The announcement of Facebook and other big companies, such as Mastercard, Visa and Spotify, to create Libra might be considered a quantum leap. Are we witnessing the birth of a new, global payment system allowing billions of people without bank accounts to become financially integrated? Will consumers benefit from very cheap cross-border payments?
And the answer to why we are all moving all this paper is that customers want us to move it and are willing to pay to have it done. But the answer still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. There are several interrelated reasons why change could be expected to accelerate in the retail payments arena in the near future.