CEOs Team With CFOs to Turn Payments Into Source of Strategic Advantage

Watch more: How B2B Innovation Drives the Smart Economy

While 2024 may have been governed by the economic and strategic priorities of the chief financial officer, 2025 is putting greater accountability at the feet of CEOs.

Decisions around liquidity, mergers and acquisitions, compliance and digital innovation no longer live strictly in the finance silo; they are anchored in the CEO’s capacity to draw a new playbook for growth and resilience.

As executives look ahead to 2026, Boost Payment Solutions founder and CEO Dean M. Leavitt said they should treat payments not as a back-office afterthought but as an intentional lever.

“Payments are, in and of themselves, a strategic tool that CEOs should look at very carefully,” he told PYMNTS during a discussion for the 2025 What’s Next in Payments series, “November: The