Alternative payments – taxonomy, development, and related risks

Alternative payment methods become more and more popular among customers. Today, there is over 300 alternative payment schemes and more than 200 alternative payment methods what makes understanding the alternative payments difficult. Today APMs are the initial stage of their development. Despite the growing interest in alternative payment methods and instruments, there is still a lack of commonly accepted definition and precise market data. The purpose of the paper is to identify the alternative payment methods, provide their taxonomy, assess their development and describe associated risks of frauds. The review of APMs classification shows that they use different criteria: objective, subjective or combined. The paper proposes the definition that has changed those paradigms and has focused on payments’ innovativeness and their ability to fulfil customers’ expectations. The lack of homogenous taxonomy makes the assessment of the stage of APMs development difficult, but the paper presents the probe of such assessment based on the data of APMs usage in different regions of the world. The paper also identify frauds and threats related to APM : phishing, goods wheedling, keylogger software, malicious software, partner and DBOD risks. In the final part it discusses the factors influencing APMs further development such as new regulations, developing multichannel platforms and new business models, changes in consumer behaviour and concerns about the security. The results of the study are based on the critical analysis of available, not extensive existing literature regarding alternative financial services (including payments), statistical data of research companies and institutions altogether with consultancy firms’ reports.