Operational stability may never return to what it once was.
The new North Star isn’t certainty; it’s capability.
From Wall Street to Main Street, financial services leaders are figuring out how to accelerate transformation while mitigating risk, reduce spend while increasing value and scale faster without sacrificing resilience.
As trade-offs go, it’s a tall task that firms need to tackle in short order.
A deep dive into recent conversations with payments industry leaders for the “What’s Next in Payments Series: Trade Offs” series revealed four defining themes foundational to how the marketplace is thinking about the trade-offs that uncertainty in business can frequently necessitate.
Central to those four themes is the fact that, for a new generation of payments, banking and B2B infrastructure providers, the answers to growth despite uncertainty are emerging not through disruptive leaps but deliberate, architecture-level reinvention.
Strategic Innovation Amid Economic Uncertainty
All nine companies addressed how persistent macroeconomic turbulence—inflation, geopolitical instability, interest rate hikes and supply chain disruptions—is reshaping their priorities. Yet instead of pausing innovation, firms are doubling down on purposeful, risk-aware innovation to maintain competitive relevance.
“All businesses exist, all the time, in environments that produce some form of risks and at various stages of political, geopolitical, economical change,” Marcin Glogowski, senior vice president, managing director of Europe and U.K. CEO at Marqeta, told PYMNTS.
“The underlying principle for businesses remains adaptation,” he added.
Against this backdrop, firms are choosing thoughtful acceleration over retreat, betting on adaptability and investment in digital infrastructure, cloud computing and artificial intelligence to navigate uncertainty.
“In the payments industry today, innovation is not a luxury; it’s a lifeline,” Nilesh Dusane, global head of institutional payments at AWS, told PYMNTS.
“Legacy infrastructure simply can’t keep up,” he added. “And the traditional model … those cycles are now too long and too costly.”
Digital transformation is being driven not by theory but by practical use cases.
“Digitized payments are intended to keep operations moving, even when markets aren’t,” Ernest Rolfson, CEO and founder at Finexio, told PYMNTS.
“We draw the line where innovation would compromise the stability, security or affordability of the customer experience,” Jared Rutkowski, head of payables and receivables at FIS, told PYMNTS.
“Customers want innovation, but they need reliability more,” he added.
Leveling Up Traditional Business Models With Embedded Finance
Embedded finance also proved to be a dominant theme, not just as a feature but as a fundamental shift in how value is delivered.
“What we are seeing is more companies who are not traditionally in financial services themselves see the value of bringing financial context… to their existing relationships…,” Marqeta’s Glogowski said.
The evolution of non-financial brands into financial service providers empowers the broader offering of real-time payouts, embedded accounts or branded card programs. These solutions are reframing customer engagement and enabling new revenue streams, turning finance into a strategic lever.
“We’ve moved past that world where we all pick a bank, we go stand in line, we open a relationship, and we use their money mobility,” Ingo Payments CEO Drew Edwards told PYMNTS.
“The very definition of [embedded banking] is to embed a new banking relationship into a non-financial solution,” and this can be daunting, he added.
In this model, retailers, logistics firms, gig platforms, property managers and more are all becoming quasi-banks, offering branded financial experiences that drive loyalty and unlock margin.
Prioritizing Liquidity, Cash Flow and Working Capital Optimization
The executive conversations revealed a recurring emphasis on liquidity management, days sales outstanding (DSO)/days payable outstanding (DPO) trade-offs and automation in accounts payable/receivable as tools for resilience.
“Many companies in the middle market struggle with unpaid invoices,” Boost Payment Solutions Chief Financial Officer Mariana Lamson told PYMNTS. “Sometimes as much as 30% go unresolved monthly. That’s not just an efficiency problem. It’s a business continuity risk.”
“CFOs and finance teams are paying closer attention than ever to converting sales into cash as quickly and securely as possible,” she added.
Rather than cost-cutting alone, CFOs are investing in digital strategies that accelerate cash conversion, reduce friction and enable real-time visibility—critical capabilities in today’s environment.
“AP is now a frontline lever for liquidity and resilience,” Finexio’s Rolfson said.
“Providing stability in the back office around visibility and predictability of your cash flow … that’s something we can help with,” he added.
AI and Data-Driven Personalization as Infrastructure
AI is not being presented as hype but as embedded, outcome-driven infrastructure. The focus is on practical, embedded intelligence that creates scalable, resilient platforms.
“We want to be really upfront when it comes to what’s next from the technology side,” Velera Chief Administrative Officer Brian Caldarelli told PYMNTS.
“Client experience? Non-negotiable. Fraud protection? Non-negotiable. Cybersecurity? Non-negotiable,” he added.
As the payments industry races toward real-time settlement, hyper-personalization and intelligent liquidity, sustainable growth isn’t about chasing the next trend. It’s about embedding innovation into the foundations of financial infrastructure—cloud-first, AI-ready and built for resilience.
“You can’t innovate your way out of uncertainty,” Geoff Brady, head of global trade and supply chain finance at Bank of America, told PYMNTS. “But if you’re smart about how you incorporate innovation into your risk framework, it becomes part of your process.”
“Credit analysis, AI modeling … these are core areas where innovation can plug directly into our control processes,” he added.
The companies that succeed may not be those that react to change but those who architect it.
“Money must keep flowing,” David Durovy, senior vice president of transformation at i2c, told PYMNTS.
“Prediction is the new protection,” he added. “We’re using AI to get ahead of fraud, to spot vulnerabilities before they become breaches.”
Echoing the sentiment, Boost’s Lamson told PYMNTS: “The best innovations don’t necessarily disrupt; they enhance. They build on existing processes and add value.”
