I’m finally working my way out from the aftermath of last week’s travel, which included three conferences, three cities and 15 meetings. Yet the proving of a single all-purpose template for developing payments strategies was a significant milestone for Javelin and our clients.

While in Las Vegas at BAI’s Retail Delivery conference I led a payments strategy workshop for an engaging audience of 35-40 global bankers (representing literally every continent on the planet), and was involved in several meetings with longstanding, new and prospective clients. The pace was frenetic-typically I have presentation content finalized weeks or months in advance (to keep conference organizers sane), yet last week the final versions materialized mere hours before the next event.

The Retail Delivery banker’s payments strategy session was a great success, despite my decision to change the topic mid-session to accommodate the surprisingly diverse global audience. Along with many banking executives from top US firms, the audience included individuals from such countries as the State of Oman, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom and Singapore. We provided all participants with a blueprint for achieving one goal: create a clear and effective payments strategy that accommodates all essential factors, fits any major payments initiative (such as HSAs, contactless and customer-facing security); works within corporate, regulatory, environmental and industry realities; and uses multi-stakeholder research and analytic assessments to accomplish clear goals such as adoption, margin, revenue, loyalty, write-off levels and so forth. While the diversity of payments topics and participant’s countries forced us to stay at the high level, we accomplished the objective of creating an overall blueprint that any banking executive can use to create an effective strategy for payments initiatives.

Sometimes the best victories come from frenzied and significant efforts. If you are a Javelin syndicated research subscriber, feel free to request the banker’s payments strategy slide deck and schedule an accompanying inquiry meeting.