The False Myth of Frictionless Checkout

"Faster" isn't always better. That was the unspoken tension running through this session on local payment methods (LPMs) and consumer adoption. While much of fintech celebrates speed and simplification, the panel, spanning a public regulator, a global SaaS merchant, and a cross-border payments coalition, reframed success in more grounded terms: usability, adaptability, and trust.

Martina Weimert of EPI set the tone early: Europe doesn’t lack payment methods. It lacks a cohesive user experience. Most consumers still juggle multiple apps across P2P, in-store, and online payments, with few solutions offering a unified "all-in-one" wallet. Her team’s answer, Wero, seeks to fill that gap, built around instant payments and integration with daily use cases like invoice payments, merchant checkout, and peer-to-peer transfers.

“We’re not building another app we’re addressing fragmentation,” she said, noting that real convenience comes not from novelty but from relevance across the payment journey.

Merchants Don’t Want to Be First They Want to Be Right

Adobe's Matt Wegner offered a clear-eyed view from the merchant side. His team doesn’t chase the latest LPMs. Instead, they wait for real consumer scale and prioritize reducing complexity at checkout. Every extra option risks friction. And while Adobe is now aggressively expanding into markets like India (UPI) and Brazil (Pix), they do so only once user momentum is undeniable.

That approach has trade-offs. “Sometimes we’re late,” Wegner admitted. But moving slowly, he argued, is better than forcing consumers into decisions they don’t understand and losing conversions in the process.

His call to LPM providers? Think beyond the one-time transaction. Recurring payments and merchant-pull functionality remain a glaring gap in most new methods. And Adobe, like many subscription-heavy businesses, won’t adopt tools that don’t solve for that reality.

Why Payments Fail Where They Should Work

Eric Tak of the European Central Bank brought a crucial regulatory lens and a warning about misreading consumer behavior. He referenced contactless payments and iDEAL in the Netherlands: both faced lukewarm research results, yet became runaway successes. Meanwhile, nearly identical systems elsewhere failed. “You can’t always rely on what consumers say they want. You have to look at how they behave.”

The ECB’s work on the digital euro follows this logic. It’s not about replacing physical cash, but digitizing its strengths, privacy, acceptance, universality, for the online era. Their aim is broad inclusion, even for those not fully digital. And the goal isn’t dominance it’s utility, availability, and resilience.

Tak emphasized that adoption requires infrastructure, not just interface. A new common acceptance layer for account-to-account payments could open up what’s currently a closed ecosystem dominated by card rails.

Shortcuts to Scale: Use Cases That Win

Weimert was candid: nobody wants to be the first adopter, not merchants, not consumers. So the path to growth must be rooted in specific, repeatable use cases. Think EV charging, public transport, daily coffee runs.

She pointed to the Starbucks app as an unlikely benchmark. It’s not the tech, it’s the habit, the loyalty, and the everyday relevance. Payments are invisible until they’re inconvenient. The best LPMs, she argued, solve for that moment, not for theoretical innovation.

The Subscription Problem and Opportunity

A recurring thread was the need for greater balance. Wegner and Tak both warned that payment providers often skew toward one stakeholder, either the consumer or the merchant, leaving the other underserved.

Wegner noted that while tools like PayPal’s subscription dashboards empower users, they also disintermediate merchants. Adobe wants to be part of that cancellation journey, not cut out of it. During COVID, Adobe even offered discounts or alternative products to retain small business customers looking to cancel. That’s a conversation worth preserving, he argued.

Final Takeaways: The LPM Playbook

The session closed with each speaker offering a single learning for those launching new payment methods:

  • Flexibility is infrastructure. Can your stack adapt quickly to new consumer habits and use cases? (Weimert)

  • Trust is earned, not launched. Design for relevance, not just regulation. (Tak)

  • Data will humble you. Let metrics, not intuition, guide what matters most in the checkout flow. (Wegner)

The biggest myth this panel shattered? That adoption is about being first or fastest. Real adoption comes from depth: solving real problems for both the people who pay and the businesses that get paid.

🎯 Want to see how embedded finance actually works?

Liberis is on the ground at #Money2020Europe this week. Book a meeting with the team to learn how they’re powering real growth for platforms and the sellers who rely on them.

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