In reviewing industry expert’s assessment of current trends, we see similar themes emerge: the rise of contactless payments and the decline of cash payments; cross-border payments increasing, while payment saturation rises; fraud protection. The last few years have witnessed a meteoric rise of fintechs.

All of this, perhaps, guided by Young Millennial and Gen Z’s impact on the payment culture and the ever available smartphone. These consumers just want a seamless, painless, payments journey. Banks and fintechs will have to adapt to the expectation for speedy and intuitive payment methods in order to capture the short attention span of consumers.

But across all these trends, what are the ones that will most affect our customers? We think it boils down to these three “mega-trends”:

• • Simplify Your Modernization – Moving to an open and agile framework is critical. However, the safer, more measured response to Rip and Replace is adapting to the new consumer expectations through incremental change via a microservice and API-focused architecture. This allows FIs to migrate to more nimble solutions through bite-sized chunks rather than completely starting over from scratch without major reprogramming or downtime. In the end, FIs will be more strategically positioned to meet the latest needs of their customers quickly.

• • Fraud protection – Much like the finance sector they infiltrate, fraudsters have become increasingly more advanced. And the influx of new payment channels has created exponentially larger amounts of data that must be protected at all costs. As consumers continue to shift their payment activity towards mobile and online channels, the importance of fraud prevention becomes paramount. And while we hear consumer’s need for speed, it shouldn’t come at the cost of security. Does speed trump security? Maybe real-time isn’t the answer, but meeting consumer’s need for convenience should be the focus.

• • Cross-border payments growth – The majority of businesses still do not sell across borders, but with exponential growth of cross-border payments and the expectation that countries will soon collaborate to write global standards, this will change. Speed doesn’t just impact domestic payments. All the improvements made to domestic payments will undoubtedly shift towards cross-border next. The days of cross-border payments being slow and expensive are behind us.

As these mega-trends further develop, the global payment landscape will continue to shift. Banks, merchants and financial services organizations will need to keep up with these profound changes. Euronet’s Ren solution supports our customers and partners in quickly adapting to changing business practices, which leads to greater efficiency, increased profitability, and a better customer experience. Ren’s focus on flexibility and industry standards makes it the ideal choice for modernizing legacy infrastructures and staying ahead of groundswell of change.