Not long ago, companies accepted upfront cash payments that offered clear visibility into every transaction. While payment processing could be slow and cash handling costs were high, this approach ensured strong financial transparency in business, allowing customers to quite literally see where their money was going.
This transparency was key to building trusting, honest B2C relationships. However, as more companies adopt financial advancements such as online banking, cryptocurrency, and even card-only payments, they face the very real risk of erasing that much-needed transparency altogether.
That’s because many payment technologies take company finances behind the scenes. This is beneficial in some ways as it’s neater and ensures a generally more seamless way to manage business cashflow. But those benefits are almost solely business-facing. For customers, these advancements simply lead to blind spots in vital spending, and many are rightly annoyed about it.
After all, your customers deserve to know what’s happening with their money as much as you deserve to simplify your financial transactions. As such, the answer to the question ‘is transparency as important for your financial future as technology?’ is a resounding ‘yes’. Here, we’re going to consider how exactly you can keep transaction transparency at the forefront even as payment technologies evolve.
How to Strengthen Financial Transparency in Business?
1. Leverage Transparent Digital Tools
Perhaps the most obvious way to balance transparency and financial technology is to simply invest in transparent digital tools. This may sound simple, but it’s surprising how many digital financial platforms right now incorporate hidden elements. This is most evident from the use of AI for things like payment automation or data management. With these tools in place, customers lose visibility over how their data is being handled. And, that’s guaranteed to ruffle feathers.
A preferable alternative, or an addition that should always accompany less visible digitizations, is ensuring financial transparency in business through the tools you choose to use. Fortunately, there are many digital financial solutions that still prioritize and even champion ongoing transparency, including –
- Blockchain technology: By accepting decentralized payments on the blockchain, companies can ensure transactions that are fully transparent and verifiable, because they’re fully open to the public. Customers or your internal team could even use best block explorer to inspect transactions on multiple chains within your business! Transaction transparency doesn’t get much better than that, and countless more companies are starting to accept crypto payments to tap into this benefit.
- Digital payments: While they don’t quite offer the same transparency as the blockchain, digital payments also ensure that companies can benefit from increased transparency. This is because digital banking apps provide real-time updates about a transaction’s progress, including notifications about when money is taken, and a full breakdown of your company’s banking information. Digital payments often tend to come with increased protections, which can further put customer minds at ease.
- RegTech: Regulatory technologies are constantly evolving to help businesses comply with regulatory requirements that often concern how they collect and handle customer data. Unlike other more worrying (on the customer end) AI implementations, these tools stand to provide peace of mind that data handling and other financial essentials are still well within regulatory standards at all times.
2. Focus on Real-Time Updates
In the past, financial updates weren’t necessary when customers handed over cash and saw it placed directly in the till, but those days are long gone. What hasn’t changed is the need for reassurance about where their money is and how it’s being used. Ignoring this expectation undermines financial transparency in business, and too many technologies overlook it — a costly mistake, given that 64% of customers say they wouldn’t return to a company that fails to provide clear payment tracking.
So, how do you get the best of both worlds? The only solution is to seek technologies that provide real-time updates on the customer-facing end. Luckily, there are plenty of technologies to choose from if you want to achieve this goal. Top update-based capabilities that are especially vital to modern customers include –
- SMS updates
- Webhook notifications
- Real-time updated dashboards
- And more
It’s also important to note that you should continue offering some in-person infrastructure, even as updates largely move online. A mobile notification is all well and good, but if further delays arise, or customers simply want to clarify this information, then human customer service remains your best transparency option by far. Even the best technologies won’t help you to win around your desired audience if you remove that infrastructure.
3. Say it Straight
Speaking of maintaining some traditional transparency practices, it’s important to remember that clear, honest policies and procedures remain essential for financial transparency in business. Customers don’t want pages of jargon about what your new fintech tool can do — they want a plain and simple explanation of how you’re handling their money.
A large part of this means getting up top with upfront policies regarding priorities like your transaction processing times. It’s also absolutely vital to continue being honest about any secondary processing fees before a transaction.
In an increasingly digitized age, it’s also vital to incorporate clear policies regarding the data that any AI implementations harvest from your financial transactions, and how your company uses that information in-keeping with current regulations. This simple explanation can avoid any unpleasant stings in the tail down the line, and also ensures that customers don’t suspect you of dishonest practices simply because you’re bringing unknown technologies into your financial sphere.
Conclusion
Technology stands to both speed up and simplify company finances in some game-changing ways, but businesses would be naive to assume that these tools don’t create doubt in some customers’ minds. Hidden tech introductions or a lack of clear policies can be particularly problematic for overshadowing transparency for the sake of technologies that will ultimately lose you sales.
Financial transparency in business can coexist with advancing technology, and the many companies successfully embracing the right financial tools are proof of that. By applying these top tips, you can ensure your own operations achieve the same balance and reap the benefits.
