Payments trends 2020

Payments trends 2020: Mastering a dynamic market

The dynamic payments industry continues to expand and evolve, with digital payment vehicles and transaction volumes growing across the globe. Over the past year, industry incumbents have been responding to numerous trends and drivers by:

• Modernizing their organizations and infrastructure to support new service offerings and identify new revenue streams.
  Investing in cloud computing and other digital technologies to more rapidly address evolving customer preferences and mitigate risk and regulatory obligations.
• Engaging in targeted M&A to fill in adjacencies and add capabilities and talent to address challenging areas such as cross-border payments, an improved end-to-end payment experience, multipayment integration, and business-to-business (B2B) payments.
• Collaborating with financial technology (fintech) players and other market entrants as strategies and playbooks for partnering continue to evolve.

We anticipate that 2020 strategies will likely be about the formulation of “big bets.” This could take the shape of either going all in on a targeted set of preferred partners and platforms or going broader in an attempt to service the ecosystem. We view five emerging trends as driving these strategies, presenting challenges, and creating opportunities in the 2020 payments ecosystem. These trends could help shape strategies for organizations as they seek to master this dynamic market.

What implications may these trends, collectively, have for payments companies over the next year? And what new strategies and actions might be taken in response?

Considerations and potential next steps

What implications could these five trends, collectively, have for payments companies over the next year? And what new stakeholder strategies and actions might be taken in response?

As organizations develop strategies around their 2020 “big bets,” we expect that forward-thinking organizations will also maintain focus on the fundamentals necessary to survive and thrive in the increasingly competitive payments industry:

• Designing (or redesigning) organizations, processes, and technology around an aligned payments strategy and customer experience; continuing to plan, budget for, and build out their physical and digital infrastructure; maintaining compliance with standards and regulations; and driving greater processing simplification and improved customer engagement.
• We also see new and incumbent players launching products and services that attract customers to their platforms through creative experiences and competitive pricing. To begin, they may need to make strategic positioning choices on where to compete, what products/services to offer, and how to design their growth models to meet customers’ ever-increasing appetite for innovative payments solutions.
• Financial inclusion may emerge as one of the drivers behind these strategies, especially as payments providers expand their efforts to service the needs of many and provide a customer experience that delivers ahead of the curve.