If recent years have all proved transformational in the world of payments, then 2017 has been no different.
Even cash itself has changed. New £1 coins and the arrival of plastic notes shows that old money is having to adapt and increase security. This has come at a great cost to UK plc, which is even harder to accept when we are clearly moving further towards a less cash-dependent payments system. Contactless continues to grow at exponential rates and its popularity remains undiminished.
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Society seems to have now dropped all mentions of what we used to call the mobile internet – our smartphones now are very much THE internet. Our ability to buy anything anywhere has never been stronger.
And so too is the opportunity for mobile payments. In two years it is expected that across the world people will make 200 billion mobile and tablet transactions. But in four years, there will be nearly four times as many IoT-connected devices as mobile phones. There will be 28 billion of them, which is around 50 per household.
The potential for these devices to make payments will be unlocked by tokenisation. And as we’ve recently seen, Fitbit and Garmin are breathing new life into wearables with their first steps into payments for that reason.
And tokens have a role to play with another theme that has carried into 2017. Data breaches may not go away, but by retailers switching from storing actual card numbers to ‘tokens’ which only Mastercard can decode, the sooner the industry can reduce its reliance on the strength of each and every retailers own cyber security.
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By GlobalDataAnd finally, for us at Mastercard, we have had a significant year with the acquisition of VocaLink which will undoubtedly bring added innovation to real time payments both here in the UK and beyond and is a fantastic point of differentiation in our digital payment solutions. We believe together we can offer consumers far greater choice and control when deciding how they wish to pay.
Scott Abrahams is Senior Vice President at Mastercard UK, Ireland, Nordics & Baltics
