The actions are not limited to games or simple exchanges but give participants the possibility to buy virtual goods. Major brands have already identified the potential of this market, offering their "virtual" products.
World-renowned clothing or sports equipment brands such as H&M, Nike or Gucci are entering this sector:
- Since the end of 2021, H&M is marketing a 100% vegan virtual collection,
- Nike buys the virtual shoe firm "RTFKT" which it plans to integrate into its new virtual world named Nikeland,
- Gucci distributes a pair of virtual sneakers called "Gucci Virtual 25".
Read also | Digital insurance in the metaverse [4]
Nowadays, buying virtual real estate, or even advertising space, remains the most buoyant medium. Real estate transactions are the most common item in this parallel life where the avatar not only needs a home but also needs to go to a store.
Virtual actors buy land, apartments or houses. They can also buy stores, which are also virtual. At the beginning of 2022, the large French retailer Carrefour invested 300 000 EUR in a 36-hectare area in the imaginary world "The Sandbox".
At the end of 2021, Republic Realm, an American real estate agency specialized in the virtual world, also invested 4.3 million EUR for a plot of land. For its part, the Canadian firm Tokens.com, engaged in dematerialized investments, paid 2.4 million USD to acquire 565 square meters on the Decentraland platform.
For large companies, this virtual space appears as an additional distribution channel, through which they reach out to young consumers, difficult to reach otherwise.
Today, the future exponential growth in the metaverse [5] is no longer in doubt. It will inevitably lead to an increase in employment and the development of the companies involved. All of this activity requires traditional insurance at first, before looking at the insurance of virtual goods and products.
Metaverse: electronic payment in B2B (Business to Business)
However, trading in the metaverse is only possible if the methods of payment are available for this type of transaction.
The emergence of an ecosystem allowing payments in the metaverse would be an undeniable opportunity, especially for Fintechs. The latter would welcome this new source of revenue, even though, according to the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, virtual payments generated 2.2 trillion USD in revenue by 2020.
As the graph below shows, B2B e-payments have been on a clear evolution since 2017.
Read also | Insurance and augmented reality [6]
Mapping of companies that have revolutionized the B2B payment methods
In August 2021, analytics firm CBInsights released the map of companies that have revolutionized the payment method. According to the study, financial services related to virtual payment activities are the fastest growing.
The majority of these companies focus on finance applications, known as decentralized, by leveraging blockchain [7] technology.
| E-commerce & point of sale | |
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| Infrastructure & application programme interface (APIs) | |
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| Mobile payments & digital wallets | |
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| Bill payments & accounting software | |
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| Cross-border payments & money transfer | Card payments |
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| Marketing, loyalty & rewards | Security, fraud & compliance |
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| Crypto & blockchain | |
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There are many activities in this environment in which large payment companies have joined, such as Visa, which entered with its non-fungible token (NFT) in August 2021.
Currently, NFT represents one of the most promising marketable products for the metaverse. The arrival of NFTs, programmable records that uniquely represent digital assets (e.g., art, videos, music, property, ...) and based on the blockchain, could help the circulation of monetary assets in this space.
The metaverse is only embarking on these new horizons and is still in its infancy. Very few insurance companies are interested in this adventure because it offers few insurance outlets, and therefore few returns on investment.
For the time being, insurance companies do not know how to transfer their activities to the virtual world so that they are compatible with the metaverse of tomorrow.