Telecom’s 5G Hangover Mirrors the Modernization Fatigue Facing CFOs

The telecom industry is trying to stop 5G’s rollout history from repeating itself with 6G’s coming launch.

To the envy of most chief financial officers in other industries embarking on their own new technology cycles, new guidance issued by the NGMN Alliance this week said mobile operators need clearer migration paths, lower implementation risk, simpler architectures and a much stronger economic rationale for modernization before another decade-long investment cycle begins.

The group, whose members include many of the world’s largest mobile carriers, delivered a message across two separate papers that sounds less like the launch of a new wireless era and more like a postmortem on 5G. Operators cannot afford another transition defined by escalating complexity, fragmented standards and infrastructure costs that outpaced measurable returns, the group said.

The telecom industry’s frustration with 5G increasingly sounds familiar to finance chiefs overseeing enterprise payment systems. The skepticism mirrors a broader shift happening across enterprise infrastructure projects, from banking core modernization and ISO 20022 migration programs to large-scale accounts payable and accounts receivable transformation efforts. Across industries, executives are reassessing whether modernization initiatives have become too technologically ambitious, too operationally fragmented and too detached from measurable business outcomes.

See also: Two Years Ago vs. Today: CFOs and the ERP Shift

Complexity Has Become the Real Cost Center

The core complaint operators now level against 5G is not that the technology failed technically. In many respects, 5G succeeded exactly as engineers intended. Networks became more software-defined, more virtualized and more capable of supporting differentiated services. The problem was that the operational burden expanded alongside the technological sophistication.

The industry organization warned that 6G cannot succeed if it merely introduces another costly layer of architectural change without reducing integration burdens and delivering clearer returns. That concern lands at a moment when many enterprise CFOs are asking similarly uncomfortable questions about their own modernization agendas.

For years, large organizations have pursued transformation initiatives under the assumption that digital modernization would naturally unlock efficiency, automation and new revenue opportunities. Yet many projects, particularly in financial infrastructure, have instead generated sprawling transition periods, duplicated systems, vendor lock-in concerns and mounting operational costs.

Consider ISO 20022 migration efforts underway across global payment systems. The messaging standard promises richer data, improved interoperability and greater automation capabilities across cross-border and domestic payments. But the transition itself has become enormously complex for banks and enterprises alike.

Organizations are simultaneously maintaining legacy messaging environments while introducing new data models, compliance processes and interoperability layers. Corporate treasury teams often discover that modernization requires not only technical upgrades, but also expensive workflow redesigns across ERP systems, reconciliation processes, liquidity management operations and supplier payment environments. The result is a modernization paradox. The transition period becomes so operationally demanding that many of the expected efficiency gains are delayed for years.

At the same time, many enterprises pursuing real-time payments, embedded finance capabilities or artificial intelligence-driven invoice automation are discovering that modernization rarely replaces old systems cleanly. Instead, it creates layered environments where legacy payment rails, ERP infrastructure and reconciliation processes continue operating alongside newer digital tools.

Read also: The B2B Payments Status Quo Works. That May Be the Problem.

CFOs Are No Longer Funding Technology Narratives Alone

For much of the past decade, modernization initiatives were often justified through strategic positioning arguments. Organizations needed to digitally transform to remain competitive. The assumption was that infrastructure modernization itself represented strategic value. That logic has weakened in today’s higher-cost capital environment.

Rather than embracing radical architectural reinvention, operators are calling for backward compatibility, simplified operational models and deployment flexibility that reduces stranded investment risk. Operators appear less interested in revolutionary network redesigns than in ensuring that future infrastructure can integrate cleanly with existing investments. In effect, they are demanding an emphasis on interoperability and migration continuity.

“It’s not about abandoning legacy systems, but modernizing around them intelligently,” Garrett Baird, vice president of product, banking and FinTech at Paymentus, told PYMNTS last month.

“The Orchestration Advantage: How Routing Architecture Shapes Payments Performance,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and Spreedly collaboration, found that companies with only three or four orchestration capabilities often incur greater complexity without realizing much benefit.

In B2B payments, finance leaders are becoming more selective about which modernization initiatives genuinely improve cash flow visibility, reconciliation efficiency, fraud mitigation or supplier payment optimization. In banking, institutions are reevaluating whether massive core transformation programs deliver returns proportionate to their implementation risks. In telecom, operators are warning that 6G cannot become another open-ended reinvention exercise searching for sustainable monetization.

Overall, no matter the industry, firms no longer want innovation defined by how much infrastructure changes. They want innovation defined by how much disruption can be avoided.

For all PYMNTS B2B coverage, subscribe to the daily B2B Newsletter.