Among the many buzzwords that dominate conversations in the fast-moving payments world, five in particular will stand out in 2017 predicts electronic banking and payment systems provider ACI Worldwide.
Mark Ranta, the company’s head of digital banking solutions, has selected the following and added commentaries for each.
Omnicommerce: While mobile and online shopping have continued to rapidly rise in importance, we are seeing instances of the “eCommerce” world really pushing into the physical – you only have to look to Amazon’s plans to open 2,000 grocery stores in the US over the next 10 years.
Equally, you can see the innovations taking place on the product side – from the latest point of sale (POS) terminals or Biometric palm readers, the physical in-person commerce products don’t seem to be disappearing. From a financial institution (FI) standpoint, this is an important trend to watch as “digital transformation” strategies often seem to over-emphasise the importance of digital-only or, rather, drastically de-emphasise the value in the physical.
Blockchain: The speed of payments globally is accelerating. As the world is shifting to real time, it will be interesting to see how blockchain dovetails with immediate payments, particularly as I am coming around on the thought that the technology is more mature than many had given it credit for. We remain bullish on the potential and are beginning to shift from bearish to bullish on timing in terms of mass market adoption (maybe to the “within 5 years” category).
[NAME] Pay: From Apple Pay to Android Pay, the [NAME] Pays have dominated 2016. While the proliferation of Pays will continue, the phenomena of checkout paralysis will become very real. I am intrigued to see how this story plays out, but I also hope that for the sake of our industry, more storefronts will turn on their near field communication (NFC) capabilities to increase acceptance of mobile-based payments. As a mobile pay user, I for one am looking to leaving my wallet at home more often!
Ecosystem: In 2017, we will see the payments industry elevated by partnerships and through working together. We have seen this in Europe already, as countries have put together open working groups that have competitors working alongside one another to solve very complex problems.
If we as an industry hope to survive the “disruption event” we are in today, I think joining more holistically together as an ecosystem needs to be a key tenet. The payments race going on today doesn’t have to be a winner take all event, and as the pie continues to grow in size, there will be plenty of growth opportunity for all of us.
“2020”: When everyone started talking about the year 2020, it was in an imaginary future kind of way, like the way we thought we would have flying cars by the year 2015 (for those of you who are really into Back to the Future, the thought was we’d be there by October 21, 2015).
2020 is now in our three-year planning windows, which means we’ll be funding projects and products that will be sold and implemented in market in the year 2020, and while we likely will still have checks, cash coin and card swiping, the world of payments will certainly look closer to the projected realities of the first Money2020 event five years ago than many of us believed possible at the time. Time to start projecting for 2030 (which we are closer to today than the year 2000…).