New Study Takes Aim at Future of Mobile Payment

A recent study released from Silicon Valley Bank and Commerce Ventures took a closer look at the overall environment for mobile commerce, financial technology (fintech), and related key areas. The findings were noteworthy in several regards, and paint an exciting picture of the months and years to come in the field.

First, blockchain technology was front and center for many, but not even a majority. Just 45 percent of surveyed companies or portfolio companies therein were using or investing in blockchain technology, leaving the majority 55 percent to not do so.

However, a clear majority of 59 percent saw cryptocurrency going mainstream by 2025. The biggest issues holding it back were consumer education—25 percent agreed here—and 20 percent each going to reputational issues (bitcoin, for example, is often seen as the currency of drug dealers online) and price volatility.

Financial services were expected to see innovation over the next 12 months, with several sectors getting equal perception of gains. Twenty-three percent expected to see advances in money transfer, while 15 percent expected advances in retail banking. Three separate sectors saw 11 percent expectations of innovation gains: lending, payments, and “other,” demonstrating how diffuse the fintech market overall really is.

Overwhelmingly, companies expect the biggest hurdle to growth to be regulations, though given the Trump administration so far, that may not be the problem you’d expect. Fully 90 percent of businesses expected artificial intelligence, meanwhile, to be at least “important,” with 60 percent calling it “critical.”

That’s a lot to take in, but underneath it all, one point shines through: we’re going to see a whole lot of changes coming up in fintech. Whether it’s mobile payments backed up by AI, sending and receiving payments in cryptocurrency, or just changes at the regulatory level, something’s going to happen. We’ve seen enough changes over the last year to drive that point home like a tungsten spike dropped from low Earth orbit. We can likely barely conceive of what we’ll see even by October 2018.

From banks to communications companies and beyond, fintech is shaking up everything. What changes we’ll see in the next year, in the next several years, remain to be seen. It’s a pretty sure bet, though, that these will be profound changes.