A report written by two payments analysts, James Schneider and SK Prasad Borra, at the Goldman Sachs research division, has stated that Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are part of a technology megatrend that could fundamentally alter the transactions mechanism.
The report titled, The Future of Finance: Redefining The Way We Pay in the Next Decade, was released yesterday and was second in a series, which has earlier taken up rise of the shadow banks.
The report suggests that if the concerns regarding the safety of funds are taken care of, along with implementation of the Big Data, Bitcoin, undoubtedly has the potential to disrupt the $1.2 trillion dollar global payment industry.
“Bitcoin, along with improved payment security, ‘big data’ analytics and faster payment networks are the components of a technology trend that will disrupt the payments ecosystem.”
The firms that will benefit immensely from the Bitcoin revolution will include the large public merchants, who will save on payment costs. Traditional payment methods such as Western Union, MoneyGram, Paypal and Xoom, will be the major losers because of their extremely high transaction costs. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are already proving to be nightmares for the traditional money transfer companies in the sub-Saharan region of Africa where mobile payments have strongly caught up, and are even threatening the banks and other long-standing finance companies. More details about the Bitcoin revolution in Kenya can be read here.
Coinbase, BitPay and Ripple Labs continue to dominate the Bitcoin space, the report says.
New entrants are expected to snatch up to 20% of the current $30 billion customer-to-customer market from the top players over the next 10 years. As a result of increasing competition, the transfer fee should also drop to 2.5%, from the current average of 6%.
With more than 100,000 merchants already accepting payments in Bitcoin, merchant adoption could rise phenomenally in the coming years as well.
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