When we think about financial inclusion, it’s tempting to associate it with poorer populations in emerging countries where cash is still the driver for a high percentage of transactions. Even though 43% of sub-Saharan Africans have an account at a bank or with a mobile money service provider(1), the vast majority of purchases are still completed using cash. In Nigeria, for example, the rate is 95%.

In today’s fast-moving world, convenience and security are essential to success in payment. This has become even more relevant in the face of unpredicted challenges posed by the post-COVID ecosystem we now find ourselves in. Many behaviours have been impacted by the crisis, compelling consumers and merchants to move away from the physical world of commerce. In this article, we will focus on the Polish market, where these changes have been clearly demonstrated through dedicated studies. 

In the past decade the increased interest in sustainable transportation has been pushing the EV manufacturers, infrastructure developers and charging station makers to constantly innovate and improve the century-old technology. The race is on for a better drive range, efficient charging, superior battery capabilities and of course outstanding customer experience.   

Not so long-ago, companies relied on servers and systems that resided in their own premises. If more capacity was needed a new server would need to be spun up, a task that could take weeks and would then need to be maintained, kept up to date via patches and capable of scaling as the company grew over the following years. This was a complex and costly exercise, one that would frighten the hardiest of IT managers.

Open Banking, the UK’s implementation of Europe’s Second Payment Services Directive (PSD2), has had something of a slow start, with limited adoption, then COVID-19 and Brexit hitting but the principles behind it are solid. Its fundamental changes to how banks handle financial information mean that banks can now share the kind of information that you would see on an account statement with authorised providers – with a client’s permission of course – and add a host of security, scalability and flexibility features that open up the possibility for new revenue streams for merchants.

Recent years have seen the humble payment terminal evolve from a traditional, proprietary embedded operating system, into an open source point of sale (POS) utilising Android. This new paradigm comes with the ambition to accelerate customers’ digital transformation and reshape the traditional “point-of-sale” into a “point-of-interaction”.