Rezolve Ai Investor Day: Capitalizing on the Opportunity - REZOLVE AI PLC

Hi everybody, good morning. Good morning, hello. I'm Elizabeth Lashar, I'm our EVP of the Americas, so nice to meet you. I am so excited to be here. I've started with Resolve AI in January. I have had the pleasure of working in technology for two decades, please don't do the math, but I have had the opportunity to work in retail consumer goods and financial services across the world I've worked with Microsoft Google Oracle and many others but I am very honored to be here today with Steve Perry Steve Perry has been had the opportunity of sitting here with us but for 25 years you worked for Visa Europe as an incredible roles head of strategy a chief financial officer a COO CEO and among many the greatest successes have been 99% market share of debit payments in the UK we're spending debit cards were 3x credit cards incredible he's also agreed terms with Apple pay in Europe and leading the teams that rolled out chip and pin which is insert your credit card and add your tin you want this is it a live mic okay fabulous and we're on so tap and pay which here is called contactless he's our non-exec um director of resolve ai and on our board so we're i'm just so honored you're here between us we have close to 50 years in financial services and technology again don't do the math and in that time we know that pay has changed and it's been rebuilt again contactless tap and pay which they say in the uk and digital wallet which now includes our face. It's absolutely been astounding what's happening. This has changed how hundreds of millions of people behave at checkout. But the one thing that we know that hasn't changed is a cart abandonment. Seven of 10 shoppers walk away from their cart. In the next 15 minutes, we're going to walk through why that is, what's broken, and how we can do the shift. Steve, you have spent 25 years selling payment capabilities to retailers. What has changed over that time? And what are merchants looking at today? That's a great question, Elizabeth. Everybody hear me okay? Those 25 years really take me back to the birth of e-commerce. And in that time, I've seen all sorts of friction, layers of friction layered in the payment value chain. Those layers of fiction have nevertheless left e-commerce growing at a fantastic rate. But what I'd like to reflect on is the extent to which it could have grown at a much accelerated rate had those layers of friction not been there. I guess at the time, as one of the leaders in the industry, at least across Europe, there's a degree of culpability for the actions that we put in place. But at the same time, at the end of the day, they seemed right. So what we've got are layers of fiction, but a developing e-commerce economy. What do merchants want? Well, they want that improved. What they actually want to see initially is an improvement in cart abandonment, re-sales, obviously. The second thing they're looking for is integrated rewards and loyalty, not the kind of network that I created many years ago. And finally, what they need is control. Control of the network, control of the system, and they need to be in a place whereby they own the customer relationship. And of course, it's to be profitable. That's, I think, what merchants are looking for, given the development of e-commerce through the three phases that we saw Dan present at the very beginning. No, I love that. I think we should, can we break it down a little bit more? You know, that North Star that the retailers have always been working on is reducing that cart abandonment. And, you know, we know that's still at 70%, so it's barely moved, really. What is it about checkout process that's really broken today? This is beginning to feel a little bit like therapy, where I reflect on some of the potential misdemeanors that I'm now owning up to, that at the time seemed to be the right things to do. So one of the first misdemenas was, along with the rest of the industry and bankers, to think about e-commerce as potentially the Wild West of payments. And if we weren't careful, we were going to hemorrhage forward across the board. So it became a fantastic adventure in fraud management. And that's how we approached it. At the one extreme, zero transactions means zero fraud. I understand that. We weren't that naive. We were after growth and were after transactions. But the endeavor to ensure that we kept Ford out of the system, which we did rather well, meant that we put layers of friction at every point. Not least of which, back in the day, yes, I'm that old, and you'd make me feel very old today compared to how I felt first thing this morning. The layers we put in about inputting card numbers, addresses, CVV, and all those wonderful things created friction. And that was the first problem. The second problem was the level of friction that retailers put in our way. They understandably created websites, e-commerce sites, as if they were catalogs, as if it was their department store. Now, I showed you a picture of my little puppy today. I can go online, and I can buy a collar for my puppy. It's really straightforward. I did show you a picture of a very old classic car that I've got that has no capability of Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, but I want to play my Apple Music in it. I need a cable. That kind of search is impossible. It's a layer of friction that means I don't do it. I actually ask somebody else to do it for me, which is sort of where we're going. So, as part of my therapy, I see the need to actually remove those areas of friction. You know, that's a good point when you talk about friction. And when we look at the generations today, we know Generation Alpha are those kiddos that were born in 2010. Right now that's five trillion in buyer opportunity in the next, by 2029. And when you're talking about them not having the patience for friction, that is true. They want, instead of seven clicks to close, they want one. You know, so time is now, really, to be frictionless and to really close and to really work on that card abandonment. Now, when we look at loyalty and the programs and how they encourage customers to return, can an improved payment experience really complement this effort? What are your thoughts on that, Steve? Once again, the therapy is really helpful because having dealt with the concept of fraud as being one of the overarching drivers of payments in e-commerce that I was trying to address 20 odd years ago. Having felt that we dealt with it, having left the retailer to