2014 Year of Digital-Payments Transformation

Digital-Payments – In the present economy and era, having knowledge of payments is crucial, particularly in the realm of digital payments. Individuals seek inexpensive, secure, user-friendly, and expeditious payment options. Due to a scarcity of both time and money, merchants and consumers are constantly seeking the most favorable options. Meeting these objectives will require significant contributions from AI and blockchain technologies.

AILabPage wishes you and all your family and friends a very Happy & Productive New Year 2014. Writing this post from La Reunion.

Digital-Payments & Year 2014 – 2020

Payments especially Digital-Payments look really easy; which is why innovation is so hard. In the last few years, we have seen tsunami kind of disruption in payments services, which led eCommerce, wallet services, Digital-Payments, and remittances to just explode. Artificial intelligence with its subsets like Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Artificial Neural Networks made this industry almost to an explosion point. Quantum FinTech is not very far though as a concept. #QuantumFinTech 

Machine Learning is more passionate about Predictions rather than Causality. Are terms like Statistics and Machine Learning synonyms or is there any difference between these two jargons?. Statistics – Its a graphical branch of mathematics(In my personal opinion). It deals with the collection, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of masses of numerical data.

Artificial Intelligence and any discussion around on how this has gotten to so much deeper in FinTech and what benefits it has provided; unfortunately beside Digital-Payments and Payment Intelligence discussion rest of the points will remain out of scope for this post and we will discuss about AI and its merger with FinTech in other posts in later year.

“Artificial intelligence with its subsets like Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Artificial Neural Networks made this industry almost to an explosion point”

I am here again with my observations, experience and reading from the internet. Please note all my posts are about FinTech, MFS, Digital-Payments, Banking, Telecom and IT Industry (Some time I also write just anything).

Development of Digital Payments

New markets, products and services are emerging so quickly it is difficult for consumers and regulators to keep pace. Consumers often have to figure out new technologies for themselves.

Key success will be in by offering a full range of merchant solutions for e-commerce as well as retail and mobile order customers. Prides itself will be high-level security, the customer support that will put merchants on the road to success.

In the last few years almost 5 years we have seen tsunami kind of disruption in payments services which led eCommerce, wallet services, Digital-Payments, remittances to just explode. If we review just the last 2 years of work and throw the impact of it on this year it would give us a very clear projected picture.

“Consumers will be willing to pay (Digital-Payments) for convenience”

The 2015 year can be written down as a year of awareness & noticing payment methods other than cash. In the year 2017, we will see (Most likely as per my own calculations and observations), consumers gearing-up for technology, making mind ready to pay a little extra for convenience and winning the comfort from their cosy rooms.

Convenience i.e Digital-Payments

Consumers will be willing to pay for convenience and pay for fast delivery also internationally for all global players. Banks have seen the greatest disruption so far in money transfers (derived from Digital-Payments)— sending money from person to person, either domestically or internationally. 

In 2017 we will find cream out of FinTech tsunami, which will offer affordable payment services. The product mix I will include e-commerce functionality, mail, mobile commerce, high volume offline/online card processing, mobile payments, and retail commerce. BaaS (Banking as a Services) over BaaP (Banking as a Platform or simply Digital-Payments platform) will start showing results.

Merchant has all the tools i.e e-commerce, digital wallets, Digital-Payments, payment services and money transfers will sell successfully online, offline and grow businesses. The year 2016 was the year of financial services with greater technology with too much of Innovations thereafter adoption and trials. In the Indian scenario, consumers might face up to the new and different challenges and have the right solution ready for as well.

In India due to radical change happened on 8th November 2016 for the Indian payment industry, which is also a remarkable period of change for India.

Considering the change as an extraordinary phase in Indian banking history even though consumers faced some turbulence along the way. Patience & and support shown were even more radical (Positive) example. When even consumers experience service quality disruptions due to the significant increase in footfalls at bank branches across India banks did a remarkable job.

Payment Intelligence and Relationships

I believe it is time to reimagine the payments relationships between banks, retailers, and Fintech. Combative stances and door slamming will only result in lost opportunities for all. To reimagine those relationships, it is helpful to start by understanding the perspectives of each main party.

Regulators may step in to address issues but this is often after significant consumer adoption and the market may have already moved on. While the cash payments wave continues unaffected. Mobile/Internet Payments on e/m Commerce Platform is bringing new innovations to the payment industry and changing the way merchants do business.

The change in this segment is so huge which cannot be absorbed alone by one type of business entity. Payments gateway and solution service companies experimenting with customised solutions rather than giving one-size-fits-all (Like a master one master key for all holes) product solutions to merchants.

Today’s generation of consumers has high expectations when it comes to transparency and flexibility. Modern asset managers act quickly, effectively and transparently. They facilitate an independent yet customised solution and serve as clients’ professional link to all new technologies. This next-generation offer optimises innovation, advancements, cleverness, coolness and smartness. Consumers of the future and we know the future is here and it’s today. Consumers are self-confident, quick, competent, global, tech-savvy and demanding. What they want.

