Omni-channel payment capabilities continue to be a high priority for payment service providers (PSPs) and acquirers in Europe, despite low usage by customers and a lack of merchant interest, according to a survey of by First Annapolis.

The survey found that payment acceptance providers have made good progress towards offering omni-channel payments but they face some internal challenges, including overcoming internal organisational and distribution constraints. It gathered data from 18 European PSPs and found that:

• 90 per cent already provide both POS and e-commerce services;
• none have fully achieved the one-stop-shop positioning;
• loyalty and financing are most likely to be missing, both at POS and in e-commerce;
• in-house development is almost always preferred to partnering with third parties or leveraging licensed solutions.

This graph shows how both finance/invoicing services and loyalty services are missing for a large portion of providers on POS and e-commerce channels. Gateway services are the most likely to be developed fully in-house across POS, e-commerce and other channels.

Which of the following products/services do you offer and how are they enabled? (% survey respondents)

The survey also found that half of the respondents already enable baseline cross-channel functionality including: providing merchants with a single view of data across channels, cross-channel tokens, and buy-online/in-store pickup. This is expected to grow to 75 per cent by the end of 2017. The following graph shows that channel optimization/customer behaviour analytics and payments split across channels are currently less common but will see growth in 2017.

Which of the following cross-channel payment use cases do you currently support or plan to support in the next 12 months? (% survey respondents)

First Annapolis describes the penetration of omni-channel propositions as “somewhat disappointing”, since almost half of participants indicated that fewer than 10 per cent of customers are currently using an omni-channel product. They also report that a lack of coordination across different distribution channels (i.e., POS services sold through different channels to e-commerce) is one of the biggest challenges. And 39 per cent said there is still a lack of merchant interest in omni-channel payments. Despite these challenges, omni-channel payments remain a key investment priority for 2017.