry leaders like Yael Barak and companies like Worldpay, will be well-positioned to succeed in the digital economy that awaits us.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:19

Thank you or mobile, you'll find WorldPay at the heart of great commerce experiences globally. In this five-part series, we'll dive deep into seamless commerce experiences across all customer journeys, including from the consumer and merchant perspectives. We'll also look at solutions in the market today and where Omnicommerce is heading in the future.

Speaker 2: 0:43

Today, my special guest is Yael Barak, the VP of Product Management at WorldPay. In this episode, we're going to be talking about seamless commerce experiences and how consumers are truly driving Omnicommerce. Today. We've got a great episode ahead, so let's get started. Hi Yael, thank you for being here and welcome to Leaders in Payments podcast, especially this special collaboration between the Leaders in Payments and WorldPay. In this episode, we'll be discussing Omnicommerce, so thank you so much for being here today.

Speaker 3: 1:12

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

Speaker 2: 1:14

So let's go ahead and dive right in. If you don't mind, tell our audience a little bit about yourself, maybe where you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live and, if you don't mind, touching on your professional journey a little as well.

Speaker 3: 1:24

So I am originally from Israel. That's why I was born and grew up. I left Israel to go to university and I spent about seven years in New York doing that and that's where actually I got a little bit, I think, my early start into what got me into career and product management. I was a student and, like most students, I needed to make a living and so I got a job doing some very basic at the time. It was a thing building websites for others like companies who wanted a website online. So I picked up an HTML manual and I started learning how to code very simple HTML and building websites. But that got me really a taste of this thing that was, at the time, just internet and online and blew my mind in terms of how you can access millions and billions of people through one channel. And as I kind of progressed in that, I left school behind. So I was doing a PhD, but I left school behind and I got more and more into commerce and marketing, online marketing and all of that good stuff, doing affiliate marketing.

Speaker 3: 2:33

This is like early 2000s. So you know, think very, very basic things compared to what we were doing today. There was no Facebook right. There was no social media. Even Gmail didn't exist, you know. And so at some point I moved to Canada, which is where I live today. I'm in Montreal, and when I moved here I got a job with a little startup that had a vision that if you wanted to buy software for your computer at the time, you know, people would still buy you'd go to office depot and you'd buy a little cd and it had like an antivirus on it and you went home installed it. That company had a vision that basically, you don't really need to buy the physical CD-ROM with a software on it, you just need the license key and so you could buy a digital version of the software, download it directly from you know whichever company you're buying it from, and what they're giving you is the download of the file and you're paying for the activation key, and so it can be a completely digital experience so you don't have to leave your house. At the time again, these things didn't really exist. So I was doing product management for that company and as part of that we were implementing payments, because people now need to pay online for these keys that they're buying and because it's a completely digital product, you don't ship it anywhere. You can deliver it anywhere in the world in an instant, meaning you can collect payment from anywhere in the world, which again got me exposed to not just online payments but cross-border online payments and international having customers in different countries and different currencies wanting to pay in different payment methods, and it was just for me the gateway into where I am today. And this was about I don't know 15 years ago.

Speaker 3: 4:15

At this point, I had jumped ship and went to work for a payment processing company here in Canada and I got my start working on very core payments product like gateways, card processing, alternate payment methods, cross border multi currency processing. And then, as I grew and evolved in these roles, I started specializing in some segments. I did things like regulated gaming, for example, which is very specific to very types of merchants and customers and use cases, and then in the last, I would say, five or six years, very much immersed in software-led payments, embedded payments we call it sometimes integrated software vendors, payment facilitators, marketplaces all of those models where a payment company gets distribution basically through a partner, through a software partner. So I did that for a while. The company called PaySafe and then in 2020, started another startup, checkoutcom, out of London and had a chance to work on similar products for them.

