Truist seeks to strengthen the importance of its merchant offering by adding tools and services for clients and packaging those in a more cohesive way, an executive said.  

There’s “a larger opportunity for us to make this more relevant to our clients' day-to-day operation,” said Chris Ward, Truist’s head of enterprise payments.

On Tuesday, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank said it’s boosting merchant services capabilities, rolling out a faster onboarding experience and adding insights for business owners. Truist is also offering more business management tools through Fiserv’s Clover point-of-sale system and Early Warning Services’ Paze digital wallet as an online checkout option. 

The enhancements are designed to strengthen the entire experience for Truist’s merchant clients, Ward said. All new features are live, after being piloted last quarter, he said; more tweaks are in the works, although he declined to share details. 

The crowded merchant acquiring segment has gone beyond payment processing to include software and other value-added services in recent years. Merchant services is a “big, important part” of Truist “becoming more critical” to clients’ payment needs, Ward said. 

Rather than offering point solutions, “we’ve done a nice job of integrating a set of capabilities together, so it’s not just one piece, it’s bringing multiple things together, and I think that gives us a differentiated experience,” he said.

The merchant segment can also serve as the connection point to other areas of the bank, including deposits, treasury and lending, as Truist helps clients consider cash flow, liquidity and capital needs, Ward said. 

Truist doesn’t disclose the size of the merchant services business, but it’s one where executives “see meaningful opportunity for growth,” Ward said. The bank reported card and treasury management fees rose 2% year over year, to $347 million, in the third quarter.

During Mike Lyons’ first earnings call as CEO of $554 billion-asset Truist, he mentioned growth opportunities in payments, including expanding the bank’s consumer credit card business and its treasury management business on the wholesale side.

Truist is “focused on closing key gaps” and "building digital and payments capabilities, including mobile banking, treasury management, and credit cards,” Lyons said during the bank’s third-quarter earnings call Oct. 16. 

Ward declined to comment on Lyons’ strategy. However, Ward said he thinks “payments is a critical component to the firm and a critical component to driving primacy for consumers, for small businesses, for wholesale clients,” he said during an interview at last month’s Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas. 

Lyons, who briefly served as CEO of Fiserv before taking the helm of Truist, is “a big supporter of payments,” Ward said. “It’s great for our business.”

Truist has had a “long-standing relationship” with Clover, and Tuesday’s announcement represents an expansion of that tie-up, Ward said.  

The bank’s payments segment has been heavily focused on delivering integrated capabilities for clients, which Ward said can help the super-regional differentiate from competitors. 

“The larger folks run a lot of mono lines,” he said. 

Truist seeks to be a “more integrated, trusted adviser and enable our clients to operate the way they want to operate,” Ward said. “We think that'll continue to be our hallmark.”

Ward having oversight of both consumer and wholesale payments at the bank makes for “richer capabilities” for clients in both segments, he said. He’s intent on making payments speedier, simpler, safer and smarter for the bank’s clients.

“I don't think any consumer or business wakes up and says, ‘Oh, I want to make an ACH [payment] today,’” he said. Instead, it’s “‘Hey, I’ve got to pay somebody.’ And that's really how we think about how we should tackle things.”

Payments is a crucial component to becoming a client’s primary bank, and primacy, in turn, is key to the bank’s growth, Ward said. 

The broader shift toward faster, digital payments, particularly in the commercial world where there’s lots of room to run, is also a growth accelerant for the bank, Ward said. “There's still a lot of transactions that still could be card-able in a [business-to-business] context,” he said.