Digital Payments and 5G

5G will change the operations of banking industry. Financial Technology (FinTech) is going to change ways of spending, saving, and buying financial services such as payments, investments, loans, and money transfers.

5G will create a new era of high-frequency mobile trading that will revolutionize stock market transactions.

The upgrade from 4G to 5G promises better mobile speed, reliability, and capacity. 5G offers these advantages due to the use of Massive MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output) antennas, edge computing, smaller cells, beamforming, and better Wi-Fi to cellular convergence.

As of now, Bluetooth, RFID and many other short-range communications standards  keep devices disconnected from one another. 5G will bring unity. Phones, smartwatches, earphones, activity bands, virtual/augmented reality headsets, flexible sensors on smart clothes, and smart glasses and eyewear like Google Glass will talk to each other, and swap data. That will enable payments to be made from any wearable.

It is predicted that by 2021, 5G will add £8.9 billion in revenue for retailers operating mobile-enabled payment gateways. The main reason is that the increased speed of 5G will make mobile transactions easier.

5G is as much about ultra-low latency as about speed. 5G will bring a lightning-fast real-time user experience to mobile devices, so much so that consumers will experience banking and payment transactions instantly on their device. 5G will mean zero waiting time.

5G will push the bank to be real-time. By 2025, more people will transact and interact with their money on a computer, smartphone, voice and augmented reality every day, than those that visit the world’s collective network of branches on an annual basis.

5G can enable real-time digital transactions cutting settlement cycles and eradicating latencies. As 5G enables even more advanced innovations, it will likely boost consumer assurance in entirely digital payments and help influence more consumers to reassess their payment behaviours.

Beamforming is a technique that focuses a wireless signal towards a specific receiving device, rather than having the signal spread in all directions from a broadcast antenna, as it normally would. The resulting more direct connection is faster and more reliable than it would be without beamforming.