Month: March 2025

Communication remains one of the most underrated and underdeveloped leadership skills.  A survey by The Economist Intelligence Unit found that miscommunication is a major cause of workplace failure, resulting in delays, missed goals, and lost revenue.

So, what does effective communication really look like in today’s leadership environment?

As a member of a Senior Management Team in a fully remote environment, we often consider the benefits of in-person communication and the power of this should not be underestimated.

Rooted in neuroscience, psychology, and evolution, in-person communication engages mirror neurons for empathy, triggers oxytocin to build trust, and utilises multiple senses for deeper emotional impact. With 70-90% of communication being nonverbal, facial expressions, body language, and tone enhance understanding, while the brain processes face-to-face interactions more efficiently and accurately.

Can effective communication be achieved in a fully remote environment?  I believe it can. Some of the science can be captured remotely by applying similar strategies used in face-to-face communication, with some adaptations to fit the virtual environment.

This post begins a series over the coming weeks exploring research and methods to address this challenge.

Clarity Over Complexity

In the brilliant book Smart Brevity, the emphasis is on clarity, efficiency, and impact in communication, cutting unnecessary words whilst keeping the message compelling.  Here are the key principles:

• If remote, then camera on – Should be the norm rather than the rule; enhances non-verbal communication, accountability, psychological safety and efficiency.
• Lead with the essential – Start with the key takeaway.
• Be concise – Cut fluff, use short sentences. No rambling.
• Make it skimmable – Use formatting and bullet points to guide attention.
• Provide context – Explain why it matters and give just enough detail to avoid overload.
• End with action – Tell the audience what to do next.

To achieve this, leaders must understand and genuinely believe in what they are communicating because it directly impacts credibility, influence, and their ability to inspire others.

Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Winston Churchill, Madeleine Albright and Brené Brown all used concise, impactful, action-orientated communication to distil complexity into digestible communication.

Leaders, write your message, then cut 50% of the words while keeping the key point intact.  Make your communication clearer, more engaging, and easier to act on. It saves time, builds trust, and ensures staff quickly understand and retain essential information.

PIX is an instant payment platform created and managed by the Central Bank of Brazil. It went live in late 2020 and by 2024, it enabled 246 billion transactions worth a total of $3.3 trillion. That’s a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) over that four-year period of a whopping 34%! In Brazil, RTPs are now worth 27% more than both credit card and debit card transactions put together.

How does that compare with credit card and debit card transaction growth over the same period in Brazil? Between 2020 and 2024, credit card transaction values still rose from $1.18 trillion to $1.35 trillion – a CAGR of 3.4%. Whereas in Brazil, debit card transaction values rose from $910 billion in 2020 to $1.05 trillion in 2024 – a highly respectable CAGR of 8.3%.

What do these figures tell us? They certainly put numbers around the impressive growth in the number and value of RTP transactions being completed in this fast-growing emerging economy. However, they also indicate that, thus far, the card networks and their issuing banks don’t appear to have stopped growing their transaction values as a result of the rise in RTPs.

Let’s take a look now at why RTPs have seen such meteoric adoption over the last few years. Several factors have been at work:

Central government sponsorship

Firstly, the most successful RTP platforms in terms of adoption have essentially been mandated by central governments, set up either by a consortium of national banks or by one single central bank, as is the case with PIX. In the main, the systems are governed by a central regulator. So, Singapore’s RTP called PayNow was set up in 2017 by an association of major local banks and is regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. RTP platforms are effectively subsidised by central governments. So, RTP fees are close to zero. For example, PIX fees average 0.22%, whereas the average Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) for debit card transactions sits at 0.5%, and at 1.63% for credit card transactions in Brazil.

Cash conversion (to RTPs)

Secondly, their runaway success in terms of adoption has been in emerging market countries. Why? Because a large part of the growth of RTP transactions has been at the expense of cash transacting. Yes, in places like India up until about 10 years ago, a huge number of transactions by one-man bands and microbusinesses, especially involving low-value transactions, were paid for with cash. Millions of people there and across the world were locked out of access to credit and even debit cards – many were unbanked.

However, nearly all of them have a smartphone today. They can log into the relevant mobile app and send money instantly to a merchant or friend now. Much of this would have been done by handing over well-worn rupees just a few years ago. The good news for banks and card networks is that RTPs’ growth is not at their expense. Quite the reverse, in Latin America, the World Bank is already on record saying that real-time payments platforms like PIX have helped drive bank account ownership from 39% to 74% of adults within the last decade.

To show the extent of this symbiotic relationship, you only have to look at the growth of BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) transactions and even of RTP transactions which are underpinned by credit card balances (so-called “Credit via RTP”). For many in lower economic groups in emerging markets, RTPs are giving them access to credit through a financial institution for the very first time in their lives!

