Done well, this can have a long-lasting effect on behavioural change towards greater adoption of e-payments. To strengthen this proposition to customers, financial institutions should continuously enhance their security features, and put in place while actively promoting their product arrangements that will give customers the peace of mind. This may include strengthening the effectiveness of fraud detection and prevention engine using the latest technology such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. Additionally, offering liability protection programs and a commitment to resolve disputes within a stipulated timeframe would go a long way in providing assurance to customers. Supporting this, financial institutions’ mobile applications and Internet banking channels must provide seamless ways for users to track their expenses. This would include budgeting features, instant notifications and possibly smart money management tools. Some of these enhancements may be small tweaks with a potentially big impact to get users to be more comfortable with e-payments. Going beyond payments to enhance value proposition to end-users This brings me to second key priority – the need to go beyond payments in response to certain “new normals” in the payments landscape. Today, customers increasingly expect payments to be fast, frictionless and free. Competition has also heightened. Non-traditional players such as fintechs and bigtechs are increasingly relying on payments as entry point into financial services. Against this backdrop, payment service providers must rethink their strategies to remain relevant and be sustainable in the long run. Today, going cashless is more than just e-payments.

Before delving into the details, I’d like to give you a preview of my main points:   First, I would like to discuss capital and the financial crisis, and will suggest that many U.S. financial institutions did not have the quality or quantity of capital needed to withstand the shocks we recently experienced. The focus in Basel III on improving the quantity and quality of capital at financial institutions – particularly systemically important financial institutions – is critically important.   Second, I will suggest that we should be particularly focused on narrow definitions of capital, which are what investors focused on during the financial crisis.   Third, I will suggest that stress tests are an important supervisory tool that should be used for prudential and macroprudential3 supervision as well as for management’s own capital planning efforts. The rapid recapitalization of many financial institutions in the United States greatly benefitted from the attention during supervisory exercises (including stress tests) on the quantity and quality of capital. I will also discuss the evaluation of discretionary capital distributions (such as increasing dividends, and stock buybacks). Capital and the financial crisis I think it is instructive to look at the capital ratios of two of the very large banking organizations that encountered problems and were acquired during the financial crisis. Wachovia was one of the four largest banking organizations in the United States, with total assets in 2008 exceeding $ billion.