Major Trends Poised to Impact Mobile Payments
The mobile payments industry, for all its gains and advances, is still at its base a young industry. It really didn’t start going mainstream until Apple Pay hit, though things like credit cards had been around for decades. However, a new report from TechGenYZ illustrates some of the major new trends that are poised to deliver impact of their own to an industry that is, in many ways, still developing itself.
Easily the biggest issue is the rise of Gen Z, or the generation just after the millennials. Despite moves to the physical, Gen Z has a clear devotion to the digital; 28 percent would rather give up money or friends than lose their mobile device.
Additionally, the rise of application programming interfaces (APIs) and open banking concepts, as well as a steadily-increased demand for loyalty rewards and the best in customer experience, proves what customers want is fundamentally changing, and businesses are increasingly struggling to find and present that.
Credit cards are also changing, even after the rise of the Europay / Mastercard / Visa (EMV) standard, and as more and more businesses start to accept mobile payments, the landscape is once again trembling underfoot.
All of these changes are prompting the last two major trends TechGenYZ noted: fraud is only on the rise, seeing a slate of new opportunities with all this change afoot, and a complete revamp of all current systems is vital to take advantage of all the changes while protecting against the massive downside that could, if allowed to run amok to its fullest, destroy all trust in the mobile payments market.
Though the potential for fraud would essentially have to have free rein to get that far, every potential problem unprepared for could result in loss of face and ultimately loss of business throughout the ecosystem. We’ve already seen as much several times from the data breaches we know about; how many times did Chipotle offer up “back from the brink” scenarios?
Yet aside from this danger, there’s room for opportunity. The next company that brings out a top-notch rewards program or something similar could very well pull market share from the biggest companies. We might well see even more change than we’ve already seen, and that’s saying something.