What Opportunities Will We Find When We Take Payments To The Edge?

Payments never used to be a hot topic of conversation.

At cocktail parties, not that long ago, when people working in payments responded to the quintessential “where do you work and what do you do” question, most were probably met with a lot of polite head nodding. Plastic cards served an important purpose, and everyone at the party probably had one (or more) and even used them, but most people didn’t necessarily associate “payments” with anything all that exciting or innovative.

Not anymore.

Payments executives are the cool kids at the party now – the innovators who are using mobile phones and the Internet and apps and technology to transform how business happens today – and where.

Thanks to their efforts, payments is no longer only initiated by a plastic card and a swipe at the point of sale in a brick-and-mortar retailer. Now, payments is initiated by buy buttons on a merchant’s online checkout pages and a raft of third-party social media sites. Payments is happening inside of apps on mobile phones and between people and businesses inside of mobile and online banking sites. And, payments is happening through any number of connected devices that are creating entirely new businesses and unlocking any number of new commerce opportunities in the process.

These innovators are taking payments to the edge – and beyond – and redefining payments and the commerce ecosystem that it powers.

We asked a few of these innovators about their plans take payments to the edge in 2016 and beyond. While each has their own perspective on where they see “the edges” and how they’ll harness the opportunities they’ll find there, they all agree on one thing: we’ve just scratched the surface of payments’ potential.

We couldn’t agree more.

We think that we’ll all find lots of interesting new use cases when we take payments to the edge. And the prospect of taking that journey will inspire lots of innovators to think big about how to bring those opportunities to life.

Eighteen of those payments pioneers are highlighted here.

Seven hundred of them will be assembled here in Boston on March 16-17 at Innovation Project 2016, including the CEOs of many of the companies that have been pushing payments to the edge for many years.

What opportunities do you think we’ll find when we push payments to the edge?

Let us know what you think. And, join us in March, when the conversation will push all that we know about payments to the edge – and even beyond.

To download the Payments at the Edge eBook, click the image below.