By the late 1980s, MasterCard was removing humans from the authorization cycle, replacing them with modems. By the 1990s, the Internet was connecting the last mile to merchants, replacing modems with instant authorization. Will the 2020s be the decade when payment ecosystems remove issuing banks from the process?

The landscape of payments technology is rapidly evolving in many directions, serving previously unserviceable merchant environments and supporting electronic payments where they were once unsupportable.