Fintech technology facilitates all our purchasing processes

A person buying movie tickets from their mobile phone in less than 15 seconds, another person buying shoes from their favorite online store safely, quickly and comfortably from their home computer, are examples of purchasing processes that a few years ago might have been thought impossible and that are now a reality thanks to financial technologies or fintech, as they are known.

In 1994, Bill Gates, then CEO of Microsoft, said that “banking is essential, but banks are not.” It seems that more than 20 years ago, the richest man in the world had already begun to visualize how fintech would evolve thanks to Internet connections and, well, apparently other technologies that combined to give life to smartphones would appear years later to revolutionize our lives and become a catalyst in several industries, banking among them.

In 2014, global investment in the development of fintech technologies reached 12 billion dollars; on the other hand, banks spent 215 billion dollars on software, hardware and all kinds of services in order to create innovations that generate value to meet the needs of people who began to demand new ways of making transactions over the Internet and, above all, from their mobile phones.

It is therefore important for entrepreneurs and companies to clearly define what they want to offer their clients and then choose the tools they will make available to them.

Fintech as a driver of innovation for the benefit of e-commerce

Financial technologies have made payment processes for online or smartphone purchases much safer, faster and easier to implement in the development of any business, which has catapulted their use in recent years. In the United States alone, 67% of Millennials currently use mobile banking services, compared to 18% of those over 60 years old.

And well, e-commerce is one of the areas that are taking the most advantage of these new tools, integrating technologies supported by financial institutions, such as Visa, into their apps and digital stores. For example, practically any business can implement payment processes with relative ease, something that did not happen a few years ago, since each company had to create a development compatible with certain codes in order to integrate some banking services and that could result in a rather time-consuming process, as well as expensive.

But thanks to new trends in the collaborative economy, there are developments such as Visa Checkout that, in addition to protecting each customer's data, reduce friction during a payment procedure and can process their sales closings up to 22% faster, which according to comScore, makes buyers confirm their purchases up to 69% more.

Now, one of the most important aspects that have improved with financial technologies is security, from the integration of data encryption to a complex, but fast (2 seconds) approval and confirmation process for each transaction. Thus, fintechs have managed to offer security and confidence to customers, but also to companies, since they can be sure that they have the support of important financial institutions.

Currently, it is estimated that online sales in Latin America in 2016 will increase by around 24% compared to the previous year, which would generate profits of around 45.7 billion dollars.

Source: http://www.xataka.com/