The next decade of payments belongs to businesses, not consumers: Forrester

We live in a world where centuries of glacial paper-based payments evolution have given way to exponential digital payment innovation: a world of fragmentation across device, form factor, and payment method. Against this backdrop, regulators struggle to contain risk, and firms struggle to meet the changing needs of consumers.

By 2030, payments will become a feature in devices - including vehicles - with owners loading preferred payment options and usage rules into their profiles, outlines new report from Forrester ("The Future Of Payments")

"The last decade was all about mobile payments and the consumer. The next decade is all about building payment fabric for businesses - embedding technology, and programmable payments - as payments becomes an operating system,” says Forrester Principal Analyst Jacob Morgan

Over the next decade, Forrester finds:

• Tech titans will dominate the entry point for payments. Without regulatory intervention, tech titans will keep consolidating and orchestrating more of a customer's relationship with payments, assimilating value-adding services like "Buy Now Pay Later" (BNPL), card issuing, and P2P payments.

• Payment fabric providers will dominate the landscape. These providers will help intermediate layers of the payment stack and encapsulate payments technology in vertical platforms for industries such as restaurants or airlines. Interoperability will be a winning strategy - controlling the point of access or the point of integration to a collection of networks.

• Platforms will create their own payments networks. Taking cues from Singapore's Grab platform and Italian-based utility Enel, large firms like utilities and telcos will seek to orchestrate their own payment platforms - enabling tighter control over payments and creating new revenue streams.