However, for real-time payments to really take off, they need to work well for three key groups: the banks, businesses as well as consumers. Each has its own interests and incentives, and each has a potential stake in the success of RTPs:

Banks

Even if consumers had access to mobile banking, that didn’t mean that they were going to use bank transfers to pay for things. To make that leap from theoretically possible to practically useful, banks needed to make RTPs seamless to use. That might mean allowing people to send transfers to aliases (such as phone numbers) rather than entering long sort codes and account numbers, or investing in marketing to teach their users about RTPs. These changes required an investment on the banks’ part. In some markets, banks were motivated to do this to counter the rise of digital wallets, which they worried would disintermediate them. In other countries, they did so to encourage the digitisation of payments.

Different countries had different RTP adoption journeys. For example, in 2005, the Swedish government decided to shift the cost of handling cash onto commercial banks to reduce their costs. The banks responded by deciding to push Swedish people towards digital payments. Initially, the banks tried to incentivise the use of cards, but that still left millions of peer-to-peer (P2P) payments occurring in cash. So, in 2012, Swedish banks came together and developed ‘Swish’, a mobile app that allows instant P2P bank payments, thereby creating the country’s first RTP platform.

Small Businesses & Mobile Workers

Small businesses quickly perceived their own advantage in accepting real-time payments. Labourers doing up your house and microbusinesses were the first to embrace RTPs. Bank transfers typically have lower processing costs than credit cards and less fraud relative to traditional banking methods, and they don’t require card terminals or cash registers—making them easy to implement. And the money hits your bank account immediately. Gone are the days of waiting for that customer’s cheque that’s ‘in the post’.  Microbusinesses could avoid the intrinsic costs associated with hiring a POS terminal, paying card transaction processing fees, and waiting for next-day clearance of funds.

The NIBSS Instant Payment (NIP) system, which launched in Nigeria in 2011, shows how benefits for retailers can help drive RTP adoption. Prior to NIP, most businesses relied on cash because they valued the immediate access to funds. For millions of small business owners in Nigeria, the difference between getting your money today or in a few days could be the difference between staying afloat and going under. With NIP, businesses can now get both immediate access to funds and avoid the risk of carrying cash. They can also transact safely across larger distances, no longer having to move cash across the country, which was expensive and often unsafe.

Consumers

Once banks made RTPs easy to access, consumers were quick to embrace them as digital alternatives to cash. Sending funds to a phone number or an alias, rather than using a long IBAN code or sort code and account number, made bank transfers quick, easy, and something people could do from anywhere. They also allowed users to avoid the hassle and risks of carrying (and losing) cash. Naturally, P2P RTP methods sprouted up around the world.

Furthermore, RTP is increasingly enabling popular, low-cost, cross-border instant payments. For example, Project Nexus, an initiative by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), connects domestic instant payment systems (IPS) to enable fast, cost-effective, and transparent cross-border payments. This project has made substantial progress in linking IPSs across multiple countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand.

Will there be any losers?

So, the question remains, is the traditional card fee model fatally undermined by the arrival and rapid adoption of RTPs? The answer is no, not uniformly. Some geographies and some types of businesses and types of consumers are clearly early and enthusiastic adopters of RTPs. However, many of these people were previously operating outside the traditional banking system anyway as we’ve discussed. In fact, RTPs presents an opportunity to serve these new prospective customers with value-added financial products for the first time.

Where are the areas of risk and opportunity for card issuers and paytechs as a result of the rise of RTPs? It’s clear that more and more smaller merchants are likely to be gravitating away from expensive payments hardware – most notably POS terminals. It seems likely that this dynamic will be more pronounced in emerging markets that are rapid adopters of RTP systems.

SoftPOS opportunity

However, that creates an opportunity for SoftPOS paytech innovators like Mypinpad because, like RTP payments, they are mobile-based rather than hardware-based.  That allows merchants to accept both RTPs and SoftPOS payments on the same device which they already have in their pocket. The customer will choose which method suits them best—with many choosing to have micropayments on RTP and larger payments on card. There is, therefore, a symbiotic relationship between RTP and SoftPOS for the most part which is not true for traditional payment terminals.

For larger merchants, SoftPOS’ ability to enable secure payments that are integrated into and embedded within complex, customised workflows designed to improve the customer experience. It will be up to incumbent technology providers, issuers and acquirers to impress merchants with value-added services around transactions moving forward.

Next time, I’ll take a deeper look at some of those use cases and complex workflows that are likely to receive wider adoption, as incumbent players are threatened with the loss of transaction volumes and fee levels over the coming years as RTPs continue their inexorable rise.