Last week we shared five current trends in the digital payment landscape, which included less monopoly, greater adoption, more options, greater awareness, more alternatives, and more methods. If you didn’t get a chance to read part one, you can grab last week’s feature or read Digital Payments Industry Trends online.

This week, we’ll continue the conversation with more highlights.

6. More methods — Card-based payments were recently based on swiping at a machine and e-commerce card, not present (CNP) transactions. However, these days, contactless is where it’s at, and thanks to near field communications (NFC) and EMV, we have Tap-to-Pay, and thanks to QR codes, we have scan-to-pay. Digital wallets also enable mobile app payments, whether between peers or from consumer to business; and biometrics, whether via fingerprint authentication, pay-with-voice or pay-with-face.

7. More collaboration — In much the same way that JETS, which operates MultiLink, is owned by seven local financial institutions, Zelle (previously mentioned) is a payments network that lets you send money from your US-based bank account to someone else’s US-based bank account, owned by seven of America’s largest banks. Paypal has long allowed US-based users to connect their bank accounts to their Paypal accounts. UPI in India, a Government-led initiative, has offered affordable access to real-time payments to hundreds of millions of people. International remittance services collaborate similarly with local financial institutions to facilitate the cross-border movement of money. We expect this trend of collaboration to continue.

8. More integration — From a technology standpoint, application programming interfaces (APIs) are what companies usually use to enable the collaborations mentioned above. These APIs allow collaborators to securely connect to a company’s technology and business capabilities and make different processes more efficient, from authentication to procurement to delivery. Once businesses determine that exposing more of their business processes to their partners is viable from a risk and revenue perspective, API development and integration will continue to increase. Look for this trend to also continue.

9. More regulation — As more public-facing products and services are launched, governments must protect the consumers of those products and services. As such, we are already seeing and will continue to see more government policy and legislation crafted to guide a lot of fintech and digital payments activities.

10. More investment — Analysts report that fintech investment globally smashed all records in 2021, doubling 2020 figures to hit US$100 billion. Digital payments are still very much in their infancy in the Caribbean, and market penetration is still low, with massive room for growth. As far as the trends for our region are concerned, new digital payments products and solutions continue to be built and launched. We believe that investments in these products will continue to increase as we reduce cash-based transactions and improve financial inclusion.

The above list is by no means intended to be exhaustive, and each point certainly doesn’t cover everything there is to discuss under it. Are there any glaring omissions you think should have been included? Let’s discuss this on Twitter or LinkedIn @KyleAlewis and @NardaVentura — we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Kyle Lewis, co-founder & CTO EzeePayments.com, member of the Jamaica Technology and Digital Alliance