Paysafe Prognosticates 2018 in Mobile Payments

December 13, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

2017 was marked by being a year of no shortage of news in the mobile payments market. With mergers and acquisitions, data breaches, and the meteoric rise of bitcoin, we’ve had plenty to talk about worldwide. There’s every indication that 2018 will be no different, and Paysafe drove that point home by sending us a list from CEO Todd Linden of what it expects to see happen next year in payments.

First, Linden predicts that analytics will be bigger than ever, and data streams from payments will provide a lot of the necessary fodder to carry it off. While loyalty program growth was on the decline—growth was just 15 percent this year as compared to 26 percent a year prior—merchants will turn to other potential data streams.

Moreover, Linden also expects more users to turn to mobile payments; just this year, 54 percent of Americans expected they’d be abandoning cash in favor of other methods within the next two years—that’s Paysafe’s own research that spotted that—thanks to a combination of convenience and improving security.

On security, look for that to only get better. With 49 percent of American online shoppers now considering fraud a matter of when, not if—and 58 percent ready to respond to that threat by adopting most any security measure that’s ready to beat fraud—next year will likely have a particular focus on shoring up security and fending off potential hacking.

Basically, look for more of the same in the mobile payment market. Essentially, businesses will continue to analyze the market, respond to customer issues, and fill in any perceived shortfalls to keep customers happy and coming back for more. It’s interesting that “more of the same” here means “a lot more change,” but since 2017 was so full of change in the mobile payments market, it would indeed be more of the same for that level of change to continue.

Mobile payments is a learning game. This is a market that’s seen a lot of new developments and incorporated them rather smoothly into the larger narrative. We’ve seen barely a handful of firms depart the market, and plenty more get in to take their places. To suggest that 2018 would be any less so is almost certainly a fundamental miscalculation of the market as we know it.