A free 2015 Payments Outlook from Mercator Advisory Group says that 2015 will be a year to remember, thanks to the convergence of three trends in payments:

• the deployment of EMV in the U.S. in the target year of 2015;
• the diversity of prepaid cards and services card malls — despite their common perception as "gift card" malls; and
• a discussion of continued growth for the card mall business, which provides an anchor point for digital services delivered via PIN on receipt.

"Payments stakeholders have a lot to worry about strategically," Ken Paterson, vice president of research at Mercator and author of the report, said in a press release. "These three trends, which have been building for several years, all become serious business concerns in 2015 that will demand decisions and actions. And that is on top of ongoing security, regulatory, and operations concerns."


According to the release, the outlook document also introduces five macro themes that will be key elements of Mercator research in 2015 and beyond:

• how evolving peer-to-peer payment and lending services threaten to disintermediate traditional financial institutions;
• 
how card network tokenization and EMV will drive new challenges and opportunities for stakeholders;
• 
how new analytics can drive real results in specific applications, including optimization, lean data decisioning, and offer management;
• 
how competing business and technology models in mobile will position themselves with merchants, issuers, and consumers; and
• 
how POS and mobile technology will drive merchant demand for integrated data, marketing, and payment applications.


The 2015 Payments Outlook Viewpoint is the last in a free series of seven viewpoints documents from each of the Mercator advisory services — debit, credit, prepaid, commercial and enterprise payments, emerging technologies, banking channels, and global payments — that provide insights into trends and themes that will affect the payments and banking industries and consumers, the release said.

Download the free series of 2015 payments and banking outlooks.