Mega Trends: Adapting to the Digital Platform Era
The Rise of Digital Payments It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find consumer-facing businesses that aren’t equipped to accept digital payments.
The Rise of Digital Payments
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find consumer-facing businesses that aren’t equipped to accept digital payments. For example, a market survey conducted in 2019 by Wonder reported that 97% of restaurants in the US use a Point-Of-Sale (POS) system to accept payments1. Many other industries like retail and professional services are following suite, and many of them are taking it a step or two further.
The emergence of companies like Shopify and SquareSpace, in tandem with a global pandemic, has led to an explosion in the world of ecommerce, allowing brick and mortar businesses to gain an online presence overnight. Combine these online stores with the embedded capability to leverage both traditional credit or debit card payments options with offerings like PayPal, Apple Pay, and Amazon Pay, with flexible payment plan options supported by Affirm and Klarna and live tracking for everything that you order, digital payments in today’s economy result in convenience that our grandparents never could have imagined.
Privacy / Automation Tug-O-War
Who will arise victorious in the battle between privacy and automation? What many of us may have assumed would be a close race is a lot less close in reality. Generally, when asked if they care about companies storing / using their data, people respond negatively (and sometimes vitriolically). But we’ve seen time and time again that there are a few key exceptions when it comes to making decisions in real-time that are being used to proliferate the market with emerging technologies that enable automation at the expense of privacy.
Consumers are willing to sacrifice their privacy for convenience. This is best exemplified by the growth of smart home technology like Amazon Echo or Google Home. While consumers are generally horrified by companies like Amazon and Google collecting and analyzing their personal data like what they search for, listen to, or send in their messages (all of which are explicitly being collected and analyzed through this technology), the demand for them is rapidly growing. The smart home devices market is currently expected to reach $123.36 billion in 20252.
Any effort beyond clicking a button or two is often enough to dissuade consumers from prioritizing privacy and protecting their data. We can look to the world of passwords for an example of this. According to a survey conducted by Google, only 45% of respondents would change their password after it had been exposed in a data breach. This is in spite of the fact that 40% admit their personal information has been exposed online and 47% have lost money due to compromised information3. Even the simple act of resetting a password can be too much for people to act on behalf of the privacy of their data.
Digital Awareness
The benefits of participating in the digital economy far outweigh the detriments, but it is important to acknowledge both. Every week there is a headline in the news about another major corporation falling victim to ransomware. Every day another company’s data is breached by hackers. But there is a silver lining here.
Those of us who are impacted learn a valuable lesson firsthand about the risks that we face by participating in the digital age, whether that be through allowing customers to buy products or services from us through an online store or setting up a home network to control the lights, air conditioning, cameras, or locks through your cell phone. And those lessons are passed on to others in the form of stories that we can use to educate ourselves about these risks and take action against them.
At Periculus, we are most excited about helping to usher in the era of digital awareness for businesses across the globe. Technology and automation are here to stay, and so are the risks that follow them. All that we can do is prepare ourselves and be ready to respond to anything that may try to knock us off course.
1 https://askwonder.com/research/market-penetration-pos-systems-restaurants-industry-us-26rg82f4a
2 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/smart-home-devices-global-market-172500807.html
3 https://www.comparitech.com/blog/information-security/password-statistics/
