Every business can agree that, despite the challenging circumstances, COVID-19 also brought with it an overwhelming real-time use case for digital services.
Despite many of these solutions being around for several years, entire industries across every geography were caught digitally unprepared when the virus arrived, putting them in an urgent predicament as the crisis unfolded. How do you continue to efficiently transact with customers when they can't reach you in person and you're not set up to accept payments online?
Read more: Digital payments are at the heart of disruption across industries
Sadly, this is not generally the picture. Many governments are still using cheques and cash for payments - the World Bank reports that only 25% of developing countries process social benefits electronically. This creates a significant administrative overhead and places substantial costs on citizens and businesses. Cash and cheques also provide much less capacity for management information and analysis of trends in income and expenditure; the majority of government resources are focused on transaction processing, rather than extracting value from the operational data. Governments recognise this, with 90% seeing the need to improve the overall efficiency of their payment systems.
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The technology could boost the use of public key infrastructure to secure electronic transactions. PKI uses certificates to verify the identity of the sender of a message and works as an e-signature.