An Investigation of Digital Payment Platform Designs: A Comparative Study of Four European Solutions

This paper focuses on the triumph march of mobile phones that currently are annexing music players, navigation devices, and cameras as separate physical objects. The next target is set on payment. Through synthesizing available literature, we construct a framework for studying digital payment platforms that combines platform, technology and business design aspects. The framework is applied to conduct a comparative case study of digital payment platforms. Four types of market actors are considered: banks, mobile network operators, merchants, and startups, which are incumbents and disrupters in the payment industry. These actors issue four types of payment systems, and we can observe that three of four platforms types can be classified as multi-sided platforms (MSP). All alternatives seek foothold by issuing evolutionary payment instruments, which are intertwined with digital payment platforms. By hosting third-party services, payment instruments are evolving from single-purpose to multi-functional ones. Our research extends existing payment literature from the MSP perspective to emphasize certain digital payment platform components, which impact strategies and complementary products.