Payment provider innovation across remittances, B2B payments, and retail card and noncard payments is setting a long-term growth runway. In the short term, providers must navigate a host of obstacles to enable more crypto users to become crypto payers—and so far they’re succeeding.

The pandemic, along with shifts in consumer health behavior, have heightened the need for medical payments innovation. With unpaid US medical debt approaching $200 billion, healthcare providers must take a patient-centered approach to enhancing their payment infrastructures.

Payments Ecosystem: This year will reveal how providers must adapt to lasting pandemic-driven digitization across payments channels, ranging from in-store retail to B2B ecommerce.

Increasing digitization among the 32 million US small businesses is changing the competitive landscape and forcing banks, acquirers, and fintechs to invest in next-generation features. These features range from payments and value-added services to outreach.

Payments Ecosystem: Diminishing analog payment use—as well as the battle for share between entrenched electronic payment methods and emerging challengers—will intensify the battle for customer spending this year.

EU probing Apple Pay: Restricting access to key NFC technologies on iPhones prevents EU banks from providing payment solutions, limiting competition. Mounting scrutiny could alter the duopoly’s payments dominance.

Payments Ecosystem: Acquirers and processors, networks, and issuers each play distinct roles in the payments purchasing chain. But those roles are shifting amid commoditization, new competitive dynamics, and technological innovation.

Watch the on-demand replay of our webinar, The Payments Ecosystem.

As online shopping continues to increase, gross payment volume (GPV) across digital commerce platforms in the US is expected to grow by 26.4% to reach $275.2 billion this year.

Noncard crypto payments are increasingly available to consumers and may also be attractive to merchants.

Open banking eliminates many of A2A payments’ pain points, making them an even more attractive option for merchants.

Improving B2B payment automation and resolving cash flow issues provides a route into the SMB payments market.

It helps Robinhood compete with banks, other fintechs, and other digital brokers by capitalizing on a shift to debit and younger users’ payment preferences.

Legacy players in the $774 billion remittance payments market risk being relegated by digital challengers—unless they improve their solutions.

The payments behemoth singled out digital wallets as a way to boost engagement going forward.

CanPay, SuperNet, and POSabit offer digital solutions to cannabis dispensaries, which have historically relied on cash payments.

Payments are set to break physical and digital borders in 2022. Innovations will make payments accessible across regions; super apps will address consumers’ financial needs all in one place; and lending will extend credit to once-inaccessible segments.