Читать книгу The FINTECH Book - Chishti Susanne - Страница 10

Anyone seeking evidence of the potential market power and reach of technology-driven finance providers need look no further than the now venerable PayPal. Launched in 1998, the company was taken over by eBay in 2002 and became the default payment system across all of the online auction operator’s international sites. Since then PayPal has expanded its offering and it now sits alongside debit and credit cards as a payment option on an ever-increasing number of e-commerce sites. Whether that online performance will translate to dominance in face-to-face transactions remains to be seen. Today, the company boasts more than 100 million active accounts and processes an average of US$315 million in payments every day.3

The payments market is evolving fast and this evolution will chase convenience, speed, and data collation. Witness the initial success of Apple’s contactless payment system Apple Pay, which allows consumers to purchase and pay for goods and services simply by placing an iPhone 6 in proximity to a point-of-sale terminal. Apple Pay is just launching in the UK, but it currently accounts for US$2 out of every $3 processed by contactless systems in the US.4

One of the single greatest obstacles is ubiquity – the consumer can be faced with a myriad ways to pay. We are now witnessing a global wave to introduce 24/7 real-time bank account-to-account transfers in all the major jurisdictions. This shift, coupled with regulatory reform, will create opportunities for new players to enter the market and provide data aggregation services and payment initiation options to give life to the Internet of Things revolution.

The use of pre-paid cards is also on the rise. A 2012 report from MasterCard5 predicts that the market for so-called e-money (cards pre-loaded with cash) will be worth around £822 billion by 2017. If these numbers are impressive, they represent only the tip of the FinTech iceberg.

Borrowing and depositing is also undergoing something of a revolution, thanks in no small part to the emergence of P2P lending platforms. In the UK P2P lending emerged shortly before the financial crisis with the launch of Zopa in 2005. Other platforms such as Funding Circle and RateSetter followed. To date, the industry has lent a cumulative figure of £2.6 billion and the market is growing. Lending in the first quarter of 2015 came in at £459 million, an increase of one-third on the previous three months.6 These figures are small when compared to the sums advanced by the big banks but it is a young and rapidly growing market.

Importantly, the P2P market not only provides businesses and private borrowers with a source of cash, it also offers investors and savers a place to deposit cash and earn higher interest rates than in a conventional bank account. Elsewhere, challenger banks – some of them digital only – are also moving in on the deposits market.

Some aspects of FinTech innovation remain well outside the mainstream. Digital currencies, such as bitcoin,7 potentially offer an opportunity and means to exchange value, but most would agree that the real value will emerge from the application of the supporting distributed ledger technology. The use of the distributed ledger brings additional value in the recording of non-financial asset ownership and, coupled with digital currency, could provide a platform for future innovation to reduce costs and speed up transactions. Effective regulation of this environment is required to reduce risk for all participants.

Move away from the corporate face of FinTech innovation – PayPal, Apple, Google, et al. – and thousands of companies are working in technology hubs around the world on ways to make familiar activities such as stock trading or money transfers not only more convenient, but also more attuned to the way consumers use their smartphones, tablets, PCs, and smart watches. This wave of innovation is not only coming from established FinTech centres but also from emerging hubs. For example, Johannesburg has become a centre for bitcoin development, while across Africa entrepreneurs are developing mobile-based banking and payment systems appropriate to the local telecoms and financial services infrastructures.8