Payment firms turning focus on Data Containerization, IoT among new tech

With the government encouraging people to go cashless and providing more opportunities for payment solution companies to setup innovative platforms, India is witnessing increase in adoption of digital payment methods.

According to RBI figures, till March this year, digital payments have climbed more than five times since 2015 to 22.4 transactions per person. The recent decision of the RBI regarding regulatory sandbox for fintechs in India should further encourage payment solution companies to focus more from the technological point of view to make digital payments more reliable and user friendly for the people.

There’s lot to look forward to for the payment solutions industry as they turn towards new technologies or using the technologies available in the market in an innovative way. Both global and Indian companies certainly are willing to take big strides in this regard and certainly looking to make a mark towards it. Recently, Philip G. Heasley, CEO of ACI worldwide and Jeremy Wilmot, Group President, ACI Worldwide spoke to Moneycontrol regarding key technologies that are making an impact in the payment solutions market.

According to Wilmot, “The key technologies in payments industry are those technologies that can support very scalable and a very secure environment – the technologies that has the ability to process billions of transactions a day in the future, technologies that have ML capabilities and AI so as to use data from payments, to protect the payments and then predict what is going to happen with individual payment transactions are going to have key advantage in the coming time.”

He also pointed out at using existing technologies in the market in innovative ways for smaller companies. “Sometimes people think that advance digital payments require new technology, but that is not always true. For example, the SMS technology which has been there for over a decade now on all the phones. You can have real time validation of transactions on an interactive automated basis,” Wilmot added

Keeping the future in mind and the key technological trends that will make a big impact, Heasley feels smaller companies need to start investing in to play a big role in the payments industry. “Blockchain technology is going to have a real place going forward in the payments industry especially from the reconciliation and record keeping of historical transactions point of view,” he adds.

Heasley went on to say the importance of cloud and how it should be taken seriously keeping the broader perspective in mind. The third technology he pointed out to is Data Containerization, where, instead of running big programs companies are going to start slicing services into reusable containers using this technology. The places where users will start and stop payments which are endpoints will be containerized.

“Artificial intelligence is also going to play a big role in analysis of the data we receive and use accordingly. Self-healing kind of networks is also going to play a big role whether you do it through a cloud or other methods ie., basically you will never be down and always ready. But the major thing that is going to drive all of this is IoT which very few people pay notice to,” he added.