Open Payments Platforms: Risks and Opportunities
Report Summary
Open Payments Platforms: Risks and Opportunities
For providers, open payments platforms represent a tremendous opportunity as well as proportionate risk.
Boston, December 13, 2010 – A new report from Aite Group examines the current state of the open payments platform (OPP) segment as well as its growth opportunity and risk potential.
Today’s open payments platforms are a collection of payments-enabling technologies that allow the software-developer community to freely incorporate payments capabilities into their applications and provide increased flexibility in terms of payment type and channels supported. Current platforms are more robust than earlier platforms, and this evolution represents a substantial opportunity for the OPP provider; rather than being limited to its own resources to devise and implement new use cases and applications, the platforms are essentially deputizing an army of software developers and entrepreneurs to develop innovative uses for the payments system.
By 2015, Aite Group anticipates that more than US$35 billion in gross dollar volume (GDV) will flow through open payments platforms globally—up from US$3 billion in 2010. With large opportunities come proportionate risks. While there is nothing inherently risky in an open payments platform, the extent to which the open model accelerates the inclusion of new types of payments originators, channels, and applications can significantly affect a payment provider’s exposure.
“The charting of any new territory means that fraud and risk must be carefully monitored,” says Julie Conroy McNelley, senior analyst with Aite Group and author of this report. “This is certainly true for open payments platforms; as more dollars are processed leveraging open platforms, the appeal of this segment to fraudsters will grow.”
This 18-page Impact Note contains two figures and three tables. It provides a brief profile of the key players in the open payments platform market today, including Amazon, IP Commerce, Ixaris, MasterCard, PayPal, and Visa. Clients of Aite Group's Fraud & AML service can download the report.