Juniper Research has shared key fintech and payments trends in order to provide industry stakeholders, including banks, intermediaries, and providers, with foresight into emerging technological shifts and market opportunities.
Juniper Research stays focused on on identifying and “evaluating the latest disruptive trends in fintech, payments, and banking.”
In addition to this, as the “tricky” economic climate continues, a focus on reducing costs and maximizing return “on existing investment is a key priority for success.”
Juniper Research anticipate that these economic pressures will be a major priority for stakeholders and will drive “a number of key trends discussed here, including minimizing industry monopolies, financially inclusive initiatives, and ensuring protections are ahead of the game.”
The Juniper Research report noted that it is clear that fintech and payments markets are “undergoing significant changes.”
From the methods consumers and merchants use to secure their finances, the way regulations are “impacting the wider market, and the directions companies are taking to maintain consumer loyalty, payment preferences and financial technologies are changing quickly in different markets, all across the world, for market stakeholders and consumers alike.”
Juniper Research has identified key themes that will shape the “most influential” trends throughout 2025. As stated in the report from Juniper Research, these themes will shape disruptions in the market, and “will require stakeholders to respond swiftly to secure a competitive edge.”
The contactless payments market within digital wallets has been “defined by the openness of the ecosystems involved.”
With Android devices, access to NFC by nonOEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) wallets is unrestricted, “meaning that any developer can use NFC capability for payments.”
However, the report noted that Apple has always represented a “closed ecosystem” for NFC payments.
This has been challenging for regulators, especially in Europe.
In December of last year, Apple was rumored to be “offering to open up NFC access within the EU to address regulatory concerns, with it being confirmed in July 2024 that the EU had accepted Apple’s offer, reaching an agreement to open up NFC access within the EU, free of charge to developers/third parties.”
In August of this year, Apple announced that it was “widening this access significantly by enabling third parties to offer NFC payments on iPhone outside the EU market.”
This rollout initially covers Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, the UK, and the US, with “further locations to follow.”
So with these developments, the status quo within digital wallets is “being heavily disrupted.”
As noted in the update from the Juniper Research, The important questions are what effects will this have, and how transformative will it be?
The most recent developments in AI, specifically AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), surround the development and deployment of common-use AI tools such “as virtual assistants and large-language models.”
But financial institutions are “realizing that there is major risk in developing AI tools without clear goals.”
As mentioned in the research report from Juniper Research, the hype around AI has been such that leaders have “prioritized these projects across many different business areas, irrespective of their practical utility.”
A major issue Juniper Research have seen with AI projects is that they are developed as short-term projects, rather than “benefiting from AI’s ability to learn.”
The more data an AI model can process, “the more refined its capabilities for that task becomes.”
Where AI has been applied to issues regarding fraud and identity within fintech, it has been “given extended periods of time, and the necessary data infrastructure has been in place for it to analyze data sources and learn from them.”
As banks and other FIs become “disenchanted with AI hype, efforts for AI within 2025 will focus heavily on automating and improving fraud prevention and identity verification.”
Instant payments, especially A2A (Account-to-Account) payments, have been gaining significant traction globally, with Europe “being a hub of activity.”
Juniper Research team has pointed out that payment harmonization through seamless cross-border payments has become a greater “focus for consumers, businesses, and payment industry stakeholders.”
In Europe, this has been seen through the likes of Vipps and MobilePay merging to cover the entire Nordic region, and several national schemes such as Poland’s Blik partnering with the EPI (European Payments Initiative), a digital payment service designed to “offer a sovereign payment alternative to consumers across the region.”
In comes Wero; launched in summer 2024, this is a pan-European digital wallet developed by the EPI which is “live in Belgium, France, and Germany.”
What sets Wero apart from similar services and digital wallets such as PayPal is that it is designed around instant payments “with easy set-up, requiring only a consumer’s phone number.”
As noted in the update from Juniper Resaerch, since accounts are set up by usoing phone numbers, payments can be made to other users with “just phone numbers, meaning that inputting bank information is a thing of the past.”
With more than 30 banks partnered with Wero, “more than 75%” of citizens
in the three countries of operations are “eligible” to use it.
