How can anyone predict what mobile payments will look like in 2018? By exploring how innovation and regulation will come to define the various players in the industry. PYMNTS.com spoke with Ted Bissell, mobile payments expert at PA Consulting, to discuss how he breaks down mobile payments’ future into four categories, how traditional and disruptive companies can coexist, and why regulation will continue to be a factor in the years to come. 

It’s difficult to predict what the mobile payments world will look like six months from now. Guessing where it will go in 2018 is an even more daunting task.

Yet that’s what Ted Bissell, mobile payments expert at PA Consulting, attempts to do through his “Future of Payments for 2018” discussion: a presentation that aims not at providing one defining future for mobile payments, but rather creates several different “worlds” in which payments may grow to exist.

“We were looking to step outside of everyone’s more medium-term decision making, and we picked 2018 as a date that’s beyond the business plans of most people in the payments space,” Bissell said. “What we did is use our future worlds methodology … and created these different worlds as a good way of defining how the market is going to evolve. “

How does Bissell define these worlds? Imagine a grid with an X-axis and a Y-axis. Now imagine that the X-axis ranges from old school, traditional payments players on one end to disruptive newcomers on the others. For the Y-axis, visualize a highly regulated environment at one extreme, and an environment “relying on trust” at the other.

Each quadrant on the grid represents a possible space in which mobile payments’ future may reside.

In one quadrant is the “stable world,” which includes traditional businesses operating in a highly regulated environment. According to Bissell, this is the sphere that’s most familiar to people in the financial sector right now.

Moving along the X-axis, we enter the “new world with training wheels,” which Bissell cites as a place where businesses with new, disruptive ideas function, but do so in a regulated environment. He mentions PayPal as one of this quadrant’s best examples.

If he head down the Y-axis, the next quadrant consists of the “cloud world,” a world in which disruptive businesses function more through trust than regulation. Google is cited as a company currently moving into this world.

And finally, we have the “impossible world” in the final quadrant, so named because it’s difficult for traditional businesses to function in a deregulated environment. Bissell cites this as the least likely direction for payments to head in the future, and said no examples of a businesses operating in this sphere currently exist.

When asked on which world he thought payments was most likely to settle, Bissell gave an answer that many who are familiar with the ever-changing industry can most likely agree with.

“We’re seeing parallel developments moving in all of those directions right now,” Bissell said. “…but in the U.S., it’s likely that disruptive players capture a decent share of the market within a year or two.”

To hear more Bissell on what the future of mobile payments may look like, listen to the full podcast below.

Ted Bissell is a mobile payments expert at PA Consulting Group. Ted leads the mobile strategy team, applying experience drawn from over 25 years in the telecommunications, financial services and media industries. He has lead a number of projects establishing multi-billion-dollar mobile strategies and roadmaps in financial services, launched in numerous countries, and also in the regulated health care sector in the US. More recently, he has supported engagements with a Top-five Global Bank and the launch of a global mobile payments and loyalty platform, and moderated a dialogue on mobile financial services with the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).