As the first prise winner at the Doctoral workshop Poster competition I have got the opportunity to attend a conference on my choice. I selected to attend an industry event International conference on payment services and solutions organized by InPayCo in Paris, France, on 4-5 of November, 2015.
During the event a range of different topics have been discussed:
- Representatives of consultancy companies presented an overview of general trends in mobile payments in the global market.
- Different companies presented a range of mobile payment solutions and services. They shared the experience of mobile payments developed in different countries:
(i) There were a number of services developed by French start-up companies (Peer-to-Peer money transfer service Lydia, mobile wallet Fivory, solutions for on-line purchases CachWay and SlimPay).
(ii) Presented solutions from other countries were M-Changa (a fundrising platform from Kenya); a MasterCard’s representative presented a range of initiatives in developed countries, and a Vodafone representative presented penetration of M-Pesa in Romania and Armenia. A representative of Worldremit highlighted the situation and issues related to remittances to developing countries.
(iii) A round table discussion was focused on services for unbanked people and developing countries. - Another important stream of discussions was related to regulation issues of mobile payments and legislation in EU. Several presentations and round table discussions were addressing this topic in terms of security and privacy, and changes in regulation.
- Crypto-currencies (specifically Bitcoin) became a hot topic of discussions. Specifics (focus of P2P payments) and reputation of Bitcoin slows down its penetration among banks. However, the secure mechanism behind Bitcoin (blockchain), that is open source, gets popularity on its own. Mobile payment providers and even banks use blockchain in order to develop security of the services.
As a final summary, the representatives of mobile payment industry think that payment in the future will be connected to social media, more engaging and fun. In some services the service experience will play the main role and with less focus on payment process, that is payment will be more hidden (today we have an examples of Airbnb and Uber).
The payment in the future will be digitalised meaning lots of savings for all market actors starting from merchants, banks, and government.
Banks will need to be more connected in order to provide a real time transactions.
