The Rising Tide of Instant Payments

Visa and MasterCard are having tough times with monopoly accusations in the US and UK, and the social media vibe is more inclined to “bad fintech whales exploit poor merchants.”

I travelled to almost a hundred countries and lived in Asia for years. Local instant account-to-account rails are actively pushing cards from the market there because those 3%+$0.5 fees are heavy.

In China digital wallets have an 81% market share (even online), Thailand is pumping to 50%, and the trend is spilling to India and LatAm. Billions of people are okay to live without banking cards.

Source: FIS Global Payments Report

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