Multisensory payments: is this the future?

I just spotted a new innovation in India from Paytm, who I consider friends of mine after interviewing their founder, Vijay Shekhar Sharma for Digital Human a few years ago.

What’s the innovation?

Talking payments.

The Paytm soundbox – which works both online and offline with QR codes – allows merchants and customers to hear their transactions being made in 11 languages. This gets pretty interesting as it made me think about what more we could add to payments from a sensory perspective. But first, let’s explore what Paytm has invented.

It’s called the Paytm Card Soundbox. Here’s the blurb:

Featuring a long-lasting battery life of up to 10 days, the device will offer merchants improved efficiency and convenience. It includes instant audio confirmation and a display screen for transaction amounts …

And here’s the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aUlB4hX6rQ

It got me thinking about the future world of transaction banking, and how we would get multiple sensory inputs of everything we spend and contextual, repeatable perspectives of what and how we spend.

For example, I get multiple updates of how I spend already via SMS and app alerts. Now, we can get audio updates. Tomorrow, it will be visual updates in our connected sunglasses and VR … and then, we can go back in history and repeat any of those updates.

In fact, what is most likely to happen is that, in the not too distant future, I could touch any transaction on my financial system and a visual recording would appear of where that took place and when, alongside a map and clock of the timing and place it happened.

Add that to Apple Vision Pro or Meta Quest Pro and you get where we are going.

So here is the challenge for traditional banks and challenger banks: can you do this? How fast? When?

Today, most traditional banks purely provide me with truncated text for a transaction I made and, more often than not, I have no idea what it relates to. The same with payments received. The reason for this is that the back office systems were built last century, and can only provide a small field of characters, built on those systems.

I am not denigrating traditional banks, as they are doing a good job of keeping up, but how can you take a transactional truncated payment data and make it 100% real?

The idea of visualising, augmenting and creating sensory payment transactions that incorporate audio and visual delivery is going to be an interesting competitive playground. At least it doesn’t include smell, touch and taste … or is that coming too?