The best sharing economy experience is one that involves a rapidly-growing phenomenon that’s connecting people, companies, and payment processing in an innovative, tech-driven manner.
According to research from PwC, on a global scale, the sharing economy will grow to a staggering $335 billion market by 2025. To put that figure into context, in 2013, when the sharing economy took off, the market was about $15 billion.
The payments industry itself has been greatly disrupted, and arguably innovated, by the emerging technologies that power the sharing economy. Because this concept is reliant on three factors — the technology, the people that use it, and the companies that facilitate the relationship (and the payments) — it’s hard to project just how the payment processing sector will be impacted by the sharing economy’s growth.
The Underlying Tech of Payment Processing Within the Best Sharing Economy Experience
By definition, the best sharing economy experience relates to the economic and social activity connected to online transactions. Of course, what propels this concept is how people and companies are leveraging technology to enhance digital payment processing.
Let’s take, for example, one of the most popular sharing economy gigs popular across cities: ride-sharing. Propelled by the two largest companies in the space, Uber and Lyft, there’s a lot of technology necessary to enable a frictionless payment experience that exists between the company, the driver and the users.
These companies rely on mobile apps and web-based payment processing to facilitate P2P transactions between the riders and the drivers, which is then processed through the ride-sharing company’s software platforms. Not only are the riders relying on those systems to protect their credit card data that is stored within their apps, they are expecting the company to have a payment processing system that completes a transaction within seconds — while still being secure.
The beauty behind this technology is that it allows the drivers to accept jobs (rides) and submit their hours and number of rides (data) to their respective companies in order to be paid — also done through a mobile app. The payment processing in the sharing economy is entirely reliant on how the driver and user interact via the app, and when and how the driver submits the data to a company that oversees the transactions.
Other popular examples of the sharing economy include companies like Airbnb and Home Away. In these cases, the owner of a property is relying on the payment processing technology powered by those companies to facilitate a payment between them and the end-user. The technology that facilitates the payment processing experience is similar to the experiences above, which enables the end-user to easily pay online (via a web browser or a mobile app), and the property owner to get paid quickly through the payment facilitated by the company running the service.
In both of these sharing economy examples, this technology has the ability to instantly create a trusting, frictionless, and secure payments connection between all parties involved in the process. These sharing economy-inspired companies act as a payment facilitator to manage the payment processing, while involving multiple outside parties.
Thanks to advances in technology, and a rise in popular apps and company engagement to provide the best sharing economy experience, more consumers are willing to interact with this type of commerce that provides a more trusting payments experience between multiple parties. This has paved way to an entire new class of digital payment processing.
What makes the best sharing economy experience appealing for companies is that it powers a new generation of business that encourages peers to transact with each other online through companies that manage the payment processing itself. Because the success of a sharing economy-based company is reliant on trust, a positive payments experience and effective data sharing, it’s easy to see how the right combination of tools, technology and customer service are needed to propel this industry.
Of course, to make this relationship possible, it all starts with seamless, fast, and secure payment processing that enables payment facilitation in a trusting and compliant environment.
Anna Lothson is a content contributor for Payline Data. She previously wrote for PYMNTS.com, as a Sr. Content Producer, where she focused on financial services and payments innovation, fraud and security, emerging payments, and FinTech news, research and thought-leadership content across the payments industry.
