The card payments business is in a state of transformation. Financial Institutions face various internal and external challenges to their card programs: profitability pressures, technology hurdles, and increasing competition from new entrants. This makes it more necessary than ever to reevaluate current infrastructure and payment capabilities to compete. FIs must invest in their payments infrastructure while reducing costs and meeting compliance obligations in order to maintain their existing clients and compete for new business in today’s financial services environment.

One of the options for FIs to modernize their payment stack is to migrate their existing card management system to a Cards-as-a-Service (CaaS) provider. CaaS is considered a modern and flexible alternative to traditional payment card services and is becoming increasingly popular as a way to drive innovation and enhance the customer experience in the payments industry.

This Aite-Novarica Group thought leadership paper describes market trends for retail payments and assesses the urgency around the modernization of the payment infrastructure by moving to a CaaS model.