Consumers are buying more online for retail products: about 30 percent of them, according to the latest industry indicators.
Logistics dominates the news cycle today, as supply chain challenges expose the economic importance of moving goods efficiently between endpoints domestically and across borders.
This will be the year luxury brands strike back and use payments to help them reinvent the e-Commerce experience.
Proximity will no longer be a barrier or a business competitive advantage. Selecting a place to shop used to be based on how convenient it was from home or the office. Not anymore, consumers are shopping more online for retail products.
It used to be that choosing a place to buy takeout was the time it took to drive and get it. Restaurant delivery drivers eliminate that concern. More consumers are ordering more takeout from restaurants for home delivery: about 80% of them, up from about more than half since the middle of last year.
The reality of the digital shift is that consumers are no longer limited by how localized something is: the item they want to buy, the service provider they want to hire, the employer they want to work for, the coach they want to manage them, or the concert or movie they want to see. Or almost anything else that needs to be done.
Logistics will become the core competency of the winners of the connected economy. This is because it dominates the news cycle today, as supply chain challenges expose the economic importance of moving goods efficiently between endpoints domestically and across borders. In a connected economy where the digital transformation of industry sectors is as much about transformation within those sectors as it is across them, logistics is something different.
In banking, services that were previously only done in person are being provided in a digital-first way. In healthcare, logistics is about integrating data and connected diagnostic devices into the online experience so that the digital visit is as informative as the physical one. For retail, it goes beyond mastering the logistics of delivering goods to eliminate the boundary between physical and digital channels.
The push for real-time payments will begin to create a credible threat to debit card payment transactions. In America, it has been heavily criticized for being late to the real-time payments party. It's a practice that ignores the complexity of having some considerable transactionality and the challenge of enabling a new payment mode on every account in every account.
The pandemic has changed things. So has the growing access to digital services by banks and FinTechs for use cases that leverage those vectors and consumer demand for instant payments.
The crypto strategy will radically change the economy. The risk, is not just missing the opportunity to get it right, but lacking the fundamentals to know how to score, play and win the game. And having regulators set rules for the game that determine who can take the field and how many goals they can score. Perceiving evidence of this over the past two years as endless news accounts of companies using cryptocurrency to make what they do seem more relevant. It doesn't help that innovators create altcoins out of thin air just because they can, for no real purpose other than to keep the speculation bubble alive and keep the masses of PR people busy. Consumers are now more aware of real-time payments and want to receive more of their payments that way, and senders have obviously gotten the memo.
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