P2P payments go mainstream, and I am referenced

One of the biggest hurdles in the adoption of mobile payments is consumer comfort. That is to say, in order for consumers to adopt digital payments there has to be a level of trust, familiarity, and acceptance of digital payments that will entice consumers to use digital methods over older, more “engrained” methods. In fact, one of the biggest barriers to digital payments has always been a perception that the “current method works just fine” or “I see no need to switch”.

Well, things are changing. We’ve all read the stories of digital payment successes in place like Kenya and China. Alas, in economies that have had card based systems in place, adoption of digital – phone based – payments has been slower to gain popularity.

With all this in mind, I was very interested to read a commentary in Forbes about the adoption of P2P payments in Canada. In this piece, Canada Embraces Digital Payments, With Some Behind-The-Scenes Help, by Alan Zeichick from Oracle, he points to the rapid rise of one P2P solution, Interac e-Transfer.

Person-to-person (P2P) payments are one of the fastest-growing segments of business for Interac. Its P2P service, called Interac e-Transfer, saw 371.4 million transactions in 2018, representing a 54% increase over 2017. The amount of money involved is significant, too: CAN$132.8 billion in 2018, a 45% increase over 2017.