Top Trends in Alternative Payments and Digital Identity Management

Changing payment preferences create ripple effects across banks, financial services, fintechs, and merchants. According to Gartner®, as of 2022, digital wallets had 49% share in global e-commerce payments, ahead of credit cards (20%), debit cards (12%) and account-to-account transfers (9%). Even for physical stores, digital wallets accounted for a 32% share in global point-of-sale payments, ahead of credit cards (26%), debit cards (23%) and cash (16%).*

Concurrently, the need for digital identity management across citizens' and corporations' digital identities is growing. Programs are already in place or progressing across Europe, India, China, UAE, Spain, and others. These programs would need to securely store and digitally access sensitive personal information, including national, education, financial, and medical identity, and more. Both banks and tech firms are increasingly part of the payments infrastructure as trusted custodians of customer identity as well as financial services product providers.

These combined developments dramatically expand the need for data security while maintaining consumer privacy and adherence to compliance regulations across geographies. This is a challenging task. Across industries, organizations that win must offer more digital payment choices to their consumers while ensuring their infrastructure can support more file types and larger files, more significant data needs for security, and more robust payment orchestration and analytics.

Source: Gartner®, Top Trends in Alternative Payments and Digital Identity Management, Vatsal Sharma, 28 June 2023