PYMNTS’ Data-Driven Journey Through Payments Innovation

Oct. 20, 2009.

The United States was starting to see daylight out of the darkness of the worst financial crisis since the great depression. The Wall Street Journal reported that companies were starting to see profit improvements but weren’t ready to hire workers laid off during the crisis.

Many analysts speculated whether the Dow Jones average could stay above 10,000. “The Hangover” and “Harry Potter” ruled the box office. Taylor Swift was recovering from having Kanye West steal her award at the Video Music Awards.

And at a conference in New York City, a new media and analytics platform called PYMNTS was launched.

The idea was ambitious and simple, and unless you saw some dynamics in the payments and banking space that PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster and a handful of other executives saw, the timing was horribly wrong.

There were five other long-established incumbents, and most news was still analog, covering the predictable parts of payments and banking. But the press release announcing the launch shows that the original mission of PYMNTS hasn’t changed all that much. As Webster described it then, PYMNTS was “an online media channel that captures user-generated and expert-driven commentary, information, news and analysis on ‘what’s next’ in the payments sector, worldwide.”

“PYMNTS.com delivers an important ‘first look’ at what’s important to the sector, by those who are shaping its future,” said Webster in the release. “We’re often asked to help our clients define ‘what’s next’ in the context of the new technologies, new entrants and new business models and observed an opportunity to aggregate user-generated and expert-opinion on those topics in an engaging medium. We hope that PYMNTS.com will play an important role in both stimulating and documenting the exciting developments that have and will enable commerce worldwide.”

That might have been hard to see on Oct. 20, 2009. But Warren Buffett saw it. Buffett’s Business Wire, a Berkshire Hathaway company, was a JV partner when PYMNTS launched. As a long-time investor in payments and banking, Buffett provided his perspective on the sector that PYMNTS would address at its launch. Here’s a quote from those remarks, that is now prescient in its tone and content.

When asked if he saw a comeback for consumer spending, he said: “Not for a while. People had an experience a year ago that they’re not going to get over quickly. But the factories are there. The human potential is there. The system is there. It works. Over time, your kids will live better than you and I live. Our grandchildren will live better than they do. This country moves forward. And if you take the 20th century, we had a great depression, we had world wars, we had a nuclear bomb, we had a flu epidemic. We have all these things. And at the end of the 20th century, the average American was living seven times better than the start of the century. It’s amazing. The Dow Jones average had gone from 66 to 11,400. And the country works. You don’t have to worry about that.”

PYMNTS set out to track that recovery from the lens of how businesses and consumers pay and get paid and how the digital economy would evolve. In 2009, that was a limited and limiting proposition. But the world was about to change.

In 2012, PYMNTS Intelligence was born as a way to add data science to measure the consumer and business behavioral changes being wrought by the innovations coming from incumbents and FinTechs.

In the last three years, PYMNTS Intelligence generated more than 1.4 billion data points and surveyed over 2 million companies and consumers across 26 countries, producing 1,000 reports.

Most recently PYMNTS Intelligence produced the landmark “How the World Does Digital” series, which covered 11 countries and 60,000 consumers who represented 800 million digital lives comprising half of the global GDP. The study tracks digital transformation across 40 different activities showing how consumers work, live, pay, have fun, stay well and more. This report — delivered now for the third year by PYMNTS Intelligence — is an unparalleled snapshot of the digital innovation critical to understanding the evolution of the global digital landscape.

As the payments and banking industry moved toward digitalization, the rise of FinTechs and the move to a mobile-based economy in the back half of the 2010s, PYMNTS kept pace through insightful coverage and actionable data.

But then March 2020 happened, and the world was in the midst of a pandemic. The social changes it put in motion accelerated the transformation of the payments industry and the entire digital economy.

Card-not-present became preferred instead of occasional. Contactless payments went from the engineering department to the consumer seemingly overnight. Digital wallets did the same. And PYMNTS Intelligence tracked the pandemic-fueled changes daily.

Among the findings, 30% of Americans made their first mobile wallet and contactless purchases during the early stages of the pandemic; by July 2020, more than half of U.S. consumers were using touchless payments; and about one-third of shoppers reported that contactless payment options had become their preferred method for making purchases.

After a landmark piece on Seven Trendlines that would define the future of this ecosystem in January 2020 — just before the pandemic took hold — Webster’s methodology and thinking resulted in the ConnectedEconomy platform in June 2021.

“More than just a different way to talk about innovation, the ConnectedEconomy is a framework for understanding how people and businesses will engage over the years to come and a body of research and insights to help executives size and seize their connected economy opportunities,” PYMNTS wrote at the time. “The ConnectedEconomy consists of the businesses that rely on the Internet as a fundamental aspect of how they provide goods and services.”

As it heads into its next phase, PYMNTS has gone from a media platform to a content and analytics platform that sees more than 10 million monthly unique visitors, delivering content with one eye on the present and another on the future. It has avoided “hype cycles” in favor of balanced critical questioning of key issues and trends that help innovators and business executives take full potential of the innovations that will drive payments and the digital economy.

Now, on this our 15th birthday, we stand at the doorstep of the second half of a decade like no other in modern history. Innovations like tokenization, embedded payments, generative artificial intelligence, open banking and pay by bank will recreate what it means for consumers and businesses to pay and get paid securely in the ConnectedEconomy.

PYMNTS was there at the beginning of this revolution, and we will continue to examine and shape its future and give voice to those who see innovation as the roadmap for a powerful, inclusive and transformative digital economy.