InFocus: Strategies to prepare for the future of payments

In the year ahead, Deloitte predicts that payments companies will be making “big bets” on modernization, cloud computing, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and collaboration with other industry players. Explore the five payments trends that will be driving change, presenting challenges, and creating opportunities.

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?

Five payments trends shaping 2020

Trend 1. Competition between closed and open payments platforms
Trend 2. Evolving payments economics
Trend 3. Development of new standards to govern the flow of money
Trend 4. Noncommercial entities’ role in shaping the ecosystem
Trend 5. The future of payments organizations and talent implications

Download Payment Trends 2020

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.

Endnotes

1 Deloitte, “InFocus: Payments trends 2019,” https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/financial-services/articles/infocus-payments-trends.html, 2018.

2 Deloitte Center for Financial Services,“Rethinking the credit card business in a customer experience-driven world,” October 2019.

3 PCI Security Standards Council, PCI Compliance Guide FAQs, https://www.pcicomplianceguide.org/faq/#1.

4 Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, press release, “Federal Reserve announces plan to develop a new round-the-clock real-time payment and settlement service to support faster payments,” https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/other20190805a.htm, posted August 5, 2019.

5 del Castillo, Michael, “Alibaba, Tencent, Five Others To Receive First Chinese Government Cryptocurrency,” Forbes, August 27, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldelcastillo/2019/08/27/alibaba-tencent-five-oth-ers-to-recieve-first-chinese-government-cryptocurrency/#4c49b37d1a51. Accessed August 27, 2019.

6 Ibid.

7 The Clearing House, “RTP®: The New Real-Time Payments System for All Financial Institutions,” https://www.theclearinghouse.org/payment-systems/rtp.

8 Demos, Telis, “Citigroup” Enters Banking’s Hottest Business With New Payments Unit,” The Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/citigroup-enters-bankings-hottest-business-with-new-pay-ments-unit-11553598000?shareToken=st994821326fdf40a3a971433 2675f3b8b&reflink=article_ email_share.