Realtime payments are also referred to as immediate payments and instant payments allowing P2P, P2B and B2P payments. They are gaining ground, driven by consumer demand for speed and convenience. Financial institutions must respond to this demand. They cannot rely on traditional payment instruments to be competitive.

The key difference between real-time payments and other traditional payment modes is that real-time payments guarantee immediate accessibility of funds to the beneficiary of the transaction. In contrast to this, real-time authorization of a deal on a card is not the same and the buyer is committed to pay and the recipient is guaranteed to receive the funds. However, the availability of funds is not immediate. But, real-time payments could potentially replace other payment methods such as cards, checks, and automated clearing houses.

With the digital and telecom growth in India and in general APAC region, it is touted to be the fasted growing region in terms of digital payments.

There are challenges though that still need to be solved for e.g. fraud detection, dispute resolution, offline payments, transaction limits.

So let put on our thinking hats and explore this new global trend and see how we can marry traditional payment rails with instant payments.

The concept of Smart Cities — which use mobile payments, global positioning and related technology to streamline parking, transit, building access and traffic — is deeply intertwined with the development of payments technology and regulation.

According to research, about 34% of India’s population lives in urban areas, according to a 2017 World Bank estimate and if this trend continues, the UN predicts that the country’s urban population will be more than the rural population by the end of 2050. With that said and with the explosion of IOT technology, we will have huge amount of data. How do we start using this information to create seamless, efficient, secure and customer-friendly solutions? These exciting times for fintech industry to touch every ones lives in more way than ever.

Can you’ll think of any such next-gen cool use-case that we can solve?

Example Use case would be, your local grocery shop allows you to order and pre-pay while you are travelling back home from office and all you have to do is pick-up the pre-packed items on the way home?

Virtual Grocery Stores: Link 1

Financial institutions handle huge volume of sensitive data and money movement transactions. The onus is on the financial institutions to product their customer’s personal information and money, as well as their brands.

Help the financial industry in protecting customers and be always ahead of the hackers in building more secure solutions ranging from secure mobile solutions to more optimized and secure encryption algorithms. You can also think along the innovative ways to educating customers around the security and protecting themselves.

Small and Medium business contribute to over 80% of the total payments transactions and financial industry is committed to help these businesses to nurture and support local economies at scale.

American Express works very closely with these businesses and always look for new ideas and innovations to help them have better financial management and better and secure customer experience.

You can focus your innovation idea on this space where you can either look at improving or creating a new end to end shopping experience with digital money, devise new creative ways where financial industry can help SMBs in solving their problem from end to end (inventory to payments)

References:

• Link 1

• Link 2

In the last 2 decades, the computing industry has embraced distributed computing that has enabled providing services for global customers at an unprecedented scale. However, this paradigm shift has also introduced new challenges and patterns yet to be refined in terms of scalability, heterogeneity, security, failure management, etc.

You can pick any challenges around distributed computing and focus on providing solutions around those. One example can be around System monitoring:

System monitoring is a crucial first step towards building a predictive analysis for system availability. Unless, organisations are able to monitor the anomalies in the system, its hard to predict. In this area, we would like to monitor buildup of hotspots in the tech stack, which can enable us to take proactive actions to prevent it from breaking.

Build an approach where the system health and performance can be monitored to highlight buildup of hotspots, which can then be tied to alerting and auto-scaling. You can assume Enterprise level systems with multiple data centers, global user distribution, and 24x7 usage.