Speaker 3: 5:22

It's been an amazing journey building products like that, taking them again internationally from one market to the next, understanding the customer and when I say customer I mean both platform, customer, merchant and consumer so really taking a look at the entire ecosystem of a transaction and understanding how to support it best and how to support different business use cases. That has been my journey, and today I'm at WorldPay and I manage and own the products for all of our US SMB merchants and again we have some SMB direct merchants, so we go directly to these SMB merchants, but we also work through partners like platforms. We work through partners like financial institutions. So there is a lot of similar themes in what I've been doing and I think the nuances are is consumer behavior is changing and becoming more digital and the borders between what's retail and what's e-commerce and you know the channels is blurring. How do we change the way we do payment product for these businesses so that they're successful and growing?

Speaker 2: 6:27

Okay, yeah, we're going to dive into details about that in just a minute Before we go there, if you don't mind, and most of our audience will know who WorldPay is, but if you don't mind, give us a high-level overview of WorldPay.

Speaker 3: 6:41

Sure, yeah, anyone who's been paying attention in this industry knows WorldPay for years and years and years, but the company has gone through many I would say changes, evolutions. We are one of the largest acquirers in the world. We process more than 32 billion transactions a year and more than $2 trillion globally, again in a year. We have recently undergone a transformation, going from being a public company under ownership of FIS into private equity by GTCR, and the company spans all five continents, acquiring on all these five continents products from enterprise omni-channel to small business, omni-channel type payment products, fx products, all kinds of value-add services around fraud and chargeback mitigation. Lots of technology involved a very, very high-scale business, which is, honestly, really what drew me to the company at this point is that working at that scale, that doesn't exist a lot. There's a handful of companies that can really say that they're at that scale. That doesn't exist a lot.

Speaker 2: 7:48

There's a handful of companies that can really say that they're at that scale, right, right. Well, let's go ahead and dive into the topic at hand, which is Omnicommerce, and you mentioned it a little bit, but maybe let's look at it from the 50,000-foot level. How would you define it at that level?

Speaker 3: 8:04

Yeah, I think for me, Omnicommerce as opposed to what we might have called a few years ago we might have called it a multi-channel or omni-channel Omnicommerce is really the ecosystem of in which a business meets their customer wherever they are, wherever they want to transact with them, and transact can be exchanging, of course, money for goods, but it can also be exchanging information. So, in anticipation of a transaction in the future, you know me creating a profile with a company because I'm going to be a consumer of services from them, like your Netflix is, for example, be a consumer of services from them, like your Netflix is, for example. So Omnicommerce is about enabling those connections between businesses and their consumers that are both transactional. I'm buying something goods or services right now, but also I have a relationship with that merchant that requires me to exchange information with them, to have a back and forth in support of, maybe, future transactions or in order to support me as a customer. So, to me, omnicommerce is plugging into all of these and enabling all of that.

Speaker 2: 9:10

Okay. Well, part of the theme of our podcast series is seamless commerce experiences. So what does that mean to WorldPay?

Speaker 3: 9:18

So in Seamless, I think there are some very obvious examples that people like to quote very much like. The line between buying in-store and online, of course, is blurring, not just because people will walk in the store to see something but then go online and find the best price and just buy something online, but also, I think, as consumers all of us do this, myself included we think of ourselves as the center of the transaction and no longer the merchant location. So it's not just I'm going to go into a store or I'm going to go online. I actually have a device in my hand which is my transacting device. Most of the time it's my phone, and so I'm the location of the transaction.

Speaker 3: 9:57

Wherever I go, I'm the point of sale, I'm a moving point of sale transaction. Wherever I go, I'm the point of sale, I'm a moving point of sale, and I think that created all of the demand for what you call a seamless commerce experience. I'm walking around with my digital wallet, which to me means when I'm ready to buy something, I want to be able to buy it right now, and if I'm in a store, it's using that digital wallet at the cashier or actually maybe on the floor because there's someone line busting when, obviously, I'm at home, I can use my device, or even when I'm on the move and I get an alert and something and I'm ready to buy, I am buying. So that is seamless commerce experience. And again getting back to it's not always transactional. It means that my maybe profile, my consumer profile, my payment method, my loyalty is all part of my relationship with businesses that I choose to transact with, and so we have that common ecosystem that we are both engaged in and we can both optimize in order to enable me transacting.

Speaker 2: 10:57

Okay, and what is the value of this concept to the actual merchants?

