In 1995, a research group at BT Laboratories mapped out how the telecommunications landscape might look by 2020. Their predictions ranged from the fantastic to the highly practical, with visions of underground cities and Martian colonies sitting alongside forecasts for global electronic payments and online shopping.
Few outside technology circles imagined households would speak casually to devices for information retrieval. Today, voice‑driven interfaces are commonplace, even if the sophistication of natural language remains a work in progress. Similarly, electronic shopping was once an emerging novelty. Now, digital commerce dominates the retail mix, reshaping supply chains and consumer behaviour in ways the forecasters anticipated, even if the precise form of platforms and players could not have been known.
The same dynamic played out with digital payments. The prediction that coins and notes would give way to electronic cash has only partially materialised, yet the rise of contactless payments, mobile wallets and central bank digital currency pilots demonstrate how close that vision came. The pattern suggests that accurate predictions often miss only in timing, not direction, with social and regulatory adoption proving the critical variable.
Cerillion plc (LON:CER) is a leading provider of billing, charging and customer management systems with more than 20 years’ experience delivering its solutions across a broad range of industries including the telecommunications, finance, utilities and transportation sectors.
