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📈Chartpack: Global trends to inform your product’s strategy
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📈Chartpack: Global trends to inform your product’s strategy

Important trends from around the globe to improve your understanding of the tech world beyond the West

Rich Holmes
Dec 13, 2023
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📈Chartpack: Global trends to inform your product’s strategy
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🔒Chartpacks are in-depth analysis of the data and trends you need to help you make stronger strategic decisions. These product-focused insights will broaden your perspective beyond your immediate environment.

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Hi product people 👋,

Trends often start in other countries before they’re imported into the West. And with so much tech news focused on the West, we thought it might be helpful for us to put together some of the most important technology trends from around the world to help you develop a global perspective and to stay on top of trends that might be relevant to your product.

You might be considering an expansion to a new territory or maybe you just want to understand a bit more about what’s going on outside of your own country to think about how new technologies and trends could be applied to your strategy. 

If you’re interested in developing a more globally informed product strategy, this Chartpack should help.

Coming up:

  • The emergence of new payment technologies and why it matters for product teams

  • How China is dominating the world’s shopping carts

  • WhatsApp use cases you might not have considered

  • Why internationalization is getting easier for product teams

  • Live streaming and generative AI use cases: opportunities for product teams

  • 40 global tech companies you might not have heard about that are vying for global domination


Department of Product: Chartpacks

New payment methods are emerging

One area where countries outside the West often lead the way is payments. Due to factors including cultural differences, technical advances and constraints, accepted payment methods will vary greatly from country to country. 

And this has consequences for product builders. If you’re looking to internationalise and expand into new territories, many teams naively assume that payment methods in the new territory will mirror their own country. That’s often not the case and in 2023 we’ve seen the continued adoption of a wide variety of new payment methods which could eventually be adopted by the West, too. 

Firstly, India continued the rollout of its Unified Payments Interface (UPI).

Source: World Economic Forum

With 9.41 billion transactions, worth $181 billion processed in May 2023 alone, UPI surpassed credit card payments for the first time. The total transactions equated to approximately 3,600 transactions per second, a 58% year-on-year increase.

India leads the world in terms of real–time payment transactions with 48.6 billion transactions processed in 2021. China is second with 38% of the real-time payment transactions processed in India in the same year.

The technology is used for both larger transactions and microtransactions like buying a cup of tea, too. 

🧠🇮🇳How India’s UPI system works

The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) was developed by the National Payments Corporation of India, which allows instant money transfers between banks via mobile devices. 

Users must first register for UPI by downloading a compatible app, creating a UPI ID, and linking their bank accounts. Transactions are authenticated using a secure PIN, and users can send or request funds through their UPI ID or by scanning a QR code.

UPI supports 24/7 transactions, including P2P and P2M payments, with the added convenience of being able to link multiple bank accounts to a single app. The system is highly secure since every transaction requires a UPI PIN. Its widespread adoption has significantly contributed to the digitization of payments across India.

For companies looking to expand into India, offering UPI as a payment method is a must have.

Other payment technologies

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