Introduction

2020 will mark the 70th anniversary of the world's first modern credit card issuance. Over the past seven decades, these square plastic cards have become popular in most developed economies and are known as a mainstream cashless trading tool. In addition to the perceived positive effects on non-cash payments, credit cards also have a positive effect on economic development. According to Credit rating agency - Moody's, in a survey of card payment activities in 70 countries between 2011 and 2015, stated that “the use of more credit cards during this period increased 0, 1% of global GDP, contributing around $ 74 billion to GDP per year ”. Understanding the importance of this matter, XCARD – a digital-payment-focused project created to take advantages of blockchain techonology, which is powered by Mobilum, that can help credit card reach its new limits.

The Popular Of Credit Card

The popular of credit cards seems to reach the peak in US, one of the largest global markets. According to data published by TransUnion, a credit information company, the use of credit and debit cards is at a historic high in the US, where nearly 70% of consumers use payment cards. However, the above data only shows half of the story. Particularly, in order to correctly predict the future of credit cards, we must pay attention to other emerging markets in the East such as India, China as well as markets of Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam or Thailand.

Challenges To Card Payment

With low market penetration in the Asia-Pacific region, credit cards have room for growth. However, with the strong development of mobile payment, that space is shrinking significantly. During the early stages of e-commerce, credit cards and online shopping seemed inseparable and were considered as the most convenient cashless payment method. However, with the development of new technologies and mobile applications, alternative payment solutions are appearing more and more. Thanks to the faster payment speed along with many utilities, mobile payment promises to bring a more convenient and more accessible shopping experience to consumers than credit cards.

In fact, digital payments are gradually becoming more important in the global economy. In 2017, digital payment transactions amounted to approximately US $ 3.1 trillion, equivalent to 13% of the total number of commercial transactions globally and by 2019, this number is expected to increase to approximately 4.1 trillion US dollars. According to forecasts by international news agency Reuters, over 3.7 billion people in the world will use digital payment methods in 2019 and more than half of these (2.1 billion) will Use mobile wallets (mobile wallets).

With this growth momentum, alternative payment solutions can surpass card payment in e-commerce by the end of 2019. In that context, credit cards may be losing customers and revenue to new payment methods. According to a Financial Times report, in Indonesia, consumers are "bypassing" credit cards to switch to more accessible payment options such as Go-Pay, Grab-Pay and Mandiri. In China, giants like AliPay and WePay are bringing the market closer to the cashless economy. All of the mentioned above is the reason why XCARD create their digital payment dApp combined with its first-on-the-market biometric credit card to make sure users feel as convenient as possible when making their payment.

Why XCARD Can Become A Global Leader In Payments Industry?

XCARD aims to be a fully decentralized payment method, unlike the others are just provide a payment gateway. In detail, XCARD will collect many data of price from many reputable exchanges and provide the best available one for its users. Users also do not need to wait for network consensus so that they can make transaction instantly. Besides, XCARD is not only a cryptocurrency wallet app the same as the others but it can also connect to any prepaid card, debit card and credit card thanks to many various methods used by XCARD, making everything instant settlement. In order to connect to your payment card, XCARD secured wallet used methods such as wire transfer to the International Bank Account Number (IBAN) associated with the payment card, Money Send for MasterCard and OCT (Original Credit Transaction) for VISA cards. Furthermore, realizing this solution is not enough, the team decided to issue first-on-the-market biometric crypto credit card with the supportive of Visa to make sure that user can connect fiat currencies and crypto assets in real-time. By this way, XCARD’s users will have more options for their payment when joining this digital payment provider. In fact, the world economic is in chaos at this moment, for examples US-China Tradewars, making individuals and micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) more difficult to approach banking products. In simpler terms, banks and institutions prefers big companies to this type of customers. For this reason, XCARD also allows users take a loan by deposit their crypto assets as collateral no matters who you are. By this way, you will not only lose your tokens but can also get instant cash and pay back later. Especially, if you are able to payback within a day, you will not be charged any additional interest. Last but not least, MBM – a native token of XCARD will be used within XCARD ecosystem. Specifically, users need to hold MBM to process their payment with XCARD and users can become a membership if they satisfy the requirement of 0,5% of the transaction value in MBM each time a transaction is made. This will guarantee the liquidity of MBM token within XCARD’s network. More importantly, XCARD users can easily purchase MBM tokens in many big exchanges.

XCARD’s Goal And Roadmap

XCARD is a very ambitious project, hence, no surprised that the project’s purpose is to achieve a 2% market share worth currently USD 220 Billion. According to XCARD roadmap, they expect to launch their IEO worths $5 million equivalent on top ten exchange with great liquidity in Q4/2019. After launch of IEO, in Q1/2020, XCARD will officially launch their wallet on both Apps Store and Play Store to make sure that users on these popular mobile platforms can download and use XCARD. Next, European will be able to use XCARD crypto credit card in Q2/2020. For people in other regions such as Asia and South America, they can experience full featured XCARD Wallet & crypto credit card in Q3/2020. Lastly, there will be three main important events of XCARD which are the available of platform for third party services available (loans, insurance, etc.), the launch of XCARD crypto credit card in Africa and the start of community voted improvements sprint one, all of these events will take place in Q4/2020 and Q1/2021 respectively.

Conclusion

To summarize, in the trend of digital payment, card payment will face many challenges due to the appearance of many other non-cash payment methods, but there are also many opportunities for any fintech companies if they can take full advantages of all this payment method and blockchain technology. With the combination of dApp and credit card solutions that XCARD is deploying, all will promise an enormous adoption for XCARD ecosystem. With XCARD, user can buy cryptocurrencies easily than ever.