Banking on Mobile

BANKING ON MOBILE

Solving the equation of phone-based payments

Financial institutions are earmarking most of their innovation budgets to develop their mobile offerings. In fact they are investing more in mobile than the other hotly discussed technologies in financial services today, such as blockchain and bitcoin.

Although putting money into mobile, most bankers still rank their own institution's level of innovation as poor. This is worrying since the non-traditional financial service competitors are getting ready to pounce.

For instance, in Europe, as the January 2018 deadline for implementation of the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) looms, Facebook is preparing to become a payment service provider and has already been issued with a payment licence, with passporting rights across the European Union.

In Asia, three major e-commerce players – WeChat, Alipay and Paytm, all of which run marketplaces with their own proprietary mobile wallets – have now progressed from enabling payments with their wallets to forming digital banks.