Payments: What will change in the coming months

Panagiotis Kriaris is Head of Business Development at Unzer, an innovative and modular platform for international payment transactions. He shared with Qorus his vision on the disruptive world of payments.


During the past two decades, payments have changed like no other business in financial services.  And yet the most disruptive part is still ahead of us. 

To understand the magnitude of change, think of the following: 20 years ago, a 3-year-old company named Confinity had just changed its name to PayPal, Alipay and WeChat would launch 3 and 10 years later respectively, mobile payments did not even exist (the iPhone was first released in 2007), and Amazon had finally turned its first profit in Q4 – $0.01 on revenues of more than $1 billion.

Fast forward to today and technology has drastically transformed how payments are conducted with strong regional flavours: mobile payments in Europe, superapps in Asia and QR codes in Latin America. What’s more, an outbreak of a rare coronavirus in 2019 led to a global pandemic that has, in effect, accelerated major behavioral shifts: adoption of instant payments, contactless payments becoming a norm, drastic decline of cash and a huge boom of e-commerce.