How Technology is Advancing Borderless Payments
As the speed of technological progress increases from year to year, we continue observing how new technology is quickly changing the modern-day business trend trajectory. More and more industries and spheres become revolutionized by the advancing tech development and it specifically continues to gain traction within the financial ecosystem.
Fairly recent additions to fintech, such as blockchain, cryptocurrencies, new payment ways and advanced security measures have been increasing scalability and penetration of financial services worldwide, making them available to the record numbers of users.
The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic saw the world go into a global lockdown and everyone to very quickly reevaluate the ways people do business and create payments in a complete overhaul of the entire global financial system. Businesses that have been traditionally over-the-counter, went online, order and delivery services sprouted like flowers after a rain and continue thriving. Of course, all this has called for massive changes and progress in online payment infrastructure. Things needed to be made quicker, safer, easier.
Cross-border transactions continue to rise post-covid. With more evidence of new forms of borderless solutions rising within multi-commodity based trading, let’s find out what key issues businesses face in this new world and how technologies strive to alleviate them.
Scalability
Online acquiring used to be a prerogative of large banking entities. With the majority of business sales conducted offline and the expenses one needed to set up an online shop, smaller businesses often referred to just having an instagram account and accepting under the table payments. Using an online acquirer services or creating a payment gateway for a website used to be expensive and full of problems. However, now that most of the previously hard-to-maintain website tech can be outsourced and used with the help of APIs, things have become much easier. The same goes for payment providers, they have started offering a much more flexible range of payment plans to accommodate customers of various sizes and budgets. Many, for instance, like Connectum Limited, a UK-based online payment services provider, have simplified the new merchant enrollment down to a very quick and easy procedure which can also be absolutely free of charge.
This type of approach has solved many pains for smaller businesses that want to go online and be legal, and it is great to see how new tech is catering not just to the needs of corporations, but extends to everyone.
Affordability
Tech like blockchain boasts an ability to sidestep centralised verification and get rid of the middle man, cutting down the number of intermediaries involved in the transactional process and creating a more cost-effective solution for international payments. However, while blockchain and cryptocurrencies offer one of the cheapest ways to arrange international payments, this kind of low cost still comes at a price. Not every business is yet ready to embrace it, blockchain has multiple legal issues with many countries of the world, to say nothing of how its security and privacy can backlash if users are not careful.
However, even putting blockchain aside, new technology has made setting up shop online much more affordable than it was only a few years back. Easy-to-use APIs are now available for a variety of payment services as commercial products. They allow users to quickly launch services without having to develop them, purchasing expensive boxed solutions and paying to extra hands just to maintain them.
Security And Safety
With the swift spread of online acquiring, safety and security of transactions, transparency of money flows and clarity of fund sources has become a major issue, as well as the rise of fraud. However, this is also where technology is bringing up the avant garde. With the transition to 3D-Secure 2.0 protocol across Europe, and its swift adoption of it by service providers far and wide, online transactions have become safer than ever. Now users will only be able to complete a transaction only if they additionally verify the payment with something they know, like a PIN number or a password, something they possess, like a token or a personal identifiable mobile phone, or a unique physical ID trait, like a fingerprint or the use of a facial recognition tech.
Aside from that, service providers continuously work at improving their anti-fraud AIs to prevent malevolent actions.
Staying on top of the rapidly progressing technology has always been a challenge for businesses, and yet, we continue to see how efforts to employ new tech have been paying off both for enterprises and for their customers.
