‘EMV Will Continue Being The Elephant In The Room’

We spoke to Aaron Frank, CEO of Final — who was among the attendees at Money 20/20 — to ask his view on payment trends, predictions for the coming year and what the ideal payments ecosystem looks like.

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

AF: Tokenization and EMV have been the elephant in the room this year. Consumer control has been another big theme and it’s going to be a while.

PYMNTS: What about predictions for 2016?

AF: EMV adoption will continue to increase and rewards will have a major play because tokenization forces it. We’ll also see some weird stuff happen in Card-Not-Present situations and in small banks who haven’t adopted EMV because it’s not financially viable for them. There will be a rise in networks, typically a large stakeholder who holds the key to the kingdom. Players like Visa, MasterCard and Discover will want to build a payment ecosystem no matter what, because the customer experience really hurts if you have 25 checkout lanes. Banks are finally getting out of regulatory issues, and hopefully, we won’t have new regulation to push them to the shadow and we can see financial innovation happen.

PYMNTS: What does the ideal payments ecosystem look like? 

AF: Adopting to what exists. As someone earlier said, “The best payment experience is the one that goes away.” Identity management is going to be really interesting in the near to the mid future. In the long term, there will be another big breach like the Target breach where consumers will be screwed again and Washington will say, “I thought you solved this internally” and we didn’t. With that in mind, we will get more regulation around security. 

Aaron Frank is the CEO of Final, which plans to issue a credit card with more consumer control.