Payments sector poised for vast changes

The covid pandemic has unprecedented impact on the payments systems across the globe and there is need for wider adoption of technology:

Global consultancy McKinsey & Co has brought out The 2020 McKinsey Global Payments Report highlighting the shadow cast by the covid pandemic and how the crisis is having a significant and widespread effect on global payments across sectors.

The report looks at 4 areas of payments, which it considers “critical to achieving success in the context of accelerated change”: the merchant-acquiring business, which was already undergoing significant transformation; specific opportunity for small- and medium-size, enterprises, a segment that has historically been expensive to serve for large incumbents, but which has been the focus of many fintech attackers and is well overdue for a closer look; supply chain finance has long been considered to be a source of untapped value, but unlike other payments sectors, has struggled to develop enough momentum to address its structural challenges; and the challenge many established payments providers are facing the need to transform the operating model to meet the growing imperatives for efficiency, scale, modularity, and global interoperability.

We are bringing the salient points raised in the report in 3 parts. The first part discusses the overview of the global payments sector and how the events in early 2020 impacted the sector.

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