Review of developments in payment systems 2010: Future of payment systems

Over the next decade more outdated payment systems, particularly in SEPA, will be terminated, mobile phones will become increasingly important for initiating, authorizing and making payments, and will also be used by governments to deliver welfare benefits to the excluded and unbanked, and the new PSD infrastructure in Europe plus pressure from government and regulatory authorities will make it easier and more cost-effective for new payment services to be delivered by combinations of non-banks.

Also in this section:
Cheques
SEPA and PSD
Mass payments and collections
Payment cards
Mobile phones/Cellphones
Online micropayments
Future of payment systems

Major developments in payment systems lie ahead. Dave Birch from Consult Hyperion in the UK says, “I can detect a growing mood in favour of a return to community-based banking and other financial services, a return to a kind of social enterprise. This may spill over into payments as well, and the experiments that we see all around us in local, alternative and community currencies (such as the Brixton pound in London) might transmute through the use of easily accessed technology into a genuinely new phenomenon that will take us into uncharted waters.”