Riding The Wave Of Disruptive Marketplaces

In A Decade of Digital Transformation in 12 Months, 46 C-suite executives spoke with PYMNTS for its Q2 eBook on what the world will look like as recovery rolls on and the next iteration of normal rolls out. In this excerpt, Hassan Issa, COO of Limonetik, talks about the wave of disruptive marketplaces that has emerged since the pandemic began. “Will these new disruptive experiences remain clusters or, on the contrary, become the standard of tomorrow?”

Read the entire eBook here.

According to the Research and Markets report, the digital transformation market is expected to grow at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 22.7 percent from 2019 to reach $3,294 billion by 2025. Among other things, the explosion of digital has direct consequences in the world of work. COVID-19 has forced HR to quickly adapt to the management of a new organizational model, either in the recruitment process or in managing staff with remote work. The digital workplace was already born and ready to increase productivity. With its mature technologies, this operating model is designed to enable employees to be connected anywhere and all day long. As a key component for businesses, the digital experience is now commonplace and, what accelerated remote work, for instance, boosted eCommerce.

While organizations need to support their employees working remotely, they must also continue to interact with their customers to generate revenue. The lockdowns have reinforced or created new automatisms among consumers. Once unconfined, these digital consumption habits persist because they have become a reference model.

At the heart of this environment is the marketplace phenomenon. Digitalizing and powering the customer experience, offering a wider portfolio of products and services, monitoring customer behavior and managing all the technological, logistical and compliance issues, marketplaces make their economic development as a pivot of the digital transformation. The industry has had to reinvent itself, whether in the development of the consumer experience, or in the proposal of innovative solutions to rapidly adapt to the change. Probably IA will be one of the tools that will allow marketplaces to enter the new era of commerce, opening up new services, improving cybersecurity, maximizing the shopping experience, the management of the big data and targeting.

And when you speak about business, you speak about payment … the payment supports all these evolutions. Transparent, it adapts to the social and societal mutation throughout the world. From biometric to mobile payment, from online banking to prepaid vouchers, payment by installments or peer-to-peer payments, many innovative experiences are launching each week. Today eWallets are on the rise. Seen by experts as the leading payment method in the four largest European eCommerce markets (France, Germany, Spain and the U.K.), eWallets are the kings in Asia with Alipay and WeChat Pay (55 percent and 39 percent market shares in 2020) while PayPal dominates the U.S. online market with 54 percent and 48 percent market shares in 2020.

In B2B as well as in B2C, the eCommerce trend turns to globalization. Managing cross-border trade brings many new complexities. Besides the problems of logistics, languages or currency conversion, merchants have to propose many different payment methods adapted to consumer habits abroad; transaction flows must be compliant with all regulations, etc. Digital makes it possible to meet all technical and regulatory constraints, and enrich the customer experience by simplifying the purchasing process and by offering local and multicultural solutions.

But it doesn’t stop there. A new wave of even more disruptive marketplaces is emerging. Like Nifty Gateway, they integrate blockchain and cryptocurrency. Will these new disruptive experiences remain clusters or, on the contrary, become the standard of tomorrow?