The PYMNTS team caught up with experts in the payments field to ask them their views on industry trends, predictions for the coming year and what their ideal payments system looks like — and how far off that vision is.
Here’s what Jeremy Gumbley, CTO at Creditcall, had to say.
PYMNTS: WHAT ARE THE BIG TRENDS YOU’RE SEEING IN PAYMENTS IN 2015?
JG: Without a question, EMV has been the dominant force since data breaches took over in 2014. I think, in the second half of 2015 people realized that EMV wasn’t gonna go away, that the liability shift wasn’t gonna go away and more importantly cards were being issued. So, I would say, EMV has played a huge part in the shape of 2015, but has also driven development of some very interesting technologies — for instance, Apple Pay and a lot of NFC technologies that we are kind of seeing now like Samsung Pay and Google Pay, so I would say 2015 is definitely from my perspective the year of EMV.
PYMNTS: WHAT ABOUT PREDICTIONS FOR 2016?
JG: I think 2016 and 2017 are also going to be the years of EMV. I think EMV is causing mass reterminalization, which means that everybody is going to be getting a new terminal to support contactless, which then paves the road for Apple Pay, Android Pay and Samsung Pay, so I think that’s really very interesting. I think we are going to see a lot more growth in contactless payments.
PYMNTS: HOW WOULD YOU DEFINE THE IDEAL PAYMENT SOLUTION?
JG: It’s gonna get a lot faster and simpler to spend your money. I think payments will be far more context driven perhaps than they are at the moment. The whole payment system is potentially going to be more fluid than it is right now. I would also say IoT is quite most certainly coming to the forefront. Something we are very interested in at Creditcall is how to monetize the IoT, how do we facilitate payments in some very unusual form factors. We all have this concept of your fridge ordering from Amazon when your groceries are running low. What other things you could purchase in that environment? Is it your coffee machine speaking to order some more coffee? I think the monetization of those things and providing payment for it is suddenly going to be interesting in the future.
I think, what’s gonna be really interesting is to see is what Apple does with direct bank payments. So rather than having that credit card sit behind your Apple Pay account or iTunes account is whether they are going to take money directly from the bank accounts and completely sidestepping the couple of percentage points of Visa and MasterCard. I think that’s gonna be very interesting.
Jeremy Gumbley works as the Chief Technology Officer at Creditcall, a NYC-based company, which offers EMV migration solutions and payments gateway.