Why Fast-Moving Issuers Win in a World of Customer Impatience

Anyone who wants to learn about a winning mindset can find no shortage of quotes to get inspired. Maybe the best one comes from the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) himself.

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career,” basketball legend Michael Jordan has said. “I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Mindset is important for any successful business. Winning, whether on a court or in a payments portfolio, starts as a state of mind. The organizations that break away from the pack are the ones that decide, before any technology is installed or any budget is approved, that speed and courage will outrun size and legacy.

That same outlook, said Kathleen Pierce-Gilmore, senior vice president and global head of issuing solutions at Visa, separates merely competent card issuers from those with industry-leading customer lifetime value (CLV). A recent PYMNTS Intelligence study in collaboration with Visa shows that institutions in the middle of the asset-size spectrum are posting the highest CLV because they move faster on replatforming and product refreshes.

“Every bank has access to roughly the same vendors and the same tech,” Pierce-Gilmore told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster recently. “Mindset is the differentiator. The tech is the price of admission. What matters is whether you’ve got the guts to do the thing that isn’t yet proven. We can business-case our way sideways til Tuesday, yet never feel fully confident. The issuers earning high CLV are the ones making those calls early and often.”

Webster agreed that conviction trumps spreadsheets.

“It isn’t about being big or small,” she said. “Mindset drives focus and prioritizes investment.”

The study’s 451-issuer sample backs her up. Top performers were 25% more likely than peers to green-light major platform work within 18 months.

That urgency echoes across several trends Pierce-Gilmore believes are reshaping issuance, from demand for certainty and security to the rise of embedded payments and flex credentials that let a single card flip between debit, credit and buy now, pay later rails. The common thread: Each trend rewards issuers that move first and iterate fast rather than wait for flawless data.

Boardroom bravery is easier to celebrate than to fund, which is why the CFO looms large in any best-in-class playbook. Pierce-Gilmore calls the CFO “one of my favorite people on the planet,” not only because the role controls the purse strings but because it forces discipline.

Her advice: Present a two-horizon road map. The first 12 to 18 months should be built on hard milestones such as user-acquisition targets, loss-rate thresholds and unit-cost improvement that let finance teams track payoff early. The next window, out to 30 months, must acknowledge looser assumptions but still spell out pivot points that cap downside risk.

“If you can show precisely where you’ll throttle back if the curve bends the wrong way, your CFO will click ‘go,’” she said.

Even the boldest issuer operates in an economy where trade finance is unstable and household confidence is wobbly. That backdrop is pushing consumers toward products that lock in cost and cadence, such as buy now, pay later plans that carve revolving balances into fixed installments.

“The ability to provide control and certainty is showing up everywhere,” Pierce-Gilmore said. Issuers that ignore that impulse risk losing spend to specialist FinTechs, she added.

At the same time, fraud and scam awareness is soaring. Consumers now look for visible guardrails in account-to-account transfers and peer-to-peer payments, an area where liability can sit uncomfortably on the sender. Visa’s own data, Pierce-Gilmore said, shows rising attrition when issuers fail to foreground protections.

If uncertainty breeds caution, it also breeds impatience.

“Our expectations as consumers are just crazy,” Pierce-Gilmore joked. She said she orders groceries in-flight and gets frustrated if the produce menu takes more than a blink to load. That intolerance travels straight to card selection: Any hiccup at checkout nudges a shopper toward a rival credential already stored in a mobile wallet.

Issuers therefore need a playbook for eliminating perpetual frictions. Among them: shaving seconds off digital onboarding, cutting steps out of provisioning and rebundling features so that repayment options appear at just the right moment. The study underlines the payoff: High-CLV issuers report 15 percentage points lower customer-churn intent than the industry average.

Embedded finance raises the stakes. In the salon-management app Pierce-Gilmore uses to illustrate the trend, hairdressers handle bookings, inventory, tips and payments in one flow.

“Payments are important, but we’re putting them in their place,” she said. For issuing banks, that means fighting to remain the default credential inside ecosystems they don’t control. Visa’s response is to make its card rails “the easiest, fastest, most reliable way” to fund those transactions, backed by software-developer kits that let banks push tokens into Apple Pay, Google Pay or a vertical-software checkout in a single sprint.

The final frontier is personalization. Specifically, delivering relevance without creeping consumers out or betraying their data. Doing that well demands cloud-native cores, real-time event streaming and consent architectures sophisticated enough to surface, say, a curbside-pickup coupon the instant a cardholder nears a store. Data science must move beyond demographic buckets to catch what Pierce-Gilmore calls “outlier tendencies”— the quirks that turn one-time buyers into loyalists.

Banks that solve that puzzle can unlock the “serendipity” Webster argued retail once supplied when shoppers stumbled on unexpected items in a physical aisle. Flex credentials add another twist, allowing issuers to toggle a single token between debit for groceries today and installment credit for a bigger purchase tomorrow. That flexibility forces a rethink of risk models and lifetime-value math, but it also deepens stickiness by saving the customer from decision fatigue.

Momentum, though, still comes back to the original premise: Act before the window closes. Pierce-Gilmore urged executives to recall the project they hesitated to pursue three or four years ago — core modernization, token-on-file, real-time data feeds — and imagine the competitive ground they might now hold had they moved sooner.

“There is something on your plate right now that, in four years, you’ll wish you had just done,” she said. “Take the leap, because waiting only turns advantage into table stakes.”

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