Digital payments 100 times faster with 5G

The global 5G services market, valued at $ 41.48 billion in 2020, is aiming to grow 46.2% from 2021 to 2028. It’s not just about faster downloads but a change that will accelerate the next phase of moderns financial services, from cloud computing to payment management. Instant payments of small amounts of money will overtake cash as the primary payment method, driven primarily by millennials and even younger generations. According to data from the Observatory on Innovative Payments of the School of Management of the Politecnico di Milano, in 2020 digital payments reached 5.2 billion transactions, going from 29% to 33% of the total value of payments in Italy. Payments with contactless grew in particular (+ 29%, to 81.5 billion) and, even more, those with smartphones and wearables (+ 80%, over 3.4 billion). The arrival of 5G will fuel the spread of mobile payments even more. 5G will make the digital payment experience even more immediate by enabling transactions via smartphones, smartwatches and a wide range of Internet of Things channels. Mobile banking will become even more the reference method for making deposits, account transfers and monitoring your expenses or earnings. But also services such as loan requests or credit checks will be increasingly practiced by mobile devices thanks to the greater speed of 5G: the compliance checks of customer data by artificial intelligence can be performed in a few seconds so as to make payments almost instant worldwide even for cross-border payments. Also on the fraud side, 5G will be able to guarantee banks faster processing of data and verification of the nature of transactions, in addition to consulting multiple instances of data in real time and geolocation of customers. financial institutions that are in a position to keep up with the acceleration brought about by 5G. Recalling that, according to the latest analyzes by EY, in Italy the 5G coverage of the population with at least three operators has reached 20%, doubling in a year (one of the operators has 91% coverage). At a regional level, coverage in Italy is not very uniform: the regions most covered include Valle d’Aosta, Basilicata and Molise (98% coverage), followed by Veneto, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Marche, Abruzzo and Calabria (97%) . Not far away are Trentino-Alto Adige, Umbria and Campania (96% coverage), Emilia-Romagna and Liguria (95%), Sicily (93%), Piedmont (92%). Instead, it falls below 90% in Tuscany and Lazio (coverage 88%), Lombardy (87%), Sardinia (84%), up to Puglia with 76%.