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.
Around the world the number of people using QR code technology is rising exponentially. A rise initially triggered by the global pandemic has continued unabated. In America alone, the first year of the pandemic saw a 25 per cent rise in QR code usage to more than 65m users. That became 75m last year, will be 83m this year, and be touching 100m by 2025.
QR code payments rose to staggering 47 per cent of digital wallet transactions in 2020!
In recent weeks and months some things have changed. The advent of the so-called ‘Pingdemic’ has led to many people deleting their track and trace app and seeking to avoid being ‘caught’ by the system. But it hasn’t actually harmed usage and acceptance of the QR code and its underlying technology. That has proven its case for a place in the world.
It’s an unwritten rule of a successful technology – someone, somewhere, will try to corrupt it for their own purposes. QR code technology is closing in on 30 years of usage, but the Covid-19 pandemic has turned the technology from niche markets to mainstream consumer use and that inevitably attracts interest from the fraudsters.
But if you want permanent proof of how adaptable QR code technology is, then look no further than Roy Healy. Back in 2019, Roy spent two hours in a tattoo parlour having a QR code inked into his forearm. The code initially pointed to Roy’s website, but he can change what happens whenever someone scans the code as often as he likes – sometimes it goes to his blog, sometimes to a fun website, or sometimes to LinkedIn and to what I guess we should call his Inked In profile.
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.
In a zero-trust environment, everyone and everything has to prove who or what it is when making a request of the network. It makes no difference whether that request is coming from outside of the network, or from someone on the inside – or at least someone appearing to be on the inside. Each request needs to be verified, authenticated, and tested before it can be trusted.
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.
