CMSPI STATE OF THE INDUSTRY REPORT
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CHARACTERISTICS OF A SUCCESSFUL
Introduction The perfect payment system does not exist, and probably never will. The analysis in our State of the Industry Report clearly suggests that current systems leave a lot of space for improvement. In this section, we’ll look at what this hypothetical perfect payment system might look like by identifying its core characteristics. We have categorized these in terms of micro (business-level) characteristics and macro (market-level) characteristics. Our micro characteristics are security , user experience and cost . It’s vitally important that a payment system is secure and accessible, but this should not come at the expense of user experience. Additionally, a secure and user-friendly payment system is not optimal if the underlying economics are overly costly and don’t pass on system efficiencies to end users in the form of either lower prices or improved user experiences. Our macro characteristics are acceptance and governance . These macro-level characteristics are important because a secure, user friendly and cost-effective payment system does not achieve optimality if nobody uses it, and a payment method with lopsided governance is unlikely to remain secure, user friendly and cost effective in the longer term. There is a question of causality between our micro and macro factors: for example, a payment method is more likely to be ubiquitously accepted if it performs well in terms of security, user experience, and cost so it could be considered a “result” rather than a characteristic of a good payment method. Additionally, a payment method is unlikely to exhibit all of these micro characteristics if it has a lopsided governance structure.
PAYMENT METHOD
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