What Comes Next in Payments?

As the latest SPEI participant and one of the most advanced payments infrastructure facilitators, Arcus is on a mission to improve the Mexican financial landscape. Our unprecedented payments technology has helped our clients streamline integration into various payment rails, enabling an easy and simple gateway to real-time payments that today has helped them move over MX$8 billion in total processed value since our real-time payments launch in March. 

We have created a seamless sandbox experience that offers an easy onboarding to our platform for clients and prospects alike. This feature reduces the launch of client apps by more than double (to 45 days or less) and helps our clients better understand their payments operations and use cases before moving to a real-world scenario.

At Arcus we are at the forefront of innovation. Our gained experience from working with hundreds of talented individuals, startups, and corporations, has led us to acquire a solid and valuable understanding of the market’s needs. We use this information along with our business expertise and operational data to better drive our decision-making process. We are always looking for that next big thing that everyone wants.

What Is Next in Payments in Mexico?

Debit transactions. This payment transaction could allegedly be considered the one-and-only transaction that kicked off fintech innovation. It is the Holy Grail of fintech innovation from our neighbors up north, yet we don't have it available in our payment schema in Mexico.

Solid request-to-pay schema. Sure, CoDi exists, but sadly the adoption and usage across the board is insignificant compared to traditional push payments or card payments. On-demand Request-to-Pay transactions are the future of debit transactions, where proper implementation is paramount for bigger and better, and also more secure, payment capabilities. Do you want to fund your crypto wallet? Easy. Approve it on your phone. Do you want to participate in your best friend’s newborn gifts? Please approve it by clicking here, and voilá, you have chimed in. Easy, right?

Friction in understanding payment flows. This comes down to the payment experts and regulators. There is still a lot of work to be done in terms of making things easier to understand. At Arcus, our biggest mantra when it comes to helping clients is to support their complexity with our simplicity, and we are constantly working on this, so stay tuned for our constantly evolving product guides, visuals, charts, diagrams, and more. This will forever change the understanding of payments.

The complexity of KYC and different regulations for ID verification. I haven't seen any country where this problem has been cracked just yet. In turn, this brings an amazing opportunity for many talented folks who want to build the real deal in online KYC protocols, strategies, models, and tech. It is yet to be seen who will solve this as easily as payments in the Mexican market. However, we are very optimistic, and something tells us that we are really close to seeing something big. 

Open payments initiation. The Holy Grail of the payment’s networks. Facilitating the capacity for any entity (company, startup, individual, you name it), to securely (AKA, customer always in control) and easily (AKA, one-click experience) interact with their bank, allowing customers the capacity to initiate and receive payments from anywhere at any time. This feature provides companies with an unprecedented capacity to manage their accounts and money movement operations through an integrated and seamless process. In turn, it helps reduce staffing, operational costs, and risk, since money operations will be automated.

At Arcus, we have built a state-of-the-art payment platform to streamline integration into various payment rails, including real-time payment networks, cash (including cash-in and cash-out capabilities), BillPay, and more to come. We understand that companies need to adopt a multi-rail payment strategy to meet consumer demand, which is why we are proud to help our partners become a part of the ongoing evolution to support a broader range of payments, and provide a seamless, integrated, and affordable experience for all. Our solutions help our clients increase user retention rates, increase transactionality, generate loyalty and become the center of their consumers' financial lives.

We are constantly on the lookout for these and other trends that help us drive our business forward, shape our solutions and become the best payments partner for our clients. 

By following our innovative mindset to develop great ideas for great solutions, we pretty much like to focus on not only creating a valid solution but also creating it in an unprecedented way. We strive to break the mold in everything we do, as we believe that by doing so, others will follow, helping the whole ecosystem. 

I am always happy to discuss, debate, and expand my horizons with new views and perspectives from anybody interested in payments. Please send me a note.