Yet another breathless report crossed my desk via Twitter this morning where the rise of mobile payments is predicted to lead to cards and cash “disappearing”, in this case by 2020. Notably, this hyperventilation comes not from a tech vendor but instead from a “research” company.
So I started to wonder why the success of mobile payments (or any other disruptive technology) is so often framed in terms of winner-take-all. Surely we can imagine new payments modalities being super successful without having to see plastic cards and cash disappear? It might just be that press releases and Twitter tend towards polar language. More likely, and not unrelatedly, it’s because a lot of people really think this way.
It’s especially ironic given how the term “ecosystem” tops most Buzzword Bingo cards these days. If commentators were to actually think ecologically for a minute they’d realise that the extinction of a Family or Order at the hands of another is very rare indeed.