Friction. If you’ve listened to a webinar on AccountsRecovery.net about payment portals and driving consumers to self-service options on their debts, one of the main issues is friction. The more friction that consumers encounter, the more likely they are to abandon their session and walk away, perhaps never to return again to your portal. What is friction? Friction are the stumbling blocks that consumers often encounter when attempting to access a payment portal, such as needing to enter a special account number they don’t know or need a copy of a statement to find. Another form of friction is having to enter a credit or debit card number to make a payment. One of the things that makes Amazon such a popular place to make online purchases is that you don’t have to enter your card information every time you buy something. Storing payment credentials in an online vault makes the process much more convenient and frictionless. Consumers, though, don’t tend to trust institutions at which they don’t regularly conduct business or with brand names they don’t recognize, according to the results of a recently released survey. While trust in vault services is increasing, it’s important for companies in the accounts receivable management industry to know where consumers stand and to incorporate this information into their processes to make paying debts via their portals as frictionless as possible.
Not surprisingly, consumers tend to place the most trust in the banks with which they consider to be their primary financial institution. Nearly 60% of consumers trust the stored credential vaults that those banks have in place. PayPal, Amazon, Apple, and Google round out the top five vault services trusted by consumers. At least 30% of consumers trusted each of those entities with their payment card information.
Banks that are not the consumers’, fintechs, and “another provider” were at the bottom of the list. The trust in “another provider” is actually decreasing, according to the survey. Where 6.2% of consumers had trust in that type of company in November 2022, only 0.9% had trust in January 2023.
While security is an important priority for consumers that use stored credentials to make a lot of purchases, the factor that weighs in most into the decision is fast payment processing.
