It's surprising and interesting how technology shifts, changes, matures and obliviates with time. Decades back neither WFH would have been a compulsion, let alone a fad nor would have obvious tools like a neglected browser, ambiguous name to photocopier or for that matter a thin line between payment mechanisms been a possibility.
While just about a decade back the answer to the same question will be starkly different — Can you go outside and make payments without cash? 2015 would say "No, Absolutely Not", while today in 2020 says "Why, Absolutely That's How It's Done, What Else!!?"
Payments infrastructure ideally co-exists with the e-commerce/online ecosystem. Hence, to create a seamless experience between a buyer and a seller, it is imperative payments become invisible. All the kinds of interactions that we have in our daily life, specifically the ones where the exchange of money is involved, will have digital payment infrastructure deeply cemented into it. There are possibly two ways to achieve this:
- Subscriptions — To put it simply, a customer trusts a business so much that the latter is authorized to debit money from the customer’s bank account without even asking them.
- Credit — Again going a simplistic logic, businesses know their customers enough that they will instantly be able to credit money to their customers at the time of purchase and collect it later.
We stand to witness various use-cases in the time to come. While initial adoption could be slow as trust matters a lot for activating a mandate, platforms focusing on trust and seamless UX would take a lead.
