‘Merchants And Consumers Need To Be In Tandem’

We spoke to attendees at Money 20/20 to ask them their views on payment trends, predictions for the coming year and what the ideal payments ecosystem looks like.

Here’s an excerpt from our interaction with Derek Webster, Founder and CEO of CardFlight, which provides mPOS solutions.

PYMNTS: What are some trends that the payments industry in particular has faced throughout 2015?

DW:The EMV migration in the U.S. with the liability shift this month has been the biggest thing the whole year.

We are also seeing a lot of interest from developers for EMV. In August and September, we saw so many developers get in touch with us wanting to know about EMV hardware.

PYMNTS: What about predictions for 2016?

DW: The next six or nine months will be about shift, and after that, there will be a role for contactless and NFC payments.

We will also see a trend in building payments in NFC-enabled devices.

PYMNTS: What does the ideal payments ecosystem look like? 

DW: There are so many players in payments. It’s really challenging to get all of the people to move at the same time in a coordinated fashion, and so we are focused on getting the merchants whatever consumers are coming with. The ideal situation would be where the merchants are in sync with consumers.

Until we see technologies that allow for merchants and consumers to move in parallel, we are only going to see more incremental gains.

Derek Webster founded CardFlight, which provides mPOS solutions, in 2013. Prior to CardFlight he founded and ran LocalBonus.com.

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