There is a growth in alternative payment methods, which is seriously threatening the long-held market dominance of MasterCard and Visa.
With online retail sales predicted to reach £53.25bn in 2015 in the UK alone, ecommerce remains a booming sector. Ecommerce is growing and retailers want a successful and seamless online offering in order to take a share in this lucrative market; those who don’t are missing out.
There are now up to 30 widely used other payment choices in Europe that are increasing with the rise of ecommerce in Europe. Amazon Prime, for example, processes payments via traditional methods. Once your card is used for the first time you can effectively use Amazon as a payment method with one-click purchasing via a wallet method. It is frictionless, fast and secure.
There is also panic throughout Europe because of the amount of competition, far more than in the US where Visa and MasterCard have ownership of the online community. More companies are competing, meaning lower rates and lower fees and consumers are being tempted by other options.
Merchants will start pushing this message as it means lower fees for them too. Acquiring banks are also seeing this shift. They have become too big and greedy and merchants are questioning them.
This change now signals one of the biggest shifts to the European payments landscape in a generation, as merchant do not need to simply accept fees and rates from the main few providers.
MasterCard & Visa remain the leading payment processes in the market, but as the popularity of alternative methods grows the questions remains ‘how much of the market can they hold onto and how long for?’
