Anyone has insights to the keys risks to the payments industry?

Based on my personal opinion, payment in its simplest form is exchanging something with another party which in this case is money. There are two ways to make payments today which is either physical money or virtual money.

For virtual money, there are so many ways to do it (credit card, debit card, QR, cryptocurrency, etc) And which method that people use is ultimately about cost, rewards, and convenience.

Companies like visa and Mastercard have strong network effects due to banks and credit cards. For PayPal, they allow anyone to make payment and collect payment online easily.

And to me, I think the risk is security since for cash you have security guards whereas for virtual money you have cybersecurity guards. Another risk is regulation since the government are concerned about company handling money and if they were to impose rules to ensure that you are financially well-backed, then you might have to withdraw from the business as seen in instarem ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11... )
I write cool stuff about personal finance and money-saving hacks here.

Payment can be a winner- takes all.

So when 1 company won, all the other companies would be close to worthless.

Look at facebook, after it won, you can't see all its competitors (hint: they are all dead)

its shld be the same for payment industry

you can only have 1 (or very little) winner