The Payment Landscape
The payments landscape is made up of a combination of entities which interact with each of these during the payment transaction process. All of these entities play specific roles in the payment processing cycle.
Users have ever-increasing ways to pay. From EFTs to sending money directly to someone’s cell phone number (like eWallets). Technology and internal teams are needed to support a diversity of types of exchanges. These relationships create a plethora of ways to pay and receive money.
As depicted, the current landscape is chaotic and there is no standardised path of processing a payment.
The landscape is constantly changing and adapting to new consumer needs and behaviours, technology changes, regulatory pressures and industry trends – making the landscape complex to understand even to users familiar with the ecosystem.
Complexity creates fear and the feeling of risk to users as they aren’t able to understand every single mechanism and path available to them. There are costs associated with these new ways of paying, along with the risk of fraud and cybercrime.
Can we prevent all these risks while still making payments as painless as possible? With PayShap entering the game, it will be interesting to observe how effectively it will move the African payment ecosystem towards an interoperable, uniform experience, or if there are more complexities to overcome.
