PYMNTS 2024: Insights From Innovators, Retailers and Industry Trailblazers

PYMNTS conducts thousands of interviews a year, some with the usual suspects of banks, card networks and FinTechs that define the financial services space, and some that get a bit outside of that strike zone. Here, we find innovative artificial intelligence companies, retailers and other firms that have drawn the attention of our readers. Our litmus test: “Interesting companies with interesting executives doing interesting things.

As we review interviews from 2024, here are five that resonated with our audience, with a compelling quote from each.

Duncan Wardle, Author

One of our favorites is one of our most recent.

Duncan Wardle spent 30 years as the head of innovation and creativity at Disney. Wardle has never worked at a bank or FinTech, nor is he a finance expert. He has a new book, “The Imagination Emporium: Creative Recipes for Innovation,” which came out Dec. 10. His publisher is positioning the work as a business book, but he disagrees and we’re with him.

“We say the biggest barrier in innovation is, ‘I don’t have time to think,’” Wardle told Karen Webster in an interview published Dec. 4. “That’s not true. The biggest barrier to innovation is our own river of thinking. Well, what’s a river of thinking? It’s our own experience and our expertise. And the more time in which we have in the banking and finance industry, the faster, the wider, the deeper the river is. But guess what? In the last four years, we had a global pandemic. We have Gen Z entering the workplace who don’t want to work for you because they believe in purpose, not profit. We’ve got climate change hitting us straight in the face. And oh, here comes AI. We don’t get to think the way we thought four years ago.”

Zach Dennett, CVS

CVS struggled with the healthcare aspects of its business model this year. However, its loyalty programs were a bright spot.

Loyalty programs have become a ubiquitous part of the retail landscape, offering consumers rewards and incentives for sticking with their favorite brands. However, as retailers expand their offerings, the proliferation of multiple loyalty programs can complicate the consumer experience and pose challenges for customers and retailers.

CVS Pharmacy, the retail division of CVS Health, acknowledged this challenge and responded by streamlining its ExtraCare loyalty program, CVS’ Zach Dennett told PYMNTS in an interview published in January.

“We heard from some of our members that they found value in our loyalty programs, but that the multiple programs could be hard to manage,” said Dennett, who at the time was vice president of loyalty, omnichannel and Hispanic formats at CVS Health and is now vice president of merchandizing. “So, we’ve been on a journey to combine what was at one point four different programs into a single program with two tiers.”

Sean Knotts, Sonos

While direct-to-consumer brands may generally find that less is more when it comes to consumers’ checkout experiences, Sonos found that for the high-consideration items it sells, adding more steps to the process can help consumers feel more confident in their purchases.

Sean Knotts, who was director of global eCommerce at the time and is now senior director of global commerce, told PYMNTS in an interview published in February that the company has been retooling the cart and checkout experiences to cater to consumers’ desire to feel that their high-value purchases are being taken seriously.

“Millions of users add to cart on Sonos.com, and just 40% of those users actually continue to start checkout, so if you can improve that rate a little bit, you’re actually going to see a huge net impact,” Knotts said. “So, we ran … some user testing, and that indicated that actually moving away from the very ubiquitous single-page checkout flow to a three-step design, which … used to be the industry norm, was actually 4% easier for users to navigate.”

James Allen, Pfizer

While the COVID-19 pandemic altered the global healthcare landscape, particularly around how care organizations connect with patients, there still exists an opportunity to streamline, digitize and ultimately democratize how patients seek and process healthcare information.

One of the most notable shifts during the pandemic was the decline in trust in healthcare institutions, particularly after the federal government withdrew from its role as a universal actor. This contributed to widespread confusion about vaccines, treatments and preventative measures, which persisted even after the worst of the crisis passed.

Pfizer responded with the August launch of PfizerForAll, a D2C healthcare platform that attempts to simplify access to healthcare information and services.

“We learned by being a major actor during COVID that there’s a receptivity from many consumers around not managing the healthcare journey, but playing a role in helping them toward the path to better care,” James Allen, vice president of U.S. Channel Management and Partnerships, Primary Care at Pfizer, told PYMNTS in an interview published in September.

“The basic information of ‘what to do next’ if you are seeking care and looking for guidance is hard to come by,” he added.

Alicja Cade, Google Cloud

Cybersecurity got a lot of attention this year, as did the double-edged sword of technology’s role in it.

Cybersecurity remains a pressing and complex challenge for financial institutions. It’s a space where technology and strategy must align to ensure resilience and compliance, and it sits against an evolving and dynamic backdrop of operational innovation, particularly as it relates to cloud computing.

“Organizations still tackle cloud integration with the perspective of ‘this is a new technology we are implementing,’ rather than focusing on how this is transforming the organization and its strategy and operations,” Alicja Cade, director of financial services in the Office of the CISO at Google Cloud, told PYMNTS in an interview published in October.

“It’s not just about the technology,” she added. “Cloud should be viewed as a strategic enabler rather than merely a new technology to deploy.”

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