The first year of this decade set the stage for a breakout in mobile payments growth. When a once-in-a-century pandemic hit, people quickly shifted to new behavior for how they pay and receive money. Uniquely, mobile payments checked off many boxes amid this dramatically changing backdrop. What’s more, it has become easier for companies to adopt thanks to growing third-party services. Going into the next decade, the mobile phone will continue to be the lifeblood of the payments-as-a-platform opportunity that lies at the heart of an emerging fintech-geared world.
Few years in recent history have been as defining as 2020. In so many ways, the Covid-19 pandemic turbo-charged trends in technology that were already beginning to pick up speed throughout the past decade. Among these trends was the adoption of new payment methods made possible through emerging fintech startups.
In 2021, we now stand at a crossroad. The heightened demand for flexible, cost-efficient and secure payments methods will drive mobile payments adoption further. It is up to incumbent financial companies to ensure they keep up with these emerging payment preferences, which will not disappear after the pandemic but rather, as we will see in this report, are projected to continue on a positive trajectory.
This is where the nimble payments-as-a-platform (PaaP) model will pay its dividend. Essentially, payments-as-a-platform providers are building upon their ability to better enable plug-and-play access for incumbent companies directly to mobile money services through APIs and open, flexible IT solutions. Working at its best, the software PaaP providers see allows companies to quickly connect to a nexus of international payments systems, effectively fast-tracking access to global financial and telecom networks while disrupting legacy companies in the process.
Today, a rising retinue of PaaP startups are providing unique cloud-based platforms to enable companies large and small to quickly scale to the demand that was driven by the pandemic. It remains among the best SaaS solutions to keep up with a new era in customer behavior.
In this special report, we’ll uncover the top trends that are influencing the payments-as-a-platform model in digital mobile payments, as well as specific applications being adopted by businesses amid this historical transformation in purchase preferences and technology. Our report delves into data-backed examples for emerging trends now being witnessed in the e-commerce, open banking, cryptocurrency, NGO and social media segments, to name a few.
Some key trends that we highlight include:
- By 2019, mobile money providers had penetrated seven times the reach of ATMs and 20 times that of banks.
- 74% of shoppers who switched to online shopping during the pandemic intend to continue after the pandemic ends.
- In 2020, more people bought cryptocurrencies across the globe than any year before.
- Over 2.5 million UK consumers and businesses use bank-enabled APIs to manage their finances and transactions, a rate that doubled between January and August 2020.
Moreover, we’ll also go in-depth to analyze what top applications and business models that PaaP providers can offer companies. Here, we’ll review recent investment rounds and emerging strategies that are leveraging PaaP mobile money solutions to better serve customers.
Some key facts we’ll focus our analysis on include:
- In 2019, the payments sector witnessed a historic influx of investment, attracting $15 billion, 20% more than the preceding year.
- Paxful, a Hong Kong-based peer-to-peer exchange service, has built a successful business by integrating over 300 payment methods, including cryptocurrency.
- Adopting mobile money platforms is an opportunity for businesses to tap into a sector predicted to grow to $930.44 billion by 2026.
In particular, we’ve compiled this report to deliver a rapid snapshot of things as they are. The world has just lived through a disruptive and society-altering health crisis that will have lingering impacts on the payments space for years to come. It has been our pleasure to help our readers make more sense of these dramatic and ongoing changes.
To read this report, please download your free copy here.