Communications – consumers want to be able to contact the service provider at any time via Facebook, Twitter, Skype or WhatsApp (These are / will be payment systems) with the expectation of instant responses and resolutions of their queries. Investors with private equity or crowd investing want simplified access to platforms where funding can be invested/sorted/visible for newly founded companies or projects.

With more and more banks, FinTech and merchants looking to get in on the advantages of instant payments updates, understanding both the value and challenges of real-time processing are now more important. Mobile wallets have had a difficult time attracting a wide user base. Even at the end of 2016, most consumers stick to older payment methods. According to some research data from Google shows in the USA, PayPal in-store was used by 18% of respondents, followed by Walmart Pay at 14%. Apple Pay, at 8%, was slightly higher than Android Pay and Samsung Pay.

Plastic Money vs Digital Money

Nearly two-thirds of U.S. cardholders are familiar with at least one form of mobile payment, marking an awareness trend that continues to rise and could ultimately translate to higher adoption and usage rates. But does awareness translates to usage? It might — 74% of consumers who have not used any of the major mobile payment apps say they are interested in doing so in the future, according to new research.

The year 2017 will the year of instant digital payment which does instantaneous validation, acknowledgement, and transmission of transaction data between the point of sale and merchants system as oppose to the year 2016 which was “near real-time,” which refers to expedited batches that may range from minutes apart to an hour or even more, real-time is truly instantaneous processing. Today’s consumers are quickly coming to expect immediate processing of their payments.

Technological constraints of mobile devices may impact upon how much information a consumer is provided with during m-commerce transaction. Security and liability – as mobile devices are particularly vulnerable to theft and misuse it is important for consumers to understand what protections are available to them in the case of unauthorised transactions. So how do consumers engage confidently with a market that is constantly changing?

How do regulators identify failures when markets emerge, and then change equally as quickly? One way to address these challenges is to identify underlying principles that remain constant, despite the technological change.

Payment Systems and Economic Needs

Payment systems are pivotal in any economy given their role to facilitate the intermediation process, which is key to achieve financial stability. Payments are a daily and routine activity carried out by people in most parts of the world. These payments cover daily human requirements from transportation, food and communication. Some people transact 2-5 times in a day while some more than 20 times making them heavy users of payment systems.

More than a billion people in emerging and developing markets have cellphones but no bank accounts yet they don’t stop their contribution to payment industries. They still do their contribution each day and many low-income people store and transfer money using informal networks. Such transactions have high costs and are prone to theft. How AI and Machine Learning can solve this issue? @AILabPage went on to find this out.

Mobile money is beginning to fill this gap by offering financial services over mobile phones, from simple person-to-person transfers to more complex banking services. To date, there have been more than 100 mobile-money deployments in emerging markets; at least 84 of them originated in the past three years. In markets with real-time payments infrastructures, banks have managed to fight back and actually have taken the lead in digital-Payments and P2P payments. For example, Swedish banks have developed an app called Swish, and in the UK, Barclays is leading with its popular PingIt app.

Even in markets yet to move to real-time payments, such as the US, banks are trying to recapture their position in money transfers. Recent examples of activity include Early Warning acquiring clearXchange, BBVA partnering with Dwolla, and TD Bank exploring opportunities with Ripple.

How does the system handle minor or intermittent communication failures? Do transactions queue and how does it work? Is the transaction secure during the entire process and how is it secured? What if only part of the real-time process works for a particular transaction? What is the notification process when a payment is not received? Mobile commerce would remain as opportunities and challenges for consumers, businesses and regulators in 2017 though.

Disclaimer

All credit and credits of contributions remain with original authors and I sincerely thanks for their contribution here. Welcome to the future of Payments. In this post, we have discussed the potential merger of AI and its bundle pack i.e. Machine Learning, data science and analytics. In the next post, we will pick up a specific use case to deliberate on.

Books + Other readings Referred

• Open Internet – NewsPortals, Economic development report papers
• Personal & professional working experience of  @AILabPage members.

Feedback & Further Question

Do you have any questions about Deep Learning or Machine Learning? Leave a comment or ask your question via email. Will try my best to answer it.

Conclusion – Country like South Africa, which has, if not highest in the world but many services where Cash is not allowed to come in as those are strict “No-Cash” services. An innovative leap is currently taking place under the keywords of social media and FinTech. Many banking services are being redefined.

This includes technologies related to e-commerce, mobile payments, crowdlending, crowd-investing and asset management. The result will be a future in which many services are only offered electronically. Countless finance apps exist which generate added value for clients. These can be used to query master data, receive business news, create portfolios, enter payments, draw up charts, convert currencies, etc. These key challenges that banks and merchants need to know and have solutions ready when embarking on real-time payment processing.

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