Earlier this year Missive teamed up with John Chaplin, Chairman of the Global Payments Innovation Jury, to support the compilation of his biennial report. The Global Jury is a panel of 70 CEOs and senior industry executives from 37 countries across 6 continents, making it the most global body to explore payments innovation. Every two years, the Jury convenes to compile a global research report into payments and fintech innovation trends.

The top findings of the 2017 Jury:

• Asia retains payments innovation crown: While Asia remains home of the most payments innovation, a position it has held consistently since the inaugural 2008 Jury, for the first time in nine years, Europe has leapfrogged Africa, North America and Latin America to take second place in the global rankings.
• Growth stage funding shortfall: While investment continues to flow into fintech companies, the 2017 Jury highlights that attracting investment at specific points in the lifecycle of a business can be difficult. The Jury reports that on a global level, the picture is of a marked shortage of growth stage capital for payments companies in all regions with a third of the Jury describing it as poor or very poor.
• Collaborate to innovate: The Jury identifies collaboration between startups and larger, established players as a win: win strategy. It can help startups to scale up and succeed whilst simultaneously solving the problem that larger organisations in financial services have in innovating.
• B2B versus B2C: The 2017 Jury also explored which payment sector offers the most profit potential for new business ventures. In developed markets, such as Europe the majority see a B2B investment as more likely to generate good returns than B2C, citing the consumer expectation that payment services should be free and the major marketing investment required to build a substantial user base. However, in markets such as Asia and Africa, the sheer size of the population still without access to formal financial services makes the Jury lean more towards B2C
• Growing importance of APIs: Addressing top industry trends, three quarters (73 percent) of the Jury believe that APIs are going to play an increasingly significant role in the payments market over the next three years. However, the Jury did not see APIs as a risk-free approach and voiced concerns about security risks and who gets blamed by consumers when things go wrong.

As in previous years, the 2017 Jury picked out the area of payments innovation that they see as most over-hyped. It’s worth noting that the fact that an innovation is over-hyped doesn’t mean that it doesn’t deliver benefits for the industry, rather that the claims made are exaggerated. And hype tends to lead to misallocation of investment resources.

And the winner of 2017 over-hyped award? Drum roll please … distributed ledger technology.

You can read the Global Payments Innovation Jury Report 2017 in full here: https://innovationjury.com/. Similarly, if you are interested in undertaking a piece of research or would like to explore communications support from Missive, please contact hello@missive.co.uk.