Closing the Payment Gap: New Data on Speed, Risk and Retention

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Payment friction takes a toll across many business operations. Firms facing greater business uncertainty report weaker payment performance, more customer delays and higher revenue losses. These five findings show where the gaps are widest and which improvements could help close them.

Middle-Market Payment Friction

Payment Performance Drops

26%

Only 26% of high-uncertainty firms say their ability to process payments quickly while maintaining fraud and security controls is strong or very strong. For low-uncertainty firms, 59% say the same.

Payment Friction Becomes Common

55%

More than half of firms say that fraud or security controls have at least occasionally delayed customer or partner payments. Recurring friction is more than six times as common for high-uncertainty firms as for low-uncertainty firms, at 25% versus 4%.

Retention Risk Jumps

11x

Forty-four percent of firms experiencing recurring friction say payment reliability and accuracy have a critical impact on customer retention, compared with 4% of friction-light firms.

Revenue Loss Multiplies

6.2x

Firms with recurring friction lose an average of 1.92% of annual revenue to payment delays, errors and fraud, plus the work required to fix those issues. Friction-light firms lose 0.31% of revenue because of these delays.

Solving Payment Friction With Automation

89%

Nearly nine in 10 firms that experience recurring friction say that automated payment processing from start to finish, which would reduce manual reviews, would help them improve speed and security all at once. This share is high across all friction levels.

Methodology

This Data Book is based on “When Controls Slow Commerce: The Data Behind Middle-Market Payment Friction,” the June 2026 edition of the PYMNTS Intelligence 2026 Certainty Project. The report is based on a survey of 60 CFOs and senior finance executives at U.S. firms with annual revenues ranging from $100 million to $1 billion, conducted from April 9-21, 2026. The survey covered payment speed, fraud and security controls, customer friction, business impact and expectations for the next 12 months. Respondents represented goods, services and technology firms.

About

PYMNTS Intelligence is a leading global data and analytics platform that uses proprietary data and methods to provide actionable insights on what’s now and what’s next in payments, commerce and the digital economy. Its team of data scientists includes leading economists, econometricians, survey experts, financial analysts and marketing scientists with deep experience in the application of data to the issues that define the future of the digital transformation of the global economy. This multilingual team has conducted original data collection and analysis in more than three dozen global markets for some of the world’s leading publicly traded and privately held firms.

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