Tracking Payments’ Trending Topics

With a new year officially upon us, we are taking the time to look back at some of the most innovative and talked about topics spanning the payments industry in 2015. From the enormous cross-border payments opportunity to the ways in which small businesses are staying afloat in a rapidly changing payments landscape, the following list encompasses many of the areas that kept the ecosystem buzzing all year long.

Converting Shoppers To Buyers

While eCommerce has definitely had an impressive year, the issue of shopping cart abandonment continues to plague online merchants. Once a shopper has gone through the trouble of finding an online retailer and filling up their digital shopping cart with the items they want to buy, what’s standing in their way of “closing” the deal and committing to checkout? Understanding how to make it easier for consumers to do that can mitigate not only lost sales, but turn a shopper into a repeat customer.

The PYMNTS.com Checkout Conversion IndexTM with BlueSnap collaboration measures the result of shopping at over 650 U.S.-based eCommerce sites across 14 merchant categories, representing over 70 percent of all U.S. eCommerce spends, in order to understand and analyze the friction that consumers experience when they go shopping digitally.

Digital Banking

Technology has changed the banking landscape as we know it. The industry itself has long been dominated by behemoth banks and regional credit unions, but the rise of alternative financial solutions and institutions is causing a monumental shift in the traditional banking infrastructure. The gradual but steady rise of FinTech startups is disrupting the traditional brick-and-mortar banking experience to make it seamless, convenient and richer.

Each month, new entrants, established players, and major developments in the digital banking/financial services industry are defined and tracked in our Digital Banking TrackerTM, powered by Urban FT. The tracker serves as a forum for the space that frames and addresses the trends, issues and unique challenges players in the digital banking ecosystem encounter.

Digital Identity

Digital security and protection – or the lack thereof – made a huge impact in 2015. With so many data breaches and cyber attacks plaguing companies and institutions across the globe, the importance of safeguarding digital identities became abundantly clear.

In an effort to frame and address the key issues and trends facing the entities charged with efficiently and securely identifying and granting permission for digital identities, the PYMNTS.com Identity Tracker , powered by Oberthur Technologies, gives monthly insight into how individuals are empowered to access, purchase, transact, or otherwise confirm their identity. The tracker is designed to establish an organizing framework for identifying the many companies that offer key services needed to securely generate, store, transact and authorize or authenticate users in the ever-changing digital world.

Financial Inclusion

Reaching the underbanked and unbanked populations around the world has transformed into a big business. If banks are willing to set their sights on micro-enterprises and on cultivating financial inclusion, new research is showing there’s another $380 billion in market opportunity just waiting to be claimed.

The PYMNTS.com Financial Inclusion TrackerTM, powered by Mozido, provides an organizing framework for the many players interested in supporting digital financial inclusion services around the world and gaining a deeper understanding of the financial inclusion landscape, including governments, financial institutions, telecoms and retailers.

Mobile Point of Sale

The proliferation of mobile devices all over the globe has revolutionized the payments industry in a variety of ways. In both the retail payments and acceptance/point of sale environments, smartphones are enabling merchants to accommodate the form factors that consumers use today and move that point of interaction closer to the customer. As the technology behind the mobile point of sale continues to advance, retailers have been empowered to turn tablets into cash registers and integrated business solutions that move payment and checkout to wherever the consumer happens to be in the store.

The PYMNTS.com mPOS TrackerTM keeps a pulse on how mPOS is reinventing the commerce ecosystem by analyzing the impact mobile phones and tablets are having at the point of sale as well as profiling the players who enable commerce via either.

Omnicommerce

By 2017, the amount of Web and mobile-influenced retail sales is expected to reach $1.8 trillion. As consumers continue to take their shopping preferences across multiple channels – via mobile, online and physical retail locations – merchants are tasked with keeping up with omnishoppers by providing a consistent and seamless experience no matter where they choose to purchase. The path to omnichannel can be a complicated journey, which is why the Vantiv Omnicommerce TrackerTM, powered by PYMNTS.com, features industry-spanning research and insights that arm retailers with data to make smarter decisions for enabling omnichannel commerce.

To keep track of how retailers are meeting the digitally powered demands and expectations of today’s shoppers, the PYMNTS.com OmniReadi IndexTM, powered by Vantiv, provides a quarterly data-driven critique of the merchants who are, or are not, engaging customers across all of the channels in which they shop. One of the most important parts of serving omnichannel consumers is supplying the capabilities and services that make their shopping experiences easier as they move from channel to channel. Software developers play a huge part in helping merchants meet these needs, which is why the PYMNTS.com Developer TrackerTM, powered by Vantiv, provides a view into the breadth and depth of the work being done by eCommerce – and commerce-related – developers as well as a directory of the multitude of providers and technologies available in the payments landscape.

SMB Technology Adoption

Small businesses may be well aware of the new technologies and innovations available to help make their businesses more secure and streamlined, but research shows they still lack an understanding of how important these measures are and exactly how they can get there. The focus of the PYMNTS.com SMB Technology Adoption IndexTM, powered by Sage, is to examine the degree to which these entities have adopted or are in the process of adopting technology to facilitate payments.

Through an in-depth survey of nearly 700 small to medium businesses across the country, the study aims to find how these enterprises measure up against behemoths in their space, to discover their priorities and concerns with regards to payment acceptance and cash flow management.

Store Front Businesses

Small businesses are considered the heartbeat of local economy – they are the businesses consumers know and interact with on a regular basis while simultaneously keeping communities thriving and surviving. Store front businesses represent approximately 37 percent of all small business establishments in the U.S., roughly 3.4 million, those you would probably see on your walk up and down Main Street USA. The CAN Capital Store Front Business IndexTM, powered by PYMNTS.com, measures where these businesses are strong and where they need help.

The Index measures the well-being of this subset of the small business community and in 2015, the performance of local businesses in the sectors which surround communities, both merchants and service providers that are typically found in both urban and suburban locations outperformed the GDP, which grew by 0.6 percent in the first quarter of 2015.

X-Border Payments Optimization

Cross-border commerce quickly became one of the hottest topics of 2015, with research predicting the market itself would reach $300 billion by the end of 2015. But identifying how prepared merchants are (or are not) to take advantage of the opportunity is an entirely different matter. Each quarter, the PYMNTS.com X-Border Payments Optimization IndexTM, powered by Digital River World Payments, tracks the journey of 195 merchants who are vying for their share of that eCommerce windfall.

With an estimated 3 billion people connected to the Internet around the world, the door has opened to turn these global citizens into potential consumers. To help merchants make the most of the cross-border opportunity presented to them, the PYMNTS.com X-Border Payments Optimization Tracker provides a monthly insight into the cross-border payments landscape, as well as the growing number of players and payment processing services making waves in the space.