Dan, the CEO of PayPal indicates that crypto has performed well for PayPal and that PayPal is bullish on the development of a Central Bank Digital Currency that could directly fund the PayPal mobile app. Confidence in crypto is spreading fast, Mark Cuban, Elon Musk, and even the New York Times have all gone public with their confidence in the continued rise of crypto.
Dan also identifies contextual commerce and Super Apps (which from our perspective have the same basis in technology, it is simply apps similar to AliPay, Paytm, WeChat Pay etc. that utilize mobile context and communications to enable the discovery and purchase of goods and services, first discussed with Alex Johnson in our blog of 2016):
“What does your business look like in the next five to 10 years?
First of all, retail fundamentally changes. It moves from a strategy of, How do I attract people to my storefront?, to basically, How do I optimize for home delivery? How do I optimize around all things digital, online and offline? Effectively the differentiation between those two things disappears. And that means that retailers need to think about, Where do they meet consumers? Consumers aren’t just going to go to their website. They’re going to be in large consumer platforms like TikTok or PayPal or others. The reason Walmart wanted to buy part of TikTok is they wanted to kind of put shopping into that platform. We call it contextual commerce.
It’s the same thing inside PayPal. We know that people will start to utilize wish-list shopping tools, and wish lists are really a form of creating an individualized demand curve. This is what you want. This is the price point that you want it; retailer, if you can give me that, I’ll buy it. And so retailers are coming to where you are looking individually, personalizing offers to you. Retail is going to shift dramatically.
And how are we going to pay for things?
There are probably going to be six to 10 superapps that evolve. You won’t have 50 apps on your phone, because you can’t remember 50 usernames and passwords; you don’t want to put in your financial information into every single one of them; you can’t remember the nav system on all of them. These superapps that will basically intermediate other apps, so you log in once, you have a common password, you have all of your data and information in one place that can be used to feed products and services on that platform. It will make it simpler and easier for the consumer.”
Overview by Tim Sloane, VP, Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group
