Payments Empowerment: How Financial Inclusion Drives Payments

Payments Empowerment -This blog delves into the benefits of various payment modes and sheds light on some noteworthy developments in the payment sector. The focal point of the Payments Revolution is given significance by highlighting the crucial element: “Swiftness reigns supreme”. By the year 2020, it is expected that online and mobile payments will exceed a total of three trillion euros. For a brief period, there was a global buzz surrounding Apple Pay due to the brand’s prestigious reputation. Cash, Online, Card, and Mobile payments are all rising together almost every day.

Payments Empowerment – Outlook

Despite the initial commotion, the hype surrounding Samsung Pay and Google Pay will inevitably die down, especially as more and more banks roll out their own payment options. Additionally, alternatives such as MasterPass and Visa Checkout are also available. The global mobile payment industry is expected to reach a whopping market value of 64 billion USD by 2019, according to my research on Google.

This surge is triggered by the increasing competition among notable participants such as Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and many other established and emerging players in the market. With countless smaller players also vying for a piece of the pie, the mobile payment industry is set to grow exponentially. Perhaps it can be dubbed a global contest for payment supremacy,” with every participant striving to acquire the largest portion of this lucrative pie. With each contender keen to know their respective share, I am both thrilled and anxious about the future of mobile payments.

Imagine you have touchable screens (like below in the picture) on every corner of the street where you shop and pay with the Mobile Payments option, and goods are delivered to your home. In a virtual grocery store in Korea, shelves are lined with LCD screens, shoppers tap the items they want, and the goods are processed, packed, and ready for collection after payments.

This can be seen as the Internet of Things, or IoT. Other applications that come to mind are ATMs and information kiosks in bank branches that may use sensing technology to monitor and take action on the consumers’ behalf (we will discuss IoT marriage with financial services in an article to be published on April 26, 2015).

The rapid speed of innovation in payment methods has resulted in a plethora of options such as paper, online, plastic, mobile, eWallets, NFC stickers, smartwatches, Facebook, Google Wallet, Microsoft, and so on. It is crucial for all businesses to stay vigilant and keep up with the most recent trends and advancements, as the phrase “many many more” suggests.

In the present and years to come, they and their clients will likely adopt novel payment methods for products and services. As time progresses, new and diverse innovations will persist, evolving and expanding. The act of payment occurs when one individual or organization exchanges something of worth with another party in return for goods, services, or to abide by a lawful obligation.

Payments are a daily and routine activity carried out by people in most parts of the world. These payments cover daily human requirements for transportation, food, and communication. Some people transact 2–5 times in a day, while others transact 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, but these have high transaction costs and are prone to theft. 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.

The recharge service is the most common type of payment system where one exchanges monetary value in return for the ability to make voice, SMS, or data calls. In one way or another, today’s mobile money transfer service originated from Airtime, where one can do a P2P transfer of Airtime that can’t be encashed but is used for one of the telecommunications purposes, i.e., voice, SMS, or data calls.

Some exiting news on Payments (Source nextboillion.net)

Bitcoin + M-Pesa = Cheaper Remittances in Kenya In Kenya, an Australia-based bitcoin exchange called Igot recently acquired the local company TagPesa, intending to target the country’s remittance market.

A Bitcoin Mobile Wallet in India Meanwhile, in India, tech firm Zebpay recently announced the launch of a bitcoin mobile wallet, an Android app that will help users buy, sell, and transact in the popular digital currency. Though the Reserve Bank of India has warned against dealing in virtual currencies due to security and money-laundering risks,

Facebook gets into payments, and Microsoft has already indicated that Bitcoin isn’t the only tech solution targeting cheaper remittances. Last week, Facebook announced a new feature in its messaging app that will allow users to send and receive money between friends.

Alibaba Smile to Pay Selfie Security is a major challenge for all mobile payment providers. For instance, the “Touch ID” fingerprint sensor that Apple Pay uses to authenticate transactions is one of its prime selling points and its biggest “wow” factors. But Alibaba upped the ante this week when the Chinese e-commerce giant’s CEO, Jack Ma, unveiled its new “Smile to Pay” technology during an exhibition on Alipay, the company’s mobile payments service.

Xiamomi, tempting 3 percent on money transfer A Chinese company also made an intriguing mobile money-related announcement this week. Xiamomi, the world’s third-largest smartphone maker, revealed on Tuesday that it will be offering its customers in China an interest rate of over 3 percent on money they transfer from their bank accounts to their mobile wallets.

New Wine in an Old Bottle: M-Shwari, a mobile banking product run as a joint partnership between the Commercial Bank of Africa and Safaricom, signed up its 10 millionth customer earlier this month, just days before a new competitor entered the field. Safaricom’s new partner, the Kenya Commercial Bank, hopes to tap some of this demand with a similar feature phone-based product called the KCB-M-Pesa Account. Along with a savings account, KCB will reportedly offer loans from Kshs 50 (around USD $0.54) to Kshs 1 million (almost USD $11,000), with payment terms of between one and six months at interest rates that start at 2 percent.

IMPS: Immediate Payment Service (IMPS) [Source: NCPI.ORG.IN] Currently, the majority of interbank mobile fund transfer transactions are channeled through the NEFT mechanism. Under NEFT, the transactions are processed and settled in batches; hence, they are not in real time. Also, the transactions can be done only during the working hours of the RTGS system. With the above context in mind, NPCI conducted a pilot study on the mobile payment system with banks like SBI, BOI, UBI, and ICICI in August 2010. Also, banks like Yes Bank, Axis Bank, and HDFC Bank joined this league in the months of September, October, and November 2010, respectively. The Immediate Payment Service (IMPS) public launch happened on November 22nd, 2010 by Smt. Shyamala Gopinath, DG RBI, in Mumbai, and this service is now available to the Indian public.

Now focus on payment methods will be in part – 3

Conclusion: Which instrument is more stable, usable, acceptable, and cheap? “All of this is because of the fact that this physical and digital world is converging.” As check usage increased during the 19th and 20th centuries, additional items were added to increase security or make processing easier for the bank or financial institution. A signature of the drawer was required to authorize the check, and this is the main way to authenticate the check. Second, it became customary to write the amount in words as well as in numbers to avoid mistakes and make it harder to fraudulently alter the amount after the check had been written. It is not a legal requirement to write down the amount in words, although some banks will refuse to accept checks that do not have the amount in both numbers and words. AI is getting traction in fintech and the payment industry; I will talk about it in my upcoming posts.

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