Note form the Publisher:  Each year end, consultant giant Jack Henry & Associates releases its list of top trends for the payments industry for the coming year, and today we're also publishing their Top Banking Trends for 2017 as well. The firm is a provider of technology solutions and payment processing services primarily for the financial services industry. Its solutions serve approximately 10,500 customers nationwide, and operates as a payments partner to approximately 5,600 banks, credit unions and other diverse businesses. 

Top Payments Trends for 2017

Real-time Payments:

• The industry’s real-time payments initiatives should be viewed as a marathon rather than asprint. While there will be pilots and a small group of early adopters in 2017, material efforts to reach full market penetration will begin to take shape in 2018, spanning several years to attainubiquitous reach.
  
  
• Stakeholders, processors and financial services providers will view real-time paymentsinnovations as a way to deliver value-added services beyond speed, addressing pain points and creating opportunities to more effectively serve their clients.

User Experience:

• Contextual commerce will continue to emerge, with more payment opportunities embedded into merchant apps. We have seen such experiences advance mobile payments through Uber and other ride-hailing services, as well as Amazon, and it will only gain more momentum in 2017.
  
  
• Financial institutions will be challenged to respond with better card branding/promotions and payments services.
  
  
• P2P payment services will become even more mainstream as common messaging platforms (such as Facebook) integrate the functionality. Anticipate financial institution P2P applications to become more user friendly to compete with non-financial institution mobile wallets.

Bill Payments:

• Financial institution bill payment services will continue to grow nicely in 2017, and biller direct models will gain strong momentum. More online bill payment transactions will be seen, with even greater growth of mobile-based bill payment services.

Cards:

• One-click checkout payments will continue to escalate in popularity, calling on financial institutions to better motivate cardholders to select their issued credentials as top of wallet.
  
  
• We will see an even sharper rise in CNP fraud as EMV cards and activated merchant terminals reach a critical mass. Card issuers and merchants beware - new CNP fraud tools are needed until tokenization becomes readily available.