Payment at a Crossroads - Multiple Paths of Development Ahead

The current status-quo of payments - from a global point of view - is very heterogenous, but always on an edge. It is hard to compare “Mercado Pago” in South America with “SEPA Instant Payments” in Europe” or the Mobile Money platforms in China (AliPay and WeChatPay) with the digital wallets of US firms (Apple Pay and Google Pay). If we try to put the current developments into a nutshell, we still see four well-known features: cards, platforms, tokens (not to be mixed with “tokenization” as secu-rity technology) and finally electronic payments emerge. Although one could think about technology as basis of these different segments, the real drivers are: • proliferation of mobile devices, • political struggle on a global scale, • innovation vs. precautionary principle/central regulation and • social benefits of centralization vs. decentralized initiatives. Nonetheless, all these “social” developments have a strong impact on technology! Developments within payments highlights multiple antagonistic trends: consumers’ perspective vs. central schemes, traditional means of payments vs. digital payments, development in Europe (driven by regulation) vs. innovations in US/Asia but with a political tension between Dollar and Renminbi, and finally a tension between customer convenience and security requirements. All these different trends have a strong impact on whole payments chains from the consumer via merchants to banks or payment services provides and call for rethinking of resilience of the payments systems around the globe. Nobody has a crystal ball for the future, but current individual develop-ments entrail a long chain of adoptions needed to serve customer in the future with highest standards. Join Dr. Udo Milkau, Senior Analyst at Kuppingercole for an insightful and thought provoking keynote session to open up our Global Payments Summit.