The payments industry is the center of a multi-billion dollar war. Over the last 18 months more capital than ever before flowed into the space with massive funding rounds and large acquisitions. In May 2018 PayPal acquired iZettle, a mobile payments company offering small businesses with portable point-of-sale solutions, for $2.2 billion, attempting to strengthen its business solutions. In August 2019 Klarna, a payment provider with credit card-alternative payment methods, raised $460 million at a post-money valuation of $5.5 billion. And then there is Stripe, offering a wide range of payment tools for internet businesses, announcing a new financing round this September, bringing its valuation to $35 billion.
In this highly-competitive space, it's not enough for payment companies to be just that–a payment provider, a payment gateway, a facilitator of payments. The only way forward is in reinventing themselves, expanding their offerings and adding extra value to merchants and consumers. For payment companies this transformation is not optional, it's a matter of survival in the long term.
The future of payments is about knowing implicit and explicit wants and needs of consumers and merchants, and the next battleground is fashion.
