NEW YORK—The key to 2022 when it comes to payments can be boiled down to one word, according to one person.
FIS Executive Vice President of Global Real-Time Payments Raja Gopalakrishnan told Pymnts.com the key to 2022, and the continued adoption of faster payments, all comes down to “simplification.”
“Adoption has just shot up,” he said, adding that If 2021 has been the year of digital payments, it should also be recognized as the year for real-time payments.
Exactly the degree to which adoption has increased is not yet clear, but Gopalakrishnan said indications are that real-time payments volumes globally are up at least 40%, with values surging by at least 30%.
And yet the market is still largely untapped, according to Gopalakrishnan, who cited data indicating that 80% of global real-time payments, about 55 billion transactions, are still tied to five countries: India, China, South Korea, Thailand and the U.K. That’s only a sliver of the roughly 56 countries that have laid the groundwork for at least some form of payment method, he said.
“The projections dovetail with Pymnts.com’s own findings on consumer demand for faster payments. In 2021, three times as many consumers received instant payments across a variety of use cases than in 2020,” the news outlet said.