Speaker 3: 11:03

To the merchant. Obviously it's being in constant touch with your customer and being able to optimize, give them choice on how they want to transact with you and how they want to have a relationship with you and, of course, it's a bidirectional relationship. It's a bidirectional relationship so as a merchant, obviously having very rich customer profiles with their history of purchases, with their preferences, with their loyalty points, with even maybe trigger points of behavior of when they like to transact and why and what kind of ticket sizes they respond to. That kind of access to data and intelligence allows a merchant to optimize, not just for their revenue and their bottom line and their ability to convert transactions and consumers, but to create better experiences for those consumers.

Speaker 3: 11:53

There's nothing like a frictionless purchase experience. For me personally, when I leave the house with just my phone and that's all I need in order to do a full day of business wherever I go, I'm the happiest. I don't like reaching out for my wallet now. I don't like reaching out for cash. If I walk into a store and they don't accept tap payments, I'm upset. So, all things considered, I think the value for merchants is meeting their customer wherever they are and being able to provide that good experience to keep them coming back.

Speaker 2: 12:27

Okay, so we can't have a payments discussion without talking about verticals, because that seems to be something we do in this industry. So do you see a difference based on the vertical or from a vertical perspective?

Speaker 3: 12:41

I see nuances. I can give you some examples. So if I have a technician coming to my house to fix my air conditioning, for example, then where in the past I might have written a check or paid in cash, then obviously today that contractor has a bunch of options. Yeah, they can come in with some mobile terminal, but they can also come in with a tap-to-pay-on-their-phone type solution where it's easy and cheap for both of us. You know them, the contractor. It's something that they like me. A phone is something they have on them, easy to pull up a customer, easy to pull up an invoice, and for me, the customer just standing there, being able to tap to pay on that phone, that's value for both sides, merchant and customer.

Speaker 3: 13:27

Here. And it's a nuance of this vertical where you have the business itself might be big, but in the field you have individual contractors running around. So maybe you don't have to send out 100 terminals anymore. Maybe each contractor is riding around with an app on their phone and able to bill customers that way. That's one vertical. Other verticals, of course, very obvious examples in food and beverage restaurants, all the options of pay at the table, pay with QR codes, splitting bills those are things where again, I think COVID did a lot to accelerate those use cases of basically how can we transact without interacting with each other, with another human being? That's another obvious vertical. I more see nuances of using the same technology in the service of the use case of a vertical. So I think food and beverage and contractors are good examples.

Speaker 2: 14:23

Yeah, and thinking about that. So one of the things that I kind of in my mind I think, okay, well, this whole concept of meeting the customer where they are in my mind is maybe easier for a larger company, but if you're a small mom-and-pop retailer, how would you see them like being able to integrate, you know? I mean, is that the concept we're talking about? So maybe I'm like a candy store and I'm a one person, you know one location, candy store. I've got people who want to buy online and I want people who want to buy on mobile and I have my retail location. I mean, is that another kind of use case, that where in the past it wasn't so easy to do but now it's gotten a lot easier? Is that kind of the right way to look at it?

Speaker 3: 15:08

Yeah, exactly, and I think we as an industry got better at putting complete solutions in front of merchants.

Speaker 3: 15:15

If I'm that small business, then, as WorldPay, a solution that I would offer that business would be not just in the past, like 10 years ago it might have been here's a terminal.

Speaker 3: 15:23

You know, you reconcile at the end of the day, batch out and reconcile, and today what I would offer that merchant is the terminal plus, let's say, an application, and it might sit on the terminal or it might be a point of sale, like value add type application that allows them to manage their customer profiles. If they're that kind of business, like a gym or spa, for example, or if they're that candy retailer, then obviously their inventory might live on the terminal as well and as they're transacting, we're giving them some basic capabilities to also run their business like, like, do inventory update or customer invoices, for example, smart receipts, things like that. So as an industry we evolved from standalone solutions to more supporting a business management type software, and some of them are generic and some of them are very specific to verticals, you know, like healthcare, wellness, education, government parks and rec there's like an endless list. It seems like every segment has its own specialized vertical software these days, Right, with payments integrated into it.

