Payments have constantly been predicted to be disrupted. But different forms of payments have proven to be more of an evolution than a revolution. Christoffer Hernæs has written about seven trends shaping the future of payments. One of the largest ones is, no surprise, Buy Now, Pay Later. McKinsey estimates that in the US market alone, fintechs have diverted between $8 to $10 billion annually from banks’ revenues.

Another hot topic for payments is Digital wallets. The movement has been slow, but digital wallet adoption is surging. Vipps is trying to take a position here outside of Norway. Stefan Astroza and Elisabeth Solberg from Cicero are commenting that «The chances of finally exporting Norwegian financial technology to the world have never been greater». I’m also noting that they are happy that Vipps main focus seems to be on its core business - rather than testing experimental ventures in entirely new industries. The question is when they are trashing their mobile subscription? I’m guessing it’s gone by this time next year.

Schibsted has launched its Future report for 2021. One interesting snippet:

Who would have thought that a newsletter on Fintech would cover Onlyfans and sexually explicit content? Well… OnlyFans, the website best known for its adult videos and photos creators, will prohibit sexually explicit content starting October 1st. The reason is pressure from its banking and payment provider partners. Mastercard is the most proactive in this regard, and several payment processors are waiting to see how Mastercard’s policies fare.

NFTs have been all the rage on my part of the internet the last few months. We covered it in February and since everyone from Louis Vuitton to Disney and Visa (?!?) has jumped onto the ship. To recap: When you buy an NFT, you more or less obtain bragging rights for this artwork on the blockchain. The original file can only exist in one edition, and the blockchain record proves who owns this original. However, you don’t own the usage rights of the work (unless it’s specified in the NFT-contract), and the link to the original file could eventually become a costly 404 error. So why are people still buying an image of a rock for over $250 000?

The answer might be that NFTs bring status signaling and social capital online at a global scale. You are signaling that you are in the group that knows. The same way you are in the group that knows when you buy a special kind of watch. That doesn’t mean that the watch doesn’t have great value. A mechanical clock is undoubtedly a marvel of engineering, but creating 10 000 unique crypto punks is also kind of a marvel of engineering.

Another reason might be that this is a new speculative asset where human psychology is all that matters. In other words, people are getting paid for knowing what’s soon-to-be cool. There might be an investment upside for some, but in my mind buying a jpeg of a crypto-punk for millions of dollars still seems batshit crazy… (considering every designer, know that this should have been exported as a png or gif! 😆)

Ultimately, the most exciting potential use cases for NFTs may not have come around yet. I find the trend of people splitting ownership of NFTs interesting, considering people already are buying fractions of analog art and Air Jordans, but as an NFT, this makes more sense. Still, all this limited edition collectible stuff feels a bit mindless. I’m more excited about what NFTs could do in the real world: An example could be Brønnøysund Register Center which is launching a shareholder book solution on public Ethereum.

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Marius Hauken, partner Stacc X