The year just gone has certainly not been a boring one in the payments industry.
Some of the most notable developments include the push by many big brands for mobile payments as well as the beginning of the fight to dominate the digital wallet market.
The NFC (near-field communication) technology has been the brightest light among all of the newly emerging types of mobile payments. Brands such as Starbucks and McDonald's among others have put their faith in this channel and installed terminals to accept those in their stores. There is however still a long way before NFC becomes an established payment method.
Towards the end of the year we also witnessed the beginning of the fight over digital wallets. With companies such as Google, Visa and PayPal all releasing early versions of their products based on this technology it will certainly be a story worth following for months to come. Digital wallets are seen by many as one of the main payment channels to be used by consumers in the future, so the competition here is likely to be fierce.
Finally fraud was, as ever, one of the main areas of focus for the payments industry. Fortunately, the number of breaches and people affected by them continued to drop last year. But this could change soon, as according to a report commissioned by PayPoint.net, new payment channels could reverse the positive trend back in favour of fraudsters.
Most of all though 2011 was the year of e-commerce and online payments. With merchant accounts and payment gateways now accessible to almost any type of business, many retailers have decided to finally make their products available for sale on the web. Both the number of online retailers as well as shoppers is rising at record levels, with many transaction records being broken by huge margins in the last 12 months. And we can only expect more of the same in 2012.
All in all it was a very encouraging year for the industry and we hope that the next one will be even better.
Happy New Year!
Eva Grzybek works for PayPoint.net Provider of Merchant Services