Speaker 2: 16:35

Exactly Right. Right, so you mentioned COVID being an influencer and I think it was a huge one in certain verticals. Let's broaden out from COVID, and I do think it's.

Speaker 3: 16:46

we definitely have a lot to credit the mobile phones that we're carrying on us, because they have changed the way we interact not just commerce wise with the world, but interact with the world.

Speaker 3: 17:13

You know point blank how we consume information, how we share information about ourselves. We we in getting back to, maybe, my earlier comment we have gotten used to putting ourselves at the center of our experiences, and that includes commerce. So the moment that consider myself a walking point of sale, then I expect that transaction experience to come to me. It's easy for me to manage my life, my daily interactions, through that device that I'm carrying. I'm expecting now that it would be inclusive of all my daily interactions, including my commercial ones. So even when we're in a store, in a physical store, like I said, we are more and more habituated to not reach for the wallet. We don't need to. The wallet is already in our hand. It already includes the card, the loyalty points, my consumer profile, my preferences, maybe even my order that I already paid for and I'm now just picking up. So I do think that consumers are driving that kind of demand for putting them in the center of the experience.

Speaker 2: 18:19

And are you seeing this demand that you're talking about mainly in the US? Are you seeing it globally?

Speaker 3: 18:26

I see it globally, but I think I see it differently in, maybe, the US and Europe, or what we would think of traditionally as the Western world, versus the way things evolved in Asia and emerging markets. In Europe and the US, infrastructure was very mature and very infrastructure for transaction processing, for commerce Rails, you know, for cards and for bank transactions has a history of, you know, over 100 years, and so in, let's say, the? U, the U S, the evolution was more around the customer, customer layer, customer experience layer, whereas when you went to, like India or Africa and China, where the rails and the infrastructure wasn't as strong, they just leaped over the need for rails and they just said, okay, well, we're just not getting, we're not going to process transaction on card rails, we're just going to create our own ways to exchange value. And you know they're, they're the ones, I think, who who really sprung the you know, the QR code as a, as a way to to initiate transactions and not have to rely on, you know, connecting with processors, physical processors, and so I think those two things come together.

Speaker 3: 19:42

Wallets, you know wallets come from the East mostly and I think those two came together in the US to create consumer facing layer, which is anchored in an experience that is, I would call it, agnostic of real or agnostic of infrastructure. I have a credit card and it doesn't matter to me how you access that account. I just need you to access that account as a merchant.

Speaker 2: 20:08

Yeah, and you know, I think you hit on something there with the global aspect. I assume you're talking about countries like Brazil that have right picks, which has really changed the payment game in that country, which I don't think could be quite possible here in the US. Maybe one day it'll work that way, but certainly not today.

Speaker 3: 20:29

Yeah, and you're right. And yeah, I would be remiss to not mention all of the cash-to-digital products that we saw, or installment products coming out of Latin America. Today we think of Klarna and Affirm as obvious things but yeah, Boletos in Brazil 15 years ago, that was how people wanted to pay, is in Brazil. 15 years ago, that was how people wanted to pay. And so, yeah, I think there's definitely an aspect of taking things from other use cases in markets where reality just dictated a different standard for consumers and bringing it all together into optionality now for a mature market like the US or Europe.

Speaker 2: 21:09

Right, Well, at a high level. Can you touch on some of the solutions that WorldPay has to help address this omnicommerce experience?

Speaker 3: 21:19

Of course. So we like to think of how we support merchants and, I think, two types of segmentation Segmentation by size, so small, medium and then enterprise, where the needs are driven by capabilities or tolerance for complexity. A small merchant mom and pop shop obviously less tolerance for complexity, less ability to manage it, versus an enterprise business. And so for these small businesses we lead with solutions that are simple to use, address most of their obvious use cases, whether it's, you know, I'm accepting payments in store or I'm sending payment links or invoices, expert and then partnering with some maybe segment specific platforms to do enhancements, like, well, if you're a restaurant, you also need help, maybe in menu management, and so if we partner with a software developer who is specializing in quick service or food and beverage verticals, then combining our payment capabilities and our ability to support all of these like transaction types and transaction scenarios, use cases, with industry specific features, creates a solution that is very compelling for a small business that is looking for something you know, economical, easy to get started with, basically out of the box experience. And then, when we go up market to the enterprise businesses, we really deep dive on not just the ability to obviously accept payments in all of these transaction types in store, online, phone, mobile transactions but also high availability. High availability, high throughput of transactions.

