2019 saw broad maturation and consolidation in the global payments space, and both of those trends should continue through 2020.
Looking back at the payments industry in 2019, the big story for the year was maturation and consolidation.
Private payments upstarts matured, finding bigger valuations at later stages. Companies like Stripe, Affirm, Klarna, and Brex all saw their valuations spike, as growth-stage investors deployed significant capital to enable economies of scale.
Not to be left out, tech giants added payments capabilities to their core product offerings. Apple, Facebook, and Google all placed bets on payments, infusing payments within their massive hardware and software ecosystems. These bets are extracting incremental revenue from existing customer bases by enabling transactions online and offline.
