E-Wallet Rising
Lots of activity with digital wallets (e-wallets) lately, eclipsing digital banks (which seem to have gone rather quiet). This is to be expected as e-wallets are close to the action and can gain millions of users and transactions very quickly. From a transactional base, e-wallets can scale upwards towards digital banks and beyond, in sequential order:- Limited Balance: An initial balance (usually less than 10K)
- P2P: Peer-to-peer money transfer (person A to person B)
- C2B: Payments (pay for goods, services eg coffee)
- Big Balance: >10K, with the possibility of deposit insurance
- Platform: Used by third parties eg e-commerce sites
- Financial Tools: Budgeting, expenditure analysis, deals etc
- Social Tools: Stimulus payments,, food vouchers etc
- Savings & Investments: FDs, stocks, bonds, insurance etc
- Bigger Domains: Global money, business banking
- Apple Cash - P2P payments via messaging
- Google Pay - Most downloaded Fintech app
- Google Maps - Pay for parking using Google Pay
- PayPal - Surpasses Mastercard in valuation
- PayPal - After crypto, to offer stocks and CBDCs
- Dify - Opera browser enters the e-wallet race
- Zelle - $307 billion sent in 1.2 billion transactions