Corporate Payments in 2018: What to Watch For

With 2017 stumbling to a close and 2018 warming up in the wings, it’s the time of year when people like to take a look back at what was and consider what may be ahead. It’s no different when it comes to corporate payments, and Celent recently sent us out a report showing off what was likely to come on the enterprise side of the mobile payments street with 2018’s arrival.

The first point Celent’s report made was that actually trying to pin down predictions has been unusually difficult. Not from lack of material, but rather due to so much material that trying to actually establish a beachhead was next to impossible.

One of the biggest changes expected to arrive was the move to Payment Services Directive II (PSD II), a move which will not only hit Europe like a sledgehammer dropped from a helicopter, but will also hit everyone who does business therein. Allowing third parties access to account information is going to be a huge shift in everyday business, and protecting accounts in the midst of that even worse.

Additionally, the point of ISO20022 emerged. While it’s currently the standard for real-time payments—thus anyone using real-time payments should likely adopt it—it’s unclear whether it will catch on beyond that front or not. Celent projects that now is a good time to get ahead of the curve and adopt ISO20022, as it will likely be outright necessary soon.

The evolution of real-time payments in general also came up, and is now a substantial part of many operations. There are still unanswered questions with this point as yet, so proceed with some caution if you’re an enterprise-level user, but it’s still a point to keep on hand.

Celent’s projections of 2018 in payments all come back to one thing: change. Lots of it, in point of fact; so much so that most of Celent’s study is a matter of when, not if. When to jump to ISO20022, when to incorporate real-time payments, and so on. We’ve already seen plenty of changes at the consumer level in mobile payments; it would be the height of folly not to expect similar behavior at the corporate level.