The incumbent outlines its response to an increasingly fragmenting payments landscape offering to support old and new customers alike by helping them de-risk major technology investments with the provision of a gateway service.

The development of digital platforms that enable direct global money transfer is a nascent but fast growing business model from the remittance industry. The model does not envisage traditional banks as part of the long term plans, and competes with the largest global money operators head on.

New payment options in the market are creating new opportunities, making competition fiercer, and reducing the use of cash and cheques.

Banks are integrating new technologies into their core businesses to improve their digital banking presence and speed-to-deliver

The People's Bank of China has established an integrated system to connect banks, merchants, and retailers to facilitate increased transactions, which grew 74.5% to $913.5 trillion in 2015. With growing consumer spending, financial institutions in China have to step up to meet the needs of retail clients.

Globally, banks and non-banks are testing whether QR codes to merchants and consumers can provide a simple solution for payments.

Australian banks are moving towards increased digitalisation, leveraging technological advancements to ensure seamless customer experience in providing better retail banking products and services.

As trials move into actual implementations, global financial markets and monetary systems will be disrupted and transformed.

The mBridge pilot has tested the issuance of over $12 million in central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and payments of over $22 million on bridge. It has resolved long-standing pain points in traditional cross-border payment systems and is rooted in the roadmap for distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based infrastructure, as well as CBDC.

Central banks worldwide increasingly recognise the benefits of wholesale central bank digital currencies (wCBDCs) in making remittances and other cross-border transactions cheaper, faster and safer. Pilot projects set in motion seek to identify opportunities and risks as well as explore the possibility of having shared infrastructure to automate cross-border payments, foreign exchange and settlements.

The current disintermediation in payments and MSME lending marks the tip of the iceberg, and retail deposits may be the next battleground

With a large portion of Africa’s population still lacking access to traditional banking services, particularly in places banks fear to tread, payment providers have stepped into the breach, gaining in popularity for offering services beyond the usual payments, money transfer and savings