By Michel Francis CEO of Reloadly

Digital mobile payments have entered a golden era.

Driven by rapidly advancing airtime software, emerging mobile payments startups are now defining future trends for the industry, ultimately outpacing incumbent financial and telco heavyweights at their own game.

We find ourselves in a real David and Goliath movement for finance, and mobile payment cloud-based platforms are among David’s more potent weapons.

Today, mobile payment startups have created an intersection between the growing accessibility of advanced airtime API technology and emerging post-pandemic customer habits, which have in turn birthed disruptive payment services across an array of industries. Many of these businesses weren’t even considered to be top beneficiaries of digital mobile payment innovation until recently, including the NGO, cryptocurrency, rewards and incentives, social media and mobile remittance industries.

Not surprisingly, the innovative potential of the payments industry has gotten it fair share of attention over the past years.

In 2019, the payments sector witnessed a historic influx of investment, attracting $15 billion, 20% more than the preceding year. Impressively, this funding made up one-quarter of investments going into the whole fintech industry.^[1]

This was before Covid-19 struck.

The first year of this decade set the stage for a further breakout, this time in the growth of digital mobile payments. When this once-in-a-century pandemic hit, people quickly shifted to new behavior for how they pay and receive money. Uniquely, digital mobile payments checked off many boxes amid this dramatic change in everyday life. What’s more, it has become increasingly easier for companies to integrate new payment services thanks to third-party services provided by startups in the growing Payments-as-a-Platform (PaaP) sector.

Going into the next decade, the mobile phone will continue to be the lifeblood of the PaaP opportunity that lies at the heart of our increasingly fintech-geared world.

In 2018, I founded Reloadly alongside my co-founder Emmanuel Piard to seize upon this moment we spotted in the digital mobile payments world. Reloadly was born to disrupt the airtime top-up industry with advanced API tools, and by offering a plug-and-play solution for developers with no contracts.

Since Reloadly’s launch, it’s become clear to me that airtime API technology can solve more problems and in more industries than even we originally anticipated. At the heart of this revelation is the potential to integrate an airtime API as a PaaP service.

There are several future trends in digital mobile payments that I believe we can no longer ignore. Mostly, that is because we see that they are already here, and here to stay.

1.    Future trends of digital mobile payments: First, more utility and city service payments will be made from mobile

A hallmark of innovation is the ability to transform mundane norms into more convenient customer experiences. Nothing exemplifies this transformation more than enabling the ability to pay for monthly utility bills or city-related services with the flexibility of mobile payments.

This experience is still mostly novel: Mobile users aren’t accustomed to having these kinds of services yet.

However, going forward, mobile payment API providers will enable companies to apply a plug-and-play solution to easily integrate with an entire local ecosystem of electricity, water and gas providers through just one endpoint. This means the PaaP service will directly connect to existing utility payments infrastructure, allowing customers to pay bills via their mobile phones.

For a look into the crystal ball of what this opportunity portends we need look no further than China, where WeChat has successfully delivered this service through the app-within-an-app model.

Today, the WeChat app embeds thousands of lightweight APIs to empower its 1 billion active monthly users to make everyday payments conveniently and securely on their mobile phone via their WeChat City service. The trend for making these essential payments has risen in recent years as well, with 30 million users choosing WeChat to make utility bill payments in 2017, up from just 8.76 million users the year before. ^[2]

Utility bill mobile payments are only the tip of the iceberg.

In China, the app-within-an-app model has actually seen the greatest increase in mobile payments for transport fines, healthcare and transportation services. Likewise, in Dubai the government’s DubaiNow App allows citizens a popular means to settle traffic fines and even pay veterinary bills for pets.

No doubt customers will welcome similar opportunities increasingly across the world. Not many people would say no to the opportunity to avoid long queues at the Department of Motor Vehicles or similar municipal institutions.

2.    Mobile payments will reduce barriers for cross-border trade

Legacy cross-border payment facilities are expensive and inefficient.

Even when users in financially included locations scale, hurdles to their recipients’ bank accounts makes sending or receiving money across borders difficult.

Banks often have to connect with other banks to process cross-border payments. For some international payments to be processed, the sending bank must have deposits in the recipient bank and currency. These processes complicate and delay payments; they also make payments more expensive.

Digital mobile payments can facilitate greater cross-border trade by opening up channels for intra-continental and inter-continental payments, especially in regions where payment platforms for remittances are limited.

