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.

Interac's e-transfer system has jumped in usage, and has become a gateway for myriad other services including a collaboration with MoneyGram.

Due to new and advanced analytical and analysis practices such as shopping behavior analysis, customer data, including credit card info, now travels to different teams within the organization, multiplying the opportunities for data leakage and exposure, writes Yo Delmar, vice president of GRC Solutions at MetricStream.

Judopay, a London-based startup enabling merchants to accept mobile payments through a turnkey process, has formed a partnership with Visa’s CyberSource unit to extend the startup’s reach to international customers.

Assemble allows Mastercard partners or issuers to provide checking, budgeting and payment features, as well as additional money management.

It may not yet be apparent, but we are on the cusp of a seismic change in our relationship with the automobile. This change will have significant implications for stakeholders in the banking and payments landscape.

Kenneth Montgomery will chair the Secure Payments Task Force, which is made up of more than 200 industry stakeholders who are working on a faster payment system in the U.S.

Establishing trust, especially when it comes to online payments, is critical. People need to feel secure and confident that their personal boundaries won’t be crossed or their information misused, writes Rik van't Hof, director of product management front-end for Ingenico e-commerce.

Garmin Pay launched earlier this year and went live last month. Other banks that support Garmin Pay include Bank of America, Capital One, U.S. Bank, several U.S. credit unions and a growing number of international banks, including Russia’s Sberbank.

America’s largest lenders made an epic mistake a decade ago when they cashed out of Visa and Mastercard through initial public offerings, says Chenault, who will step down in February as CEO of American Express.

New York's World Trade Center-based Oculus will host Chase Pay Village until Jan. 7 with an emphasis on holiday wares. Part of its mission is to determine which of Chase's mobile wallet features — if any — are most compelling to shoppers.