What would FedEx do?

If you’d like to develop a meaningful point of differentiation for your company, an area ripe for picking is electronic payments. In our view, few providers have developed a payment program geared towards genuine user needs.

However, we recognize the difficulty in thinking “outside the box” in the electronic payments arena. Constraints from vendors, auditors, senior management, and industry experts, not to mention a challenging business case, makes it easy to get bogged down in implementation details even before you can get started.

Try this exercise: Think of yourself not as a heavily regulated checking account provider, but as the director of FedEx’s new payments division.¹ It’s your job to develop products that leverage FedEx’s core expertise in expedited shipping and tracking. Optional homework assignment: Develop a three-year plan to make FedEx into a major player in payments.

We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the number of opportunities uncovered during this exercise. Too busy for homework? Don’t worry, next month we’ll present our plan for FedEx Payments.

¹This is fiction, but it wouldn’t surprise us if FedEx jumped into the payments business; it already provides C.O.D package-delivery services as well as the occasional envelope of cash.