The Under-the-Radar Changes Transforming How Money Moves

For most of the past two decades, digital commerce has evolved through visible, headline-grabbing breakthroughs. Think: smartphones, app stores, one-click checkout and real-time payments.

But the most consequential changes underway across commerce today are less obvious to consumers and even to businesses. They are structural, architectural and philosophical. These paradigm shifts spent much of 2025 working beneath the surface to reshape how money moved, how trust was earned and how companies competed.

In conversations with PYMNTS for the What’s Next in Payments “Unsung Heroes” series, a chorus of eight senior leaders shared why the future of payments goes far beyond faster transactions or sleeker interfaces to reroute and revamp the very plumbing of global commerce.

Taken together, the executive discussions chart exactly how, across four key themes, the “Unsung Heroes” that make complexity invisible, reliability boring and trust intuitive are reshaping the payments ecosystem.

• Operational Resilience as a Strategic Advantage
• Data Quality and Governance as Business Enablement
• Modernization of Identity and Authentication
• Emerging AI-Driven Interaction and Payment Modalities

This shift and its implications are likely to favor organizations that think systemically rather than incrementally. It may reward long-term investment over short-term optimization. And ultimately, it may raise the bar for what end users expect from any interaction involving money.

Operational Resilience as a Strategic Advantage

As commerce becomes always-on and global by default, downtime has shifted from an IT problem to a business-wide issue.

“Businesses want to work with payments organizations that are reliable, effective, and have a broad set of products. Trust and being able to operate flawlessly are a base expectation for consumers and merchants,” Paysafe Chief Operating Officer Roy Aston told PYMNTS.

A payment outage during peak demand doesn’t just interrupt transactions; it erodes customer confidence, damages partner relationships, and invites competitors to step in.

“We had 100% uptime this year. What you want is a Black Friday and not a blackout Friday,” Entersekt Chief Strategy Officer Dewald Nolte said. “Our Operations team is absolutely the unsung heroes.”

In this environment, reliability and resilience have become differentiators.

“Platform resiliency and business continuity planning, in my opinion, has been our number one unsung hero,” Rinku Sharma, chief technology officer at Boost Payment Solutions, told PYMNTS.

This is especially true in payments, where trust is fragile, and switching costs are lower than they appear. Consumers may forgive a slow app; they are less forgiving when it involves their money. Businesses choosing payment partners now scrutinize operational resilience alongside pricing and features.

“My infrastructure team, cloud, site reliability and database are remarkable. … We already had a high availability configuration, but this year we implemented, through our infrastructure group, high multi-region disaster recovery,” One Inc Chief Information Officer Elizabeth Hoemeke told PYMNTS.

After all, the operationally resilient firm doesn’t just survive shocks, but compounds its advantage while others retrench.

Data Quality and Governance as Business Enablement

If resilience is the ability to operate under pressure, data quality is the ability to decide under uncertainty.

“Our biggest advantage is the depth and diversity of the payment data that we manage … having that consolidated into a single governed environment allows us to create actionable insights,” Sharma at Boost told PYMNTS. “All of the capabilities needed for a future-state Boost are reliant on having good data governance.”

As data becomes central to commerce, compliance, data quality and governance are emerging as foundational enablers of trust and scale.

“To operate in all those different countries and to operate really well, whether it’s internal data and insights, risk management, or enabling sales and marketing, all of that gets sourced from having great high-quality data, and being able to do phenomenal things with that data,” Paysafe’s Aston told PYMNTS.

Clean, well-governed data improves machine learning outcomes. Clear consent frameworks increase customer confidence in personalization. Strong auditability accelerates partnerships with enterprises and regulators.

“One big unsung hero for us is the data source partners we work with to bring in data,” Trulioo Chief Technology Officer Hal Lonas said, adding that the company does not simply ping those sources. Trulioo ingests and maintains them at scale, enabling real analysis rather than simple lookup responses.

When leaders trust the data, decisions accelerate. One Inc’s Hoemeke told PYMNTS that data is central to her firm’s strategy, helping insurers understand payment trends and customer behavior over time. In an industry where margins are tight and expectations are rising, such visibility increasingly differentiates platforms.

Modernization of Identity and Authentication

Identity is no longer just about keeping bad actors out. It is about letting the right actors in, at speed, with confidence.

“We’ve all suffered the frustration of not being able to authenticate that we are who we say we are,” John Bresnahan, global head of operations at i2c, told PYMNTS.

Legacy identity models built around static credentials, perimeter-based assumptions and fragmented systems are ill-suited to today’s emerging reality. They introduce friction for users while leaving gaps that attackers exploit.

“We’re able to prevent up to 40% of fraud with a 0.5% customer friction level,” Bresnahan added, noting that only a few years ago, catching 40% of fraud attempts at scale would have required far more user friction spanning steps like step-up authentication, manual reviews or card declines.

“The bad actors only have to get it right once. We have to get it right every single time,” Boost’s Sharma noted.

At the same time, authentication and risk evaluation depend on device intelligence, behavioral analytics and repeat patterns. They are only as good as the data feeding them, Entersekt’s Nolte said. “If you get garbage in, you get garbage out.”

“Compliance isn’t a checkbox, it’s embedded into our design,” Maverick Payments Vice President of Product Justin Downey told PYMNTS.

Emerging AI-Driven Interaction and Payment Modalities

If identity defines who you are, and data defines what you know, AI-driven interactions are what increasingly define how value is exchanged.

“As a technologist, I think of that as a modern extension of ‘everything’s an API.’ We’re not far away from everything being an autonomous agent, able to interact and create these ubiquitous ecosystems,” Paysafe’s Aston said.

Artificial intelligence will transform interfaces from static transactions into adaptive conversations. In some cases, it already is.

“We are looking and exploring into some ways where we can use AI to gather customer data and insights,” Green Dot Chief Product Officer Melissa Douros said, calling “user feedback” this year’s unsung hero for Green Dot.

“There may be agents running around buying things on your behalf, but do you trust the agent?” Trulioo’s Lonas said. “Where did it come from? What’s it going to do?”

Trulioo’s role, he added, will be to validate who created the agent, who it represents and how it interacts with businesses.

“I think it’s probably unfair to call AI an unsung hero. It’s pretty sung,” i2c’s Bresnahan said.

As AI models and systems advance, accurate voice transcription is becoming a real possibility. “The accuracy levels are now incredible,” he added. “They often refer to their word error rate, and it’s 1 or 2%, meaning 98-99% accurate.”

What ties these four capabilities together is not technology, but integration. Too many enterprises pursue excellence in silos—best-in-class resilience frameworks, data platforms, identity tools, or AI pilots—without addressing how they reinforce one another.

The leaders PYMNTS spoke to focus on doing the opposite.