Payment Providers Expand Infrastructure to Boost Reliability

Watch more: FIS: Customer Retention Emerges as Key Growth Strategy Amid Uncertainty

Rising capital costs, tighter regulatory scrutiny and fragmented global trade are battering the business environment.

It’s against this backdrop that financial technology companies are under pressure to do something counterintuitive: grow without spending.

“Customers want innovation, but they need reliability more,” Jared Rutkowski, head of payables and receivables at FIS, told PYMNTS during a discussion for the July edition of the “What’s Next In Payments: Trade Offs” series.

While the artificial intelligence (AI) arms race grabs headlines, many firms in the payment ecosystem are quietly shifting strategy by focusing on product stability, infrastructure redundancy and cash flow tools that offer actual utility in a constrained economy.

It’s a return to fundamentals, with a digital edge.

“The current environment is definitely unique,” Rutkowski said. “But we’ve really approached this uncertainty by doubling down on the things we can control: customer relationships, operational discipline and product readiness.”

“Internally, we’re tightening controls but refusing to lose momentum,” Rutkowski added.

The shift comes as global macroeconomic volatility has prompted a reassessment of near-term priorities. One recurring theme: scenario planning.

Focusing on What Can Be Controlled

Rather than reacting impulsively to macro volatility, FIS has chosen to optimize the fundamentals. According to Rutkowski, this means investing heavily in liquidity and pipeline visibility, both for FIS and its clients.

“For our receivables products, we’ve worked closely with our clients to ensure their own cash flow positions are stable, which in turn has stabilized ours,” he said.

Rutkowski said FIS is maintaining a “conservative baseline forecast” but actively models upside cases, for example, if trade lanes reopen or FX volatility eases.

That dual approach is helping to shape how the company allocates resources. On the back end, Rutkowski added that the firm has scaled up invoice and payment processing capacity to prepare for volume rebounds.

“We’ve made continued investment in AI-driven capabilities like reconciliation, which we believe will define competitive differentiation in the long term,” he said.

As geopolitical risks escalate and trade routes face persistent disruption, FIS has also been rethinking its vendor strategy and infrastructure planning.

“We’ve started diversifying our supplier and partner dependencies,” Rutkowski said. “These shifts have made us really rethink single-threaded vendor relationships.”

The solution: redundancy and geographic diversification — particularly in cloud infrastructure.

“We’re expanding our cloud infrastructure in multiple regions,” he added. “If there’s an outage or restriction in one area, our platform stays up and running.”

Innovation Is Where Alignment Meets Traction

Of course, in a climate this volatile, not all innovation is created equal. For FIS, deciding which technologies to pursue requires a rigorous, risk-aware framework.

“It really comes down to customer impact, operational resilience, and the return on risk,” Rutkowski said. “We ask ourselves: Does this innovation solve a critical problem our customers feel today? And can we deliver it without destabilizing core operations?”

Before launching new capabilities, which can range from tokenized invoices to real-time payment rails, FIS assesses their potential for failure, and, critically, how quickly they can recover if something goes wrong.

Internationally, the approach is more selective.

“We continue expanding in markets with strong digital payment adoption and supportive regulatory frameworks,” Rutkowski said. “But in regions with high macro uncertainty, we focus more on partnerships than direct footprint expansion.”

With margins under pressure, every company is rethinking spending. At FIS, the approach has been surgical, but there are lines the company won’t cross even when costs rise.

“We truly believe that customer retention is probably the most cost-effective growth lever that we have as a company,” Rutkowski said. “We refuse to delay modernization of our architecture and core data infrastructure. We see that as non-negotiable if we want to stay relevant and competitive.”

“We hold ourselves to two standards: first, reliability; second, innovation,” he added.

As Rutkowski looks ahead to the next six to 12 months, he sees AI as the company’s central strategic differentiator. But how will FIS balance innovation and reliability?

“We draw the line where innovation would compromise the stability, security or affordability of the customer experience,” he said.