Simplicity in Payments Innovation

Last week, I attended Commercial Payments International’s (CPI’s) Global Summit in New York City. Conferences like this offer the opportunity to meet, network and brainstorm with other payments professionals, but they also offer several “big thoughts” to chew on during the plane ride home. This year’s CPI Summit had a few of those “big thoughts”, and so (fair warning) you will probably be hearing a lot about the conference for the next month or so from me.

This week’s topic is the idea of Simplicity in Innovation. In the opening session, one of the speakers said something that resonated and set the tone for the rest of my conference: If your new innovation requires a user’s manual, you’ve likely defeated the purpose of innovation.

I think this is an easy concept to lose perspective of when you are developing custom applications. All too often, individuals can get lost in the intricacies of a problem or various red-herrings that arise to distract you from a very basic problem-solution, and as I thought about this, my mind went straight to the iPhone in my hand.

I’ve been an iPhone user for all of a month now. It’s been a much easier transition from my Blackberry than I had expected. The iPhone is intuitive, and it solves for problems I hadn’t realized I had. Yes, I knew that I needed to access email and attachments from my phone, but I hadn’t anticipated the business advantages that I would gain with such easy access to my LinkedIn account or how useful it would become in other situations. And, all of these, without even opening a manual! I am sure the iPhone entails a lot of complicated code behind the scenes, but for the user: I just tap, and I get what I need.

Simplicity in innovation, my new mantra!