Opinions

The move will explore the risks and opportunities of the new technology, and the group membership allocation across agencies and stakeholder groups seems to be a reasonable way to include a range of opinions, writes Rob Viglione, co-founder of ZenCash.

Open APIs can bring speed and flexibility to P-to-P payments, e-commerce and financial services. But there's also identity and performance risks that banks need to address, writes Rahul Singh, president of financial services at HCL Technologies.

The number of channels consumers use to pay their bills is unlikely to decrease anytime soon, so billers that are able to check off every bill payment channel will enjoy a competitive advantage, writes Jim Lester, senior vice president of product management and strategy for biller solutions at Fiserv.

Before banks replace their core systems — which are largely homogeneous in the U.S. — they should work on ways to deliver convenient and engaging digital services for each of their channels.

Cards, e-wallets and transfers are all necessary for merchants to attract younger consumers to recurring payments, writes Artem Tymoshenko, CEO of MaxPay.

Advanced operating systems can run marketing and support services such as Apple Pay. Merchants would be well served to consider the diverse options of new terminals, writes Ben Wagner, director of solutions at Ingenico Group, North America.

It’s not speed, which will steadily if not exponentially increase in the near term. It’s the centralists that are holding onto their roles as reconcilers of data.

Shoppers will not buy products they can’t find, no matter how quick and seamless the checkout process may be, writes Trevor Legwinski, chief strategy officer at SearchSpring.

There is too much customer and regulatory inertia for banks’ business model to become irrelevant overnight. The real danger is banks will fade out of the picture over time.

Long wait times and improved marketing are a couple of reasons retailers should consider their own apps, writes André Stoorvoge, director of product marketing for payments at Rambus.