The past few years have seen big tech becoming involved in a number of financial products that span deposits, loans and credit cards and that trend will come to the world of real-time payments.
Google plans on launching a consumer bank account in collaboration with Citibank because they are interested in sitting on top of their financial infrastructure and expertise with their Google Pay technology. In 2019, Apple debuted a credit card created in partnership with Goldman Sachs. Like Google, the company has left much of the financial legwork to its bank partner, while designing the card and integrating it with its digital wallet app.
We’ll see this infiltrate the real-time payments space: Big tech players will focus on maintaining the customer relationship, experience and capturing more customer activity, searching and buying behavior, but will remain a distributor, essentially leaving the business of payments products to financial institutions.
I can’t say this one enough: We’re going to see the data economy mature further, removing the emphasis on payments products or services.
Data will become the core driver of value for payments systems. One is by predicting user behavior and by optimizing recommendations for payment services. These analytics can help payment providers plan and prioritize future product roadmaps.
As the number of payment vehicles and schemes continue to grow, they add to the already cluttered set of choices a customer has to make. Most personal and corporate users lack the subject matter expertise to decide which payment scheme is best to use.
An intelligent payment platform can use a rule-based engine, data analytics and other intelligence tools to help route transactions to either the lowest cost or fastest payment scheme available.
While there are differences in actual implementation across markets, the goal remains the same: to improve the speed in which funds move from account to account. Increasing real-time payment adoption rates and continual development and evolution of real-time infrastructures around the globe speak to the staying power of real time and indicate the true potential that is just beginning to emerge.
