They Said That: Notable Quotables From the Week of July 22

It was a week that saw a presidential campaign end, the Summer Olympics begin and the start of banking and payments earnings season. We were focused on our usual insightful interviews and comprehensive news coverage and with that in mind we present some of the notable quotes from interviews we conducted with key executives and industry innovators for the week ending July 26.

We started the week with an innovative twist on car financing. In “CarPutty Shifts Gears on How Consumers Finance Their Cars,” CEO Joshua Tatum told us that CarPutty’s own V3 tool (it stands for valuations past, present and future) uses artificial intelligence (AI) to give car owners greater insight into the value of their vehicles. By analyzing tens of thousands of data points per vehicle identification number (VIN), V3 provides real-time and predictive valuations. Consumers can track their car’s current worth, historical value, and projected future value, transforming how they view their vehicles. “It makes the consumer look at cars as assets versus depreciating assets,” Tatum said. “When the tires wear out, people can now make an informed decision on when to offload their car.”

Top of mind for this week were the interviews we did with industry influencers about the first anniversary of the FedNow platform. In “First the Launch, Then the Execution: FedNow Turns One,” Eric Foust, vice president of banking partnerships for North America at open banking and pay-by-bank provider Trustly, told PYMNTS that one year into its lifecycle, FedNow has garnered a lot of attention, but the follow-through and embrace of instant payments will require significant education, especially for consumers. “There is still a lot the industry can do to help educate the consumers,” he said, adding, “There’s going to be a maturation process where the knowledge that’s obtained on the business side, so individuals who are dealing with these payments on a day-to-day basis” impart their knowledge “to individuals who are way outside of the payment world and don’t touch the payments on a day-to-day basis.”

Foust was joined in the FedNow camp by i2c Global Head of Product Seth Perlman. In “FedNow’s First Year: Path to Critical Mass Requires Time and Education,” beyond the benefits of speed, Perlman said there’s value to glean from the data accompanying the payments, standardized through ISO 20022. “When you talk about attaching robust payment invoice and other potentially trade finance data to a transaction, that’s what really unlocks real-time payments as a valuable network for business-to-business transactions and, more complicated types of payments,” he said.

There were several earnings calls this week, among them Alphabet, which checked in with record quarterly results, but spent most of the time on its call discussing its usage of and plans for AI. In “Alphabet Touts Organic AI Development in Q2 Earnings Beat,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told the audience: “Our research and infrastructure leadership means we can pursue an in-house strategy that enables our product teams to move quickly. Combined with our model-building expertise, we are in a strong position to control our destiny as the technology continues to evolve. Importantly, we are innovating at every layer of AI stack, from chips to agents and beyond. A huge strength. We are committed to this leadership long term.”

And as we do every week, we covered the cybersecurity beat, this time coming off a weekend that saw a major IT outage at the hands of Crowdstrike. It was one of the topics we discussed with Prove CEO Rodger Desai. In “Bot? Fraudster? New Technology Finds Legit Users Without Compromising User Experience,” he talked about the use of AI agents to assist consumers in financial tasks, such as consolidating debt or refinancing a mortgage.

“Many businesses will offer AI agents to consumers to make their lives easier and to save money … but with that comes the challenge of, ‘Can you trust this agent to go and do things on your behalf?’ and ‘Can the bank trust that the AI agent is representing you?’” Desai said. “Identity is going to be a crucial ingredient to enabling this.”

Not that it was all business. There was after all, chocolate. In “Shop Talk: High-End Consumers Swap Fancy Threads for Fancy Sweets,” we found out that as consumers cut back on many premium products in the face of ongoing economic challenges, luxury chocolate brand MarieBelle New York is benefitting from shoppers’ desire to enjoy high-end experiences without breaking the bank. Maribel Lieberman, the brand’s founder, said shoppers seeking luxury experiences, either for themselves or to gift, are turning to these elevated chocolates to satisfy that need without shelling out thousands of dollars. “Through these economic challenges, chocolate is still something that people buy, because first of all, it’s something satisfying that can make them happy. Second, it’s a gift that’s beautifully presented, it’s delicious, and compared to, say, a handbag that costs a few thousand dollars, [it’s affordable],” Lieberman said. “So, for me, it really doesn’t make a difference when we have economic challenges like we’re going through right now.”