design their own websites and search engines within that, we then turned our attention to loyalty and rewards. And what we did was to take a leaf out of the book of the merchants and retailers. How did they do it? They gave consumers, once they'd filled a form in and sent it off by post, a piece of plastic that they would take out at the till in order to enjoy their loyalty points all of which was fine whilst there were two or three merchants as that ballooned and i remember my mother who's about a foot shorter than me would flick out her wallet with all those pieces of plastic and she would enjoy royalty at every point of sale we tried to do that in e-commerce and therefore we layered a piece of friction that was problematic and had no links between that and the payment transaction process layer. So again, we created a solution, but we created friction. And we told them, poor old merchant, you take it or build your own. Now, that's a good point. And I think going back to what Michelle said about loyalty as well, it's a one-stop and having those merchants really understand who's in front of them and how that works. Indeed. But I think part of this whole, and you'll enjoy this process of being, it's cathartic, this process of thinking about what might have gone wrong. You're in this positive space of putting things right. The third aspect of what I talked about beyond the reward piece and beyond the payment piece and the search engine is, of course, control. And retailers need and want to be in control of the process whilst remaining profitable. What can you say about that? Yeah, that's right. And I actually think Naga landed that really well to say retail needs to own payments. And what does that look like now? I mean, they don't have control. And having that hardware and that maintenance and the people overlay, I mean that's heavy lifting and upgrading all the time when it doesn't have to be that hard. In fact, the answer is a platform that gives them control and part of that entire journey process. And it can be as easy as just turning it on. So I think there's another way to look at it, and we're excited to share more about what that looks like. And that excitement comes from another step back into history. In the early 200s, the invention and introduction of PayPal. If you think of what they did, it was essentially put an account on file, take my payment credentials, hold on to them safely, which meant that when I could shop, I would simply dip into that and take a layer of the friction out. That was very clever. That dealt with a piece of friction. It didn't deal with anything else in terms of rewards, in terms of control, but it did take a layer of friction out, and e-commerce took a positive spike upwards, albeit for PayPal at a significant premium, way above the 2% to 3% that we've already had demonstrated as typical car charges today. But it does show that new technologies, the elimination of friction leads to increased sales. and that's what the retailers were happy to pay for. Absolutely. Retailers absolutely want more increased sales. I love that. And so far we've talked about the retailers themselves, but we know the consumers are really important on this journey too and how they pay. And how do you actually get millions of people to do that, Steve? How do you share a bit of that with us? Well, again, I'll go back in history, if I may, because that's where I spent most of my time, it would appear. The concept of chip and pin, putting a chip on a payment card, and then going to the point of sale, and instead of signing, entering my four-digit PIN to authenticate myself, was what we imported into Europe from Asia in the early 200s. And in 2004, I'll give you an example of the UK, as the market leader heading off towards that 99% market share in debit, I took a decision to think about creating chip and PIN for the UK market, it, but in parallel with MasterCard and American Express, got to move the market in one go is what we thought. So that meant conversations with MasterGard, American Express terminal manufacturers, the biggest retailers, the underground system, buses. Oh, and I mustn't forget the retailers and the retail associations, as we often did, and 30 to 40 different banking institutions issuing those cards. It was estimated it cost three billion US dollars to move the UK market to chip and pin in 2004 prices. Multiply that across all the markets, but we got the consumer on the journey. We don't face that issue now. First of all, we're not talking about a terminal infrastructure. We're talking about everything being digital. We were also talking about retailers who will go on the journey at their own pace but I would worry about those that delayed because the early mover first mover advantage is where this will deliver economic rent to the retailers so it's a very different environment very different to what we saw historically but I think it's absolutely achievable and the best thing of all that I've heard is that a consumer need only enter reward pay once and then they are mobile throughout e-commerce. Absolutely. And if we put it all together, Steve, if we move ourselves to the future, what does it look like? I'm feeling cathartic, which is the first thing, which is wonderful. The second thing is I see e-commerce as being as simple as breathing, by which I mean none of us today think of their breath. I've had a little bit of a cough at the back and I've been thinking a little about my breath, but fundamentally you never think about your breath. The future of e-commerce for me is I never think in the future about the payment because it's going to happen. I never thing about am I going to get the reward because it is going to happened. All I think about is navigating the search engine that gets me the blue suit for Tuscany for the wedding. That's the only thing on my mind. It's the transaction, it's the enjoyment, it is the digital good that I'm buying. The rest of it is my breath. I will only ever think about it as breath if I am sitting here today on this stage and i get a text that says thank you for buying a surfboard on bonsai beach and then i might have a sharp intake of breath but fundamentally that's what the future looks like when my friends my family and i just think of e-commerce as breathing i love that and obviously the retailers owning payments and the consumers having one click and done so i think the combo is is fantastic and here now to stay absolutely thank you so much steve it's been quite an honor. So thank you, everybody. Thank you, Steve.