Anyone who doubts that massive innovation in payments technology is disrupting the old way of doing things need just look at the investment plans by financial institutions.
Banks across the world are set to significantly increase spending on new payment technology in 2016, according to research firm Ovum. About 61% of banks will increase their spending on payment technologies this year, an Ovum survey found, up from 52% the year before. In addition, the proportion of banks that will spend a lot more (a boost of more than 6%) was almost 30%, up from about 10% the prior year.
Banks have compliance standards to follow and security concerns to address as the number of electronic transactions grows rapidly, yes. But there’s something else driving the spending: disruption by payments startups that has banks in danger of losing customers and (to some degree) their privileged position at the center of business and consumer transactions.
In this special report, CFO takes a look at some of those disruptive influences and tries to assess to what degree payments will undergo a sea change in the next few years.
Many new service offerings and payment options are available to consumers and businesses. But a finance chief who offered his customers and supply chain partners every new mobile payment method that came along, for example, would be wasting a lot of energy and money. There are payment technologies worth exploring and deploying, as the stories in this report examine. And then there are some that will just disappear quietly, never to be adopted on a mass scale. Choose wisely.