Published on the 10/02/2016 | Written by Newsdesk
Juniper Research reveals top transformational technologies in e-commerce…
With the release of a new study, Juniper Research has set out what it believes will be the three major disruptive forces in digital commerce. The headline conclusion is that biometrics will make the biggest difference to ‘payment completion’ – and that’s thanks to the proliferation of fingerprint readers in smartphones.
1. Biometrics
The researcher highlights the use of biometric authentication in both Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, and argues that use cases and deployments will proliferate in the short and medium term.
2. Federated Identity
Behind biometrics is federated ID, which provides merchants with the ability to gather information on customers in a click – rather than asking them to fill out long forms. Juniper observed that Facebook, Google and LinkedIn dominate this area at present, but expects new entrants such as banks, telcos and even governments to increase their presence within the space.
3. Tokenisation
The study ranks tokenisation as the next most impactful technology and notes that tokenisation addresses the major e-commerce barrier after user experience: security. By replacing card numbers with randomly generated digits, tokenisation makes the theft of card data pointless.
It also prevents merchants from having to store sensitive credentials. Juniper said it anticipates that the benefits offered by tokenisation, and its support by Visa and MasterCard, will lead to far greater commercial deployment and adoption in the near future.
Report author Tim Green said digital commerce is already worth around $1.7 trillion a year, but it still has so far to go. “Even after 20 years, it can be hard for consumers to buy the things they want to buy without fuss. Happily, exciting new ideas are on the way.”
However, the research cautions that the top disruptive technologies will invariably develop at different speeds. Unpredictable factors such as new device types and government regulation will accelerate the adoption of some and delay others.
Juniper’s whitepaper, Top 3 Disruptive Fintech to Watch in 2016, is available to download (registration required).
