Original text in Linkedin. A quick memo on some things payments, based on what I learned yesterday at the event hosted by Qvik (the venue was packed, by the way!). These insights are from the panel discussion and some private chats afterward.

✍️ Cards may be legacy, but they work. Apple/Google Pay has managed to take that old technology and elevate the customer experience to a level that’s hard to beat.

✍️ Account-to-account payment methods, the promise of PSD2 and open banking, are still in the game. However, as the CX on xPay is so good, the benefit tends to be lower costs on the merchant side, so you need to incentivize customers with things like kickbacks. A Swiss service was mentioned as a successful example (probably Twint).

When customers are already used to NFC which activates automatically without opening any apps, it’s hard to get them back to scanning QR codes.

✍️ Click to Pay by Visa and Mastercard is a solution that strives to reduce payment friction by replacing the normal 3DS verification with a lighter solution. I heard comments that PSPs may not see a reason to support this, the customer onboarding is too complicated, and that merchants feel that customers are not aware of it.

✍️ Technically, it was mentioned that it’s based on delegated authentication. This was ”coming soon” already 5 years ago when I was more involved in the scene. I couldn’t figure out the exact maturity of delegated authentication in general; I need to google more.

✍️ Pix in Brazil was mentioned as a success story. It surpassed cards as the leading payment method in just 3 years.

✍️ Cryptos won’t be relevant in payments until the whole value chain supports them. A shorter-term possibility could be to use cryptos to charge your card, but still, why?

✍️ The border between POS and softPOS is disappearing. There’s an increasing amount of Android-based POS terminals that bring modern UX to traditional POS.

✍️ Tapping your phone twice at the moment of payment seems to be an acceptable loyalty experience for now. I didn’t hear any clamoring for a world where you could register your loyalty and handle payment with just one tap. There used to be an assumption that the so-called value-added services by Apple Pay would someday enable this, but perhaps that was just a pipe dream.

The panel was hosted by Juuso Paulasuo (SOK) and featured experts Panu Poutanen (Neonomics), Axel Aspelin (Adyen), Petri Ahti (Market Pay), and Olivier Philippe Moron (Nuvei).