Celent has released a new report titled Personal Payments and Commerce 2017: A Year in Review. The report was written by Zilvinas Bareisis, a Senior Analyst with Celent's Banking practice.
This year Celent published the seventh edition of its annual trends review in retail payments. This is a companion to the Top Trends in Retail Payments: 2017 Edition report.
In 2016, the first significant steps towards the vision of contextual commerce have been taken, yet much work remains to be done. Concepts like chatbots, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud, and voice-based interfaces have real potential to redefine our payments experience.
Adoption of mobile wallets has so far been disappointing. And yet, there are reasons to be cheerful: the three major wallets made strides in availability, acceptance, and value proposition.
Although CurrentC from MCX, a merchant consortium, is consigned to history, merchant apps are well positioned to drive adoption of mobile payments. In P2P, it will take a sustained marketing effort for Zelle and the banks to succeed. Zelle and its competitors will coexist by serving different segments or different customer needs.
“Successfully weaving compelling consumer experiences across multiple companies and seamlessly embedding payments is difficult, but we expect to see more in 2017,” commented Bareisis.
“We believe that supporting in-browser transactions will be a critical driver for the adoption of mobile payments. We expect mobile wallets to continue to get better and to focus on their comparative advantages over cards,” he added.
