Back in February of this year, when the threat of COVID was becoming a global cause for concern, we posed the question on this site about whether 2020 would be the year of the QR code.
There’s a counter on the homepage of the GSMA’s website which tells you that today, there are some 5.1 billion unique mobile subscribers in the world. Elsewhere in its pages you can see that there are now more than one billion registered mobile money accounts – that’s one in five of the world’s mobile subscribers.
This month’s Wired magazine has refreshed its opinion of the QR code from marketing gimmick to everyday essential.
Payments consultancy CMSPI believes the looming deadline in Europe for retailers to comply with the regulations around Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) for online sales could cause further damage to an industry already suffering from the effects of severely reduced in-store footfall.
The modern mobile industry is only a little over 30 years old – the mobile money market barely a decade. Yet the power of that mobile device to change habits and revolutionise the way we live is both breathtaking and undiminished. The GSMA released a report this month that showed there are now more than one billion mobile money accounts active in the world.
In retail stores across the world, the sight of contactless payments by phone or by card has become commonplace. But more than 30 per cent of the world’s population are now considered digital shoppers and the online retail market was worth a staggering $768bn in the USA alone last year – and it’s a market that is expected to double in size by 2025.
What’s really going on in payments? Will 2020 be the year of the QR Code in European payments? There’s host of factors lining up to force change on the online payments market in Europe and beyond. Tony Craddock, the Director General of the Emerging Payments Association has looked at the changes 2020 will bring, touching on PSD2 as well as outlining some of the other major themes that he predicts will impact the payments market this year.
January 31, 2020 sees the UK ‘leave’ the European Union and begin the process of determining its future trading relationship with EU member countries and indeed the rest of the world. And it’s worth remembering that EU regulations tend to have impact on countries both within and without the European Union.
Industry standards are a good thing – there’s very little argument against their existence or their purpose. They help markets to coalesce around some best practices, and they can help deliver economies of scale as well as drive actual market scale. But if you sense a ‘but’ coming along in this train of thought, you would be at least partly right.
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