Mobile payments

Banks of all sizes continue to invest in mobile technology — but in order to see stronger growth, they must also invest in education to overcome consumer unease with the product.

While interest from the West has so far been tepid in the region, this is an opportune time for fintech investors to look at participation in the Southeast Asian market, writes Alexander Koles, CEO and founder of Evolve Capital Partners.

People are spending more time in messaging applications, and merchants need to be visible in that venue, writes David Nunn, head of Braintree Europe.

With so much uncertainty, the only thing that's clear is how different the sector may look a year from now. Here's an overview of the leading trends in technology that will impact payments and banking in 2018.

China's central bank has put the brakes on mobile and e-commerce payment schemes in the past, mostly from the standpoint of having a wary eye on third-party players elbowing their way into financial services.

China's Ant Financial Group, the company behind Alipay, was among eight companies that EMV standards governing body EMVCo has named as technical associates to its secure-payment consortium.

For all of the noise in the payments industry around transitioning to real-time and same-day digital payments — and in the mainstream media around the bitcoin craze — paper checks still persist as the preferred means of disbursement for the majority of business-to-business transactions.

With the increased demand for heightened security and the increased costs, there will also be a growth in attacks from nation-state actors, writes Antwayne Ford, president and CEO of Enlightened.

Bandwidth, sophisticated content and store locators can all help retailers draw and keep consumers as digital shopping and payments become mainstream, writes Herman Yau, CEO of Tend.

As shopping habits evolve, e-commerce and m-commerce methods such as in-app and one-click ordering are becoming increasingly popular. In addition, the exponential growth of the IoT is introducing a wealth of new payment use-cases, such as connected cars, writes André Stoorvogel, Director, Product Marketing in the Payments Group at Rambus.