Introduction

The World Wide Web reaches 3 billion people today and will reach 6 billion people by the year 2020. It has vastly increased access to information and education. However, these advances have not yet translated into the ability to financially transact with anyone in the world with the same ubiquity and ease as sending and receiving a message via the Web.

The Web connected fragmented documentation systems with a common set of standards. Today’s systems of value exchange lack a set of common standards, and are still proprietary, disconnected, and opaque.

The W3C Web Payments Interest Group is developing a roadmap for standards to improve the interoperability of payments using Web technologies for both online and brick-and-mortar (offline) scenarios. The group's vision will help achieve greater interoperability among merchants and their customers, payment providers, software vendors, mobile operators, native mobile apps, and payment networks. Realizing this vision will have profound and far reaching economic and social impacts related to increased choice, reduced costs, financial inclusion, fair competition, greater security, rapid innovation cycles, and overall economic efficiency.

Benefits for Financial Institutions

Financial institutions will have new opportunities to strengthen relationships with their customers and offer them more frequent and safe opportunities to use their payment instruments for ecommerce while strengthening a more direct relationship with their financial institution. Lower cost of extending banking services to new customers; 3 billion people expected to come online in next 5 years.

• Reclaim Customer Relationship. We seek to help financial institutions reclaim their customer relationship by being able to provide Web-based payment solutions directly to their customers via open standards instead of through proprietary 3rd party payment services.
• Enable New Revenue Models. We want to enable financial institutions to provide new services such as data banking, spending analysis, banking app stores, and access to low-cost real-time settlement systems.
• Ubiquity.
• Increased choice. We seek to enable people to pay with their preferred payment instruments (that are also accepted by merchants) and to increase the choice of payment instruments available to customers.
• Improved experience. We want to improve the customer experience in a variety of ways. These include reducing the need to provide data as part of a transaction (helpful on mobile in particular), simplifying payment interfaces, harmonizing checkout experience across ecommerce sites, and making it easier to make payments from a wide range of devices, such as computers, portable devices, televisions, eBooks, and automobiles.
• Greater security. We seek to increase confidence in the Web as a platform for conveniently and securely conducting financial transactions. By improving Web security and fostering an ecosystem that makes it easy to integrate more secure payment instruments, we expect to see a major reduction in payments transaction fraud (such as stolen card numbers or compromised virtual currency wallets). We are interested in approaches (such as tokenization) that reduce the need for customers to share sensitive data with merchants or other parties, at the same time as we want to make payments a seamless experience.
• Accessible.

Joining the Work

The official work started in 2015 and is expected to produce the first set of standards by 2017. The time to join the work is now.

To participate in the work:

• Join the Web Payments Interest Group