When you have been doing something well for a long time and when you have worked on your mistakes and shortcomings. When you have built unique and useful functionality and improved every feature to the point where it is on the fringe of perfect… the it is hard to look critical at yourself.

The payment industry have created an amazing system that forms the bedrock of everything that we do as a human race. It is inconceivable to consider a world without reliable payments. Everything that we own, every experience and even when we get punished culminates in a payment. Fortunately, the human race has evolved to a stage where payments are done extremely well. Trillions of payments are performed annually and by far the majority of them are concluded faultlessly – at least in the eye of most beholders.

If we were to be honest with ourselves – in a world with almost unlimited processing power and bandwidth – payments are actually in dire need of reform. While everything may look well to the uninformed, everything is wrong with payments. Because of old payment rails (designed for a time where we were severely constrained by computing resources), our payment systems are prone to errors and unreliability. It is extremely difficult to integrate seamlessly to payment systems and it is unlikely that any expert would describe payment systems as flexible and adaptable. With new requirements – in part based on the growth of mobile phones, it has become important to talk about a future payment dispensation, unconstrained by the limitations of the past.

It would only be able to do this if we are bold enough to question every aspect of the status quo and create new, modern thoughts.