ProPay On Mobile Innovation

The PYMNTS team caught up with experts in the payments field to ask them their views on industry trends, predictions for the future and what their ideal payments system looks like.

Here’s what Mike Cottrell, Director of Sales & Marketing at ProPay, had to say.

Biggest Trends

“Mobile. I don’t think that’s any surprise,” Cottrell said. “On the mobile side one of the things we’ve seen this year are products and services for the consumers to use on their mobile devices. That is changing how merchants are interacting with those folks and there’s a lot of excitement for it.

“We’re seeing a lot of innovation around mobile, and I don’t want to say mobile acceptance necessarily, but the use of mobile for making purchases. Whether that’s in-app or otherwise, we’re working with so many different companies in that arena.”

Cottrell went on to note that “a lot of these technologies are going after millennials.” Cottrell specifically offered the example of wearables being enabled with NFC, a trend he said is “going to be fun to watch.”

Preparing for 2016 and Beyond

Looking forward, Cottrell said he is most excited about the speed of innovation in payments.

“You’ve got the FinTech startups, they are seeing it as data, but it’s moving money,” he said. “The other thing that I’m excited about is I still think that large card brands are going to play a big role in driving out and supporting innovation in the marketplace.

“I see card brands continuing to grow stronger,” he continued. “They are becoming more nimble and some of the things that I see Visa, MasterCard and Discover doing are going to drive innovation in the FinTech sector and I think it’s going to make them stronger partners. Some of the things that they’re working on with Samsung and Apple Pay among other companies, it’s going to be a lot of fun.”

The Ideal Payments Solution

“I haven’t made up my mind on bitcoin yet. Until they can really solve some of the fraud issues, the under-belly of where certain industries like to operate, I think bitcoin will continue to have challenges,” Cottrell said. “However I see the blockchain technologies, that are the underpinnings of bitcoin, will be something that becomes a standard. There are companies looking at it and saying, ‘What can we do with it?’ I think in the future it’s not going to be encryption, it won’t be tokenization, I think the power of what blockchain can do will be an integral component of transactions whether they are ACH, credit or debit.”

“The other thing I see is just an open architecture,” Cottrell continued. “When you sit down and talk to developers, and we do it all the time on the payment facilitator side, they just don’t get why the banking and processing infrastructures are so archaic. … Developers say ‘I am here in the U.S., I have merchants in the U.K. and some in Asia, why do I need to go out and connect to seven different platforms? Give me one platform to service all of those customers.’ That’s what these software providers want. They can do it in every other industry, why can’t they do it in payments?”