5. Digital Transformation in Payments

All main fundamental functions played by the global financial system are potentially ripe for disruption. A disruption mostly introduced by digital innovation, but not only, as a full spectrum of technological changes are happening across multiple fields and converging into a new future steady state that is difficult to predict. The payment sector looks like the first and most obvious entry point for new FinTech challengers—encompassing a number of innovations that extend to the creation of crypto currencies and of new “rails” where transactions can be cleared and settled—potentially without any role left for traditional financial intermediaries (including Central banks) and in real time and at almost zero costs. In an increasingly frictionless, timeless and super transparent digital payments systems, new revenues opportunities are however manifesting, with new extended roles for the “controllers and miners” of data—banks but not only (or not necessarily), with an intermediation (interconnection) role extending to all kind of goods and services.