Credit Cards

Integrated Consumer Credit & Debit Product for Banks & Retailers

In the world of payment products, Credit cards have played a vital role and their continued existence and all pervading presence has been the truth that belies the apprehensions of them getting obliterated with the emergence of newer form factors such as mobiles. While the newer technologies would keep emerging, the existence and the usage of credit cards would still remain to be one of the choices for an end customer for making payments.

With significant growth in online and mobile commerce, card payments are expected to continue to show high growth in the near future. Mobile payments are expected to increase threefold to $796 billion by 2014. Today, 86% of e-commerce payments are made via credit, debit, prepaid or other payment media. According to a report, 250 million cards will be used for contact less payments next year, driven by migration to EMV chip-and-PIN and growing contact less POS infrastructure.

Key Trends and Challenges shaping the Industry

Industry emphasis on Customer loyalty

  • Card issuers have been concentrating on attaining customer loyalty. Many are collaborating with various merchants across various sectors to provide their clients with loyalty or co-branded cards.
  • Card issuers are bringing in new customers to the industry and help maintain customer loyalty through schemes such as cash back incentives and loyalty programs.

Growing security concerns and counter actions

  • The industry has seen increased amount of both online and offline fraud. Dubious websites that collect sensitive customer information are majorly involved in online fraud.
  • Magnetic stripe cards, which store sensitive customer data unencrypted on the rear magnetic stripe, have been found to be vulnerable to various frauds such as skimming and counterfeiting.
  • The adoption of Chip-based EMV cards that are less vulnerable to fraud is gaining popularity.

Rise of mobile commerce

  • The phenomenal increase in smart phone usage has resulted in rapid growth of mobile commerce. The industry is witnessing a growth in the mobile payments as customers are using mobiles as their preferred payment channel.
  • Increased use of mobile wallets linked to smart phones and the internet. E.g: Google Wallet, GoPago, PayPal etc.,.