Africa is one of such regions ripe for innovative cross-border mobile payments solutions. One reason is because intra-continental payments in Africa can incur charges as high as 20%, limiting the opportunities for trading between African countries.^[3]

Today, payments illiquidity is part of the cause for low intra-African trading activity, which is at a meager 17% compared to 59% in Asia and 69% in Europe.^[4] To resolve this, the African Continental Free Trade Agreement ( AfCTA) was created with the hopes of increasing trade and financial activities within African countries by 52% by 2022.^[5]

More collaborations with digital mobile payments platforms will be instrumental to achieving this aim. Such initiatives will help provide faster, more transparent, and affordable payments.

Digital mobile payments can help improve remittances as well.

Remittance charges for payments to Sub-Saharan Africa remain high at 8.9%. Meanwhile, remittances to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) cost an average of 7%, flows into Latin America and the Caribbean cost an average of 6%, and its costs 6.48% to send remittances to Europe and Central Asia.

Adopting digital mobile payments platforms is thus a clear opportunity for businesses to tap into a sector predicted to grow to $930.44 billion by 2026.^[6]

Going into the 2020s, additional financial and money management solutions can also be built as auxiliary services. For example, by building on top of mobile money solutions, businesses can also offer value-added services to other businesses.

Viable solutions include building automated payment processing and beneficiary management systems. Companies can also simplify foreign transactions for other businesses by offering digital mobile payment dashboards that display real-time exchange rates, provide multi-currency wallets, and digital payments cards. Numerous PaaP providers offer APIs that can enable these integrations easily with existing payment platforms on websites and mobile apps.

3.    Social media and mobile payments will converge

As social media becomes an ever integral part of daily life, partnerships with PaaP providers will be increasingly explored to leverage social networks as P2P payment conduits and to create unique online shopping experiences.

First, platforms can offer adjacent financial services.

Credit, savings, insurance, and wealth management are new ways for payment platforms to diversify their revenue. For example, as of 2018, 3.8 billion customers had not yet been reached by traditional insurance providers, opening up opportunities for platforms to harness.^[7]

Also, social media and messaging apps can be integrated within payment platforms to deliver better customer support experiences.

The success stories of WeChat and GooglePay already indicate the potential for combining payment features with social media platforms. More businesses are offering users the ability to chat and pay, and the trend is spreading across the globe. In the United States, applications like Venmo and Zelle are empowering people to make payments as easily as they converse; users can even follow one another’s accounts and make comments.

Increasingly, social media will tap mobile payment API toolkits to help distribute payments in the form of digital gifts, similar to how Venmo and Zelle work. This will allow friends and family to pay back each other for trips or send gifts such as digital gift cards directly via their social media accounts.

Going into the next decade, opportunities for payments in social media will only continue to grow as users are estimated to reach 4.41 billion by 2025.^[8]

As money goes social, brands are expected to follow the trend.

In 2019, companies spent on average 12% of their marketing budgets on social media trying to engage their target markets and boost their brand reputations. By 2025, global brands’ social media marketing expenditure is expected to rise to 22.5% of their marketing budgets as competition on social media rises.^[9]

For social media companies, the PaaP opportunity will expand their business into the frontiers of mobile money and digital gifting, diversifying streams of income in the process.

However, instead of slowly creating relationships with banks and other financial institutions, the PaaP provider will enable social media companies to rapidly scale up operations by offering instant access to a world of financial and telecom services with a simple integration, through just a few lines of code.

Author Bio

Michel Francis is the CEO and co-founder of Reloaldy, an airtime and data top up API provider that offers the world’s first developer platform for connecting to global telcos. Prior to launching Reloadly, Michel was the co-founder and CEO of CallDirek, the first international pinless and VoIP calling app in the market, which he sold in 2016. A son of ethnic Lebanese Haitian immigrants, Michel uses his intimate knowledge of prepaid-dominated markets as inspiration to build better top-up APIs and developer tools.

^[1] Forbes (2020). “The Future of Payments “

^[2] WeChat Economic and Social Impact Report (2017). “WeChat Revenue and Usage Statistics”

^[3] Delta Partners Group (2019). “Capturing the Mobile Money Cross-border Remittance Opportunity in Sub-Saharan Africa”

^[4] Brookings Institute (2020). “Intra-African trade: A path to economic diversification and inclusion”

^[5] Finextra (2020). “There is More to Digital Payments in Africa than M-Pesa”

^[6] Annual Market Research (2020). “Remittance Market Size to Grow $930.44 Billion, Globally, by 2026: At 3.9% CAGR. “

^[7]  Cheston, S. (2018). “Inclusive Insurance: Closing the Protection Gap for Emerging Customers.”

^[8] Statista (2021). “Number of social network users worldwide from 2017 to 2025”

^[9] Ostmarketing (2019). “How Much Should Brands Spend on Social Media”