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Evolution Of Payments System

Building to last

I would like to borrow a theme from Jim Collins, the management researcher and writer. His two best-known works, Built to Last and Good to Great, are evidence-based studies of what makes commercial organisations outperform over the long term. APCA’s own core principles – our values, purpose, unique positioning, member benefit proposition and vision – were developed using the Collins framework. You can find them on our website. Collins has the luxury of something to measure: he looks at relative increase in total shareholder value of listed companies against competitive peers over long periods of time. Then he tries to work out how the top performers got there in the first place, and how they stay on top. These days there is plenty of debate over the validity of this method but its influence on corporate strategic thinking is undeniable. Unfortunately, neat quantitative measures of achievement are not generally available for payment systems. But the long-term, structural orientation of Collins’ work aligns well with broader payments system evolution: how does the industry build a payments system that will stand the test of time, and respond to the unknowable challenges of the future? It’s not about any one strategy or programme, but the overall structure, culture and orientation.
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