Speaker 3: 23:12

You know WorldPay has merchants processing thousands of transactions in a second, and so the reliability of a payment solution like that, you know, even being one second latent on processing a transaction, it means a lot in a multi-lane store where you have lines of 20 people waiting to pay.

Speaker 3: 23:32

So that's one aspect of it. You get really deep on reliability and availability of your payment solution. But also then on the back end, understanding cost, understanding authorization, approval rates, making sure that when you already have that consumer paying, you're giving yourself the best chance for that authorization to go through, also for it to be routed to the most cost efficient rail, for example, debit versus credit to make sure that your transaction data is rich so that you have the most precise response from fraud detection systems, obviously wanting to minimize fraud but also minimize false positives. So as we go upmarket, those things become just as important to enterprise businesses as the actual interface you put in front of a customer in the store or online. Those are ways that we look at our merchants and think about solutions that we're going to put in front of them and help them be successful with Okay, we're going to put in front of them and help them be successful with Okay.

Speaker 2: 24:32

Well, where do you see this Omnicommerce demand going, say, in the next three to five years?

Speaker 3: 24:45

My instinct, my gut instinct, tells me that the actual physical interface that we know as point-of-sale terminal is going to more and more dissolve into a mix of devices. Dissolve into a mix of devices such as our mobile phones, tablets, so that we're not as tied to something that is plugged into a wall anymore or into a cashier in order to accept payment. I think that's going to enable a lot of innovation in terms of how merchants run their businesses, whether it's, again, physical in-store, the cross-section between in-store and I don't even want to call it online or e-commerce. To me, it's more like all those digital interactions that you're going to have with your consumers, because even our in-store interactions now are more and more digital, and I think it'll continue to evolve in that direction.

Speaker 3: 25:35

I think it would be really interesting to see how e-wallets, digital wallets, continue to evolve into the thing that customers view as their transaction method. So you know, as an example, in my on my digital wallet, on my phone, I still have the same visa or MasterCard or Amex that I have in my wallet as a physical card, but because I no longer reach for it to pull it out of my wallet, to me it's the phone, is just it right. It's just it changes a little bit the relationship you have with the payment method. It almost democratizes it, because now I can have my other types of closed loop payment methods on my phone accessible just as much as that credit card, and so it gives customers a lot of optionality, which gives merchants then a lot of optionality to play with things, to have their own closed loop value systems that maybe are interchangeable with cash or with a fiat currency. Those are really interesting directions that maybe three to five years is a bit of short horizon, but definitely, I think, seven to 10 years. I think that's where we're headed.

Speaker 2: 26:45

Yeah, I agree with you. So we've covered a lot of ground, obviously, about this concept and, just for those listening, we're going to be doing more of these podcasts throughout this series where we're going to dive even deeper into some of these topics that we've covered today. But before we wrap up the show, I just want to see if there's anything else you'd like to add before we go, and kind of go from there so anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up this episode. Kind of go from there, so anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up this episode.

Speaker 3: 27:10

I think the one thing for me that keeps me in this industry and just still wide-eyed and energetic to go to work every day is really how much. There's always a horizon, there's always more. And just the conversation of the last five minutes of where we're going in Omnicommerce, I really I think this is an industry that drives so much innovation and so much growth. Whether you're a small business or enterprise, it just gets me, it keeps me excited and I'm really eager to see where everything goes. Okay.

Speaker 2: 27:44

I think that's a great way to wrap up the show. So thank you so much for being on the show today. I look forward to further conversations. I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being here today.

Speaker 3: 27:54

Thank you as well. It's been a pleasure.

Speaker 2: 27:56

And to all you listeners out there. I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.

Speaker 1: 28:16

To learn more about WorldPay and their Omnicommerce products and solutions, please visit wwwworldpaycom.