Analysis of payment start-ups in the world: an empirical study of the current players and the anticipated trend

The world is an ever-evolving enclosure of life that is always brimming with technological innovations every second. In a setting like this it would only be fair that the payments ecosystems also evolve from the traditional cash and coins system to a more advanced non-physical monetary form. This global modification has been on the rise for the past few years but we experienced its greatest push to be adopted in our daily lives during the high density spread of covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Ever since, there have been tremendous number of innovations. To better understand the whole enclosure and to see if we can study the potential trends that might occur here, we analyse a large database of around 2,296 start-ups that have been founded in past 5 years. The focus of this study is to understand the global payment start-ups in all aspects personal to it. By categorising them according to the area of its operational focus, we arrive at a number of categories and sub-categories, this also helps us use better terms while addressing the start-ups. Later, we look into all the categories for their area of operation, customer target, regional origin and annual trends. Mobile Wallets have the highest contribution of 296 start-ups (27.2%) with an interesting rise in their sub-categories of All-in-one-platform and Digital Banks. Another sub-segment of curiosity is that of Buy-now-pay-later services which have been on the rise since their introduction recently. Globally, we observe that as expected North America (381 start-ups) dominates with the highest contribution of start-ups but a noticeable inclusion is that of Asia-Pacific which has made it to top 3 and is a region that is tremendously growing in the digital payments enclosure.