The time of mobile finances
Financial products no longer have a captive audience where clients are concerned.In the past the reason why one entity got chosen over another was down to different commisions or charges. However, due to increasingly fierce competition between market players, these differences are far less significant.
Besides, there’s a second increasingly relevant factor that’s also come into play: usability. This concept covers everything from the ease of managing your finances to personalized services and the viability of total control of your finances from a mobile terminal. And while banks have competed to create digital applications to fascilitate mobile management, fintech has emerged to further revolutionize the market.
Today practically every city dweller has mobile applications to manage their finances, both to oversee their bank accounts and as an access point for investment tools. Users now carry their bank in their back pocket.
Credit cards are no exception to the phenomenon of fintech. Faced with this situation of financial hyperconnectivity, the card industry is studying potential strategies with care, particularly those that benefit from the integration of the Internet into our daily lives: the Internet of Things.
For this reason Mastercard has made mobile connectivity a key focus for its vision of the future. In an interview with the head of digital partnership at Mastercard this year, the future of connectivity was expressed thus: ‘Every device connected will be a commercial device, everything from wearables to washing machines and everything in between.’
Apart from being able to pay digitally, another key factor credit companies are exploring is security. Mid 2017, Mastercard acquired the company NuData Security, specializing in online security, mobile fraud prevention and biometric indicators.
Mastercard bought NuData Security in acknowledgement of a pressing need for security in online transactions: as the Internet of Things develops we are looking at over 50.000 million smartphones in use by 2020.
Innovation is needed when it comes to payment and transaction security and Mastercard holds annual innovation forums in various European countries to that end. At Opinno, innovation is our speciality and it gives us great pleasure to have been chosen by Mastercard to manage the company’s annual forums in Spain and Portugal.
Our team is responsible for all aspects of the technical management of the event, registration, video production, the management of platforms for audience interaction and TweetBeam Slido and last but not least, with conducting an audience satisfaction survey.
Under the slogan ‘The Future is Now’, Mastercard not only presented the company’s key areas of interest, but also identified those made by other industry experts, thought to be fundamental in the vision of a digital future.
