Leaving the grocery store without going through the checkout lane… A refrigerator that orders milk from Amazon when you’re low to be delivered to your doorstep by drone… An immediate deposit of funds to your account to make you whole following fronting the bill on your lunch date with friends. While at first these concepts may seem like a scene from “Total Recall” or “The Jetsons,” these were real suggestions by panelists at the Innovation Project Conference I attended in Cambridge a couple of weeks ago.
These exact scenarios, as I described above, are what tech companies and startups are testing to disrupt or improve, depending on your point of view, the payments space. It’s all about frictionless payments; making the payment piece invisible to the consumer in the shopping experience. That’s what tech companies and startups are exploring today, and what panelists and attendees debated. How with the internet of things and interconnectivity of the globe gaining momentum, these advances will change the way payments occur.
A group of visionaries, venture capitalists, Fintech companies, regulators and processors gathered on the historic Harvard University campus for two days to discuss how payments can enable commerce at the endpoints of many different ecosystems and opportunities. At the heart of the conversations was how companies can partner with financial institutions and one another to enable ubiquitous, frictionless, payments capabilities for consumers and businesses alike, no matter their location or fiscal status.
It was stimulating seeing such open and respectful sharing of ideas between many brilliant minds, willing to share thoughts and suggestions on how to improve the payments industry as a whole, with careful disregard for proprietary clauses. Panelists debated payments innovation, security, payments inclusion, speed and more. While I didn’t leave Harvard Square with concrete answers on what financial institutions have to do right now to win the competitive advantage of tomorrow, I can say that the payments industry will be changing dramatically over the next 5, 10, 20 years, and in order to stay relevant, now is the time to begin having these conversations internally and with possible outside partners.