We know this is a time of rapid innovation in the payments industry, but how did we get here, and what will the future look like? Those are some of the questions answered in The Payments Council’s latest report, “Pay Your Way 2025: The Future Of Payments.” PYMNTS.com spoke to Neil Aitken of Payments Council about online and mobile payments, NFC’s future, how we’ve come to expect instant payments capabilities and the industry’s current changes from a historical perspective.
Here’s an assignment for you: outline the entire history of payments, delve into the current trends and predict where the industry will go over the next decade.
That may seem like an impossible task, but it’s exactly what the U.K.’s Payments Council has aimed to do through it’s newest report: “Pay Your Way 2024: The Future Of Payments.” The comprehensive guide takes a look at payments innovation from a historical perspective, while also projecting how we could all be making payments well into the next decade.
PYMNTS.com spoke with Neil Aitken of Payments Council to discuss the report, analyze the current mobile payments boom (NFC included) and to gain a better understanding of there the payments industry could be headed from here.
Payments Council is an organization that, in Aitken’s words, “has responsibility to make sure that payments services in the UK work for everyone who needs them.” To do so, the Council attempts to take a long-term view when assessing payments, ensures payments processes are smooth and efficient and attempts to educate the public about payments and the everyday options available to them.
The Pay Your Way report will go a long way towards helping to satisfy that last goal: it’s 29 pages filled with an extensive history of payments, some of the industry’s biggest trends and predictions for where payments will stand in 2025 and beyond.
One of the coolest features of the report is a timeline that details how payments has evolved dating all the way back to 600 B.C., when the earliest coins were made in the ancient kingdom of modern day Turkey. The next two majors payments milestones occur in the 1200s, with the advent of the Bill in Italy, and in the 1600s, when receipts came to fruition.
According to Aitken, we’ve only recently seen as big a wave of innovation in the payments sphere since.
“Coins and bank notes met the payments needs that we all had for hundreds of years, and it wasn’t really until you got into the 20th century that we started to see more innovation again, and that spike in innovation was based around cards,” Aitken said. “People started to accept the idea of money being transferred electronically, and that all took place over the 90’s and 2000s.
We’re seeing far more innovation now than we ever have before,” Aitken said
As for the two biggest catalysts of payments innovation, Aitken cited two unsurprising but extraordinarily powerful forces: the Internet and mobile devices. More specifically, Aitken noted that those two forces have led consumers to expect the ability to conduct payments at any time and at from anywhere.
“One of the biggest things that influenced how we think about payments is this notion of being able to do banking 24/7,” Aitken said.
“Up until 2008 in the U.K.., electronic payments still took three days to be processed in most cases. And all of a sudden you had this disjoint between the idea of instant and 24/7, and people rightly began to question, ‘well if I can do everything else instantly online, why are my payments taking three days?’ Aitken noted. “And that really acted as a great spur for innovation.”
To hear more Aitken on the history of payments, how mobile and online commerce is changing the industry, the future of NFC and more, listen to the full podcast below.
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