Beyond QR Codes: Surfing the New Payments Ecosystem - Seguridad Mania.com - España y América Latina

The global COVID-19 crisis certainly accelerated digital transformation efforts across industries. However, the payments ecosystem has remained locked to the legacy infrastructure, messaging protocols and entry barriers that have existed for decades, created by the global credit card brands that manage and control who gets to participate in this ecosystem. The business motivations to move beyond the technology that has supported retail payments are there: *Very expensive PCI certification costs to get access to the network *Very expensive setup and operational costs from unreliable POS terminals with limited functionality *Very expensive intermediation fees, needed to pay for the credit card brand, the bank, the network and other middle-persons *Very little control over the collection of revenue due to complex reconciliation processes between brands, banks and networks *High exposure to fraud, as this is the best understood, most exploited way of making illegal money across all countries. Fintech companies should jump into this opportunity with the determination that other disruptors have shown in the past. The cost of building protocols and networks in parallel seems unbearable but the motivations and tools are there for those who dare. Huge economies like India and China have leapfrogged entire generations of technologies, simply by the fact that their countries could not, or would not invest in the past in the technologies being used in advanced economies. Thanks to this, we see how fintech companies are thriving in Africa and India, going directly into a future where payments are designed to run on top of what people use on a daily basis to interact with others. No need to explain the huge success stories of WeChat and Alipay, which, among other platforms in China, designed for simplicity and from scratch, to dominate the way payments will be done in the future, totally outside the world of global banks and credit cards.