Payments CEOs Turn Data Into the New Currency of Power

In 2025, the CEOs shaping global identity, payments and financial operations sound less like traditional executives and more like systems architects.

Enterprise leaders in today’s environment must rebuild the infrastructure of modern commerce in real time. In conversations with PYMNTS for the “Year of the CEO 2025” edition of the “What’s Next in Payments” series, a chorus of enterprise chiefs pointed to a future in which artificial intelligence (AI), data integrity and end-to-end automation are becoming the foundation of leadership itself.

Taken together, the executive discussions chart how identity verification, B2B payments, the cross-border money movement, SMB financial automation and enterprise liquidity are reshaping operations. Four central themes emerged:

• AI Moves From Sideshow to Center Stage
• Data Becomes the Hard Currency of Trust
• The Rise of End-to-End Automation
• The Infrastructure of the Future Is Being Built Now

This is not a story about technology for technology’s sake. It is a story about power. The power to make decisions in uncertainty. To transform operations. To protect trust. And the power to create, or lose, competitive advantage in an economy where machines, agents and autonomous processes act faster than humans.

AI Moves From Sideshow to Center Stage

If 2023 was the year CEOs discovered generative AI, and 2024 was the year they experimented with it, then 2025 was the year its applications across the enterprise became almost existential.

“The defining challenge has been reviewing your business model in light of AI,” Trulioo CEO Vicky Bindra told PYMNTS. “Your ability to be either influenced, supported or disintermediated by any of these technologies is what’s causing the biggest concern or opportunity for businesses.”

AI, after all, is being framed as a once-in-a-generation systems shift, redefining operating models, culture and long-term strategy.

“AI is going to be a big innovation tool for companies like us,” René Lacerte, CEO and founder of BILL, told PYMNTS, highlighting AI not as a threat but as an inflection point. “It’s going to be great for SMBs.”

What’s changed is not just AI’s capability but its scope. 2025’s volatility, spanning liquidity tightening, geopolitical shocks, and diverging monetary policies, has turned CEOs into macro risk navigators and positioned AI as a key tool.

“There is some technological innovation and disruption that is happening, in particular around AI, that happens really once in a generation,” Convera CEO Patrick Gauthier said. “Any company, any function, any person who does not know how to understand AI would be as obsolete as somebody who does not know how to use a mobile phone.”

Meanwhile, Boost Payment Solutions founder and CEO Dean M. Leavitt cautioned CEOs against both overreliance and avoidance: “If you trust AI blindly, you do so at your own peril. But if you ignore it … you do so at your own peril.”

Data Becomes the Hard Currency of Trust

In every interview, CEOs made one point clear: AI only works if the data is clean, accurate and governed.

“AI will be a powerful tool … but the foundation must be governed and accurate,” Mastercard EVP of Commercial and New Payment Flows for North America Mike Kresse told PYMNTS. “Data that sits within the enterprise is really being tapped into now by CFOs to understand performance drivers and early red flags.”

All CEOs tied their company’s differentiation to data quality, data integrity and real-time intelligence.

“You can talk about AI in different forms, but you can’t replicate good data,” said Trulioo’s Bindra. “Good data is what defines us. Good data is what’s going to differentiate us.”

Whether for risk, payments, identity or forecasting, data is becoming the strategic currency underpinning all innovation and resilience.

“You cannot just say, ‘Oh, we’ll just dump it all in ChatGPT.’ It doesn’t work. Regulators will not allow us to do that,” said Convera’s Gauthier.

And at Boost, Leavitt sees payments data as a powerful, and still underutilized, strategic asset: “The way in which you pay and get paid … is now a really important strategic element in your business.”

Data, in other words, is no longer an output. It is becoming the operating system of leadership.

The Rise of End-to-End Automation

Automation is no longer about reducing cost. For today’s CEOs, it’s about reducing friction, eliminating risk, and enabling real-time business.

“If you are a company that wants to succeed in this high-change environment, you have to be highly agile and adaptable,” said Convera’s Gauthier.

The future enterprise will be far more automated, far less manual, and far more intelligent than anything we have today.

“The CFO must connect data, payments, automation, risk and decisioning to sustain performance,” Mastercard’s Kresse said. “Too much of the commercial payment life cycle still moves between system and paper. … It’s insanely manual.”

Across identity verification, cross-border movement, AR/AP and embedded finance, the CEOs share a vision of systems that work autonomously, accurately and invisibly in the background.

“A year or two from now, there could be a touchless experience for an SMB, so they don’t have to think about financial operations, and workflows can manage themselves. That’s ultimately what we all want,” BILL’s Lacerte said.

The Infrastructure of the Future Is Being Built Now

Individually, these CEOs run very different companies. Collectively, they describe a single system taking shape beneath global commerce, spanning payments as a strategic intelligence layer, data as the raw material for competitive advantage, and AI as the automation engine powering it.

“Any word you can think of with ‘re’ — reinvent, reframe, reengage — this is what’s happening right now,” BILL’s Lacerte said. “Durable businesses really survive because they’re built that way from day one.”

The leaders each agreed, the infrastructure of the future is not something we will build someday. It is being assembled right now.

“Our focus is on staying ahead in the next 18 months, while carving out the differentials that make us the trusted infrastructure over the next three to five years,” Trulioo’s Bindra said.

And as these CEOs emphasized, the question is no longer whether this new infrastructure will exist, but who will build it, who will trust it, and who will control it.

“The dynamic between navigating through uncertain waters, all the while future-proofing the company, is at the core of a lot of the tough decisions that we have to make,” Convera’s Gauthier said.

“At the end of the day, it’s about measuring results,” Boost’s Leavitt said, and not just in dollars but in the systems and choices that make long-term value creation possible.