INFRASTRUCTURE
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to test the world’s resolve in pretty much all aspects of life. That is particularly the case for businesses. Lockdowns and forced closures have had a shattering impact for many, with the consequential effect of shrinking global GDPs.
Lloyds Bank is developing its own Cloud-native payments platform to drive greater payments efficiency while keeping a weather eye on innovations yet to be unleashed, Head of Product – Payments, Gavin McLean, explains 62
ThePaytechMagazine | Issue 7
But one area that’s proven remarkably resilient against this severest of challenges is payments. Being able to make and receive payments is, of course, the very lifeblood of successful commerce and, according to a Lloyds Bank Commercial Banking report, the UK payments sector had to adapt and innovate as hitherto slow-burn trends skyrocketed when social distancing measures came into force. The use of cash, for example, declining four per cent a year pre-pandemic, shrank by 50 per cent within days of the UK’s lockdown in March. LINK, which operates much of the UK’s ATM network, found 75 per cent of respondents to its own survey were using cash less than before the pandemic, no doubt encouraged by the rapid raising of the contactless
payment limit to £45. And, to further add to the weight of evidence, retailers, such as large supermarkets, have seen card use rise 78 per cent year-on-year, according to Lloyds Banks’ figures. As the old Chinese proverb goes, ‘when the winds of change blow some people build walls while others build windmills’. Firmly in the windmill camp is Gavin McLean, head of product – payments, at Lloyds Bank Commercial Banking, part of Lloyds Banking Group, which is involved in one in every three payments in the UK. He’s helped the bank put its considerable weight behind improving or accelerating the use of technologies to help the payments process for both its business customers and individual consumers. Some pandemic responses have been incremental, such as increasing values for cheque imaging via its app. But Lloyds has also encouraged payment by URL, where a web link is made available by email, WhatsApp, SMS or QR code. And, as ecommerce becomes ever-more important to replace face-to-face transactions, it's continuing to invest in application programming interfaces (APIs), which offer both speed and new levels of automation. The Lloyds Bank Payables API, for instance, allows machine-to-machine instructions for the initiation of faster payments, as the clients’ system instructs the bank’s systems via an API, significantly www.fintechf.com