The PYMNTS team caught up with experts in the payments field to ask them their views on industry trends, predictions for the coming year and what their ideal payments system looks like — and how far off that vision is.
Here’s what Serge Elkiner, CEO and Co-Founder of YellowPepper, envisions.
This year was all about the tokenization of the transaction, according to Elkiner.
“I think that the industry started to realize that more and more security is needed in the transaction as it evolves outside of its current point of sale,” Elkiner explained.
“We’re migrating towards this tokenization type of transaction so it can be on any device, regardless of whether the device was built for payments or not,” he added.
“Because this year built the infrastructure for all these transactions,” Elkiner began, “I think that next year is going to be the year of implementation.”
The big players — Chase, Apple, Samsung, Android, China’s Alipay and India’s Paytm — and those who follow suit are “now going to build the value of the services on top of that infrastructure, whether it’s in the U.S. or more globally.” Now that the infrastructure is built, he says, “let’s build services that people want.”
“I think what’s going to evolve in the next five years is that payment, in my mind, should become more and more frictionless,” Elkiner describes. “There’s not going to be any more swiping of credit cards, or even taking out a phone and making a payment.”
The act of the payment, he explains, will be virtually eliminated.
“The payment will be so advanced, it will be integrated so deeply into the user experience at any level,” Elkiner said. “I think it’s going to be seamless, the same way everyone says, ‘I need to Uberize the transaction, so that I leave the taxi and it’s paid,’ — you never actually pay, it’s just paid. I think that’s how it will happen more and more.”
Serge Elkiner is Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of YellowPepper, an innovative company that provides mobile-banking and payment solutions across Latin America. Under Serge’s leadership, YellowPepper is revolutionizing the banking and payments industry by making mobile payments a reality. Across the region, YellowPepper currently provides financial services to more than five million monthly users.
Serge was co-founder and CEO of CorQuest Medical, a company that specializes in developing medical equipment and technologies to facilitate minimally invasive cardiac surgical procedures, which sold to Cardio3 BioSciences, a publicly traded Belgian company, in 2014. Prior to YellowPepper, Serge served as Vice President of Business Development at HelloTech Technologies, an Israeli firm providing remote monitoring and mobile payment solutions for vending machines. Born and raised in Brussels, Serge earned a Bachelor of Science in Accounting from Boston University.
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