Today In Data: Separating The Hope From The Hype In Payments

Hype is, and always has been, part and parcel to the world of tech. After all, almost no one bills their own innovations as the next medium-sized thing. But, as bitcoin and the blockchain have demonstrated over the last decade, sometimes the reality doesn’t live up to the advance billing. There are use cases still being discovered for both, of course, but it seems the early predictions that digital currency would overtake fiat currency were a bit over-enthused. Innovations have carried on in financial services, with big payments improvements for merchants when it comes to robustness and big shifts in consumer behavior toward digitization. Just after a decade, the blockchain isn’t driving all that many of them.

$2.1 billion: Amount projected to be invested in blockchain technologies in 2018.

140: The number of blockchain tech pilots PYMNTS has found over the last 18 months.

99.99 percent: Level of purity guaranteed by EmTech on its blockchain-based gold trading platform.

70 percent: Share of consumers who check their mobile banking app at least once a day.

10 minutes: The amount of time onboarding merchant service providers have before a merchant bails out of the process.