Crypto gains traction as investors flock to PayTech ventures, GlobalData

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the emerging technology that attracted the largest number of investors during 2018, according to GlobalData.

More than 1,900 investors funded 1,000 AI-based companies in 2018, including Horizon Robotics, Beijing SenseTime, Zoox, Yitu Technology and Pony.ai. AI actually had the lowest investors-to-idea ratio (number of venture capital investors / number of funded companies) among emerging technologies. On the other hand, companies working in the payments space held the top position with 2.4 investors-to-idea ratio in 2018 as mobile payments, digital transactions, cryptocurrency and digital wallets gained traction.

Payments technology is also ahead of other emerging technologies on average deal size front. This is driven by a $14 billion funding received by Ant Financial Services – the parent company for Alipay. Some of the other key funded companies in the payments segment include Bitmain Technologies, Revolut, Coinbase and Tradeshift.

Aurojyoti Bose, Financial Deals Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “With expanding technology-driven disruption across industries, we expect further growth in disruptive tech companies’ funding in coming years. These technologies will play a central role in the companies’ future strategies, with early adopters likely to emerge as winners.”

Frictionless payments

Consumers are already used to the idea of biometric payments, thanks to the likes of Apple Pay, but this is just the start of things to come, according to Alastair Johnson, CEO and Founder of blockchain-based payments and identity verification platform Nuggets.

Fujitsu and Singapore-based Touché are currently trialling payment terminals that incorporate palm or finger scanning technology, and California’s CaliBurger is testing a system that lets customers serve themselves after linking their faces to loyalty cards.

The race to make shopping more convenient and as friction-less as possible will gather pace, reckons Johnson. Having to remember passwords and use PINs will become a thing of the past, so too will be having to fill in long online forms to make payments. Credit and debit cards will begin to feel outdated. Major players like Visa and Mastercard are already working hard to bolster our reliance on them, by working on fingerprint scanning cards. But technology is likely to leapfrog plastic cards altogether by enabling our biometrics to be directly linked to our accounts in 2019, allowing purchases to be authorised just by having those biometrics verified.

In 2019, there will be a proliferation of payment apps and wallets launched by brands, like the M&S payment app and Walmart Pay, but the vast majority won’t get the take-up they need. The industry needs a universally accepted payment wallet – for convenience, but also for security, Johnson argues.

“As consumers’ awareness of the value of their data grows, and data breaches continue at an alarming pace, consumers are more likely to gravitate towards brands and spend their money with retailers who actively go out of their way to protect their data, and save them from sharing details with hundreds of different retailers every year,” he says.

“The emergence of sovereign payments solutions will be a big story in 2019. These are platforms that allows users to make payments to businesses online or offline without giving that information away to a third party. Advances in the fields of biometrics, blockchain technology and cryptography will make this possible.”