With globalization and technological development over the past decades, the process of payment has changed drastically. A payment transaction today has no borders, speed limit, and fewer transaction costs. Cash is losing its popularity, with credit and debit cards becoming the essential payment instruments, not to mention apps and internet stores.
Today, the trend of cashless transactions has been elevated by the current environment the world is in. The appearance of highly contagious Covid-19 has pushed people to change their payment habits. We are looking for ways of payment that do not involve any contact between the payer and the receiver. The idea that cash could potentially help spread the virus, although not confirmed yet, has changed the payment behaviour among consumers and corporations.
This creates an opportunity for digital banks, platforms, and other firms. But what are the benefits of a cashless society?
- Transactions executed online imply the reduction of staff and costs that are associated with operating with money. The reduction of transaction costs is a strong argument towards e-payments.
- Less circulation of cash will significantly negatively impact criminal activities, especially ones associated with money laundering. The ability to track transactions, which cannot be done with cash, will ensure consumer safety.
- Online transactions have the data about the sender and the receiver, which eliminates unreported and untaxed transactions and therefore decreases the shadow economy. This means that moving towards online transactions could help create a more stable economy.
However, transactional data can not only benefit to security and economy but also financial institutions and customers. As one of the trends every business has to consider is individualization of services, money could become a valuable source of information in order to comply with this trend.
In fact, information that a transaction holds may become of a greater value than the monetary token engaged in that transaction. Transaction data allows companies to draw conclusions about user behaviour, such as employment, connections, interests, health, location, and habits. This information can help not only banks or financial institutions but any company to provide more personalized service for customers. The strive for customer data and individualization has already been successfully implemented in platforms such as Alipay and WeChat in China. They create a seamless experience for customers, making payments embedded into people’s everyday lives and creating a smooth flow of their retail, banking or any other type of transaction journey, providing only things that are relevant for a particular customer. This is what only awaits Europe in the future: platformization of financial services, e.g. banking without banks, or embedded banking.
Transactional data could also be used to create a financial infrastructure that would eliminate financial institutions and banks at all in the future. We are already familiar with such applications since the appearance of blockchain technology. By creating digital currencies, or cryptocurrencies, companies, and platforms could provide a completely detached transactional infrastructure right on their platforms. Crassula helps financial institutions and Fintechs to build crypto digital banks where their clients can store and transfer their assets or money and exchange them.
The current situation in the world requests a switch to cashless, contactless, and therefore cleaner transactions. A significant factor for companies to not lose their customers in the near future could be its ability to integrate the bank’s capabilities into its operations.
The growing demand for cashless and embedded payments has led to the development of such platforms as Crassula. It serves as a bridge between the customer need for cleaner payments and the companies’ need to develop such solutions. Crassula platform offers to build payment gateways and collect payments online.
The process of digitalization of money is proceeding and may even pick up further speed. The decline in the relative importance of cash in most economies is mainly driven by the convenience and efficiency gains offered by electronic payment methods in combination with mobile devices. The transition to a cashless society could already be completed: Request for Crassula Demo if you want to build a merchant payments system or digital bank via crassula.io or message the commercial team at business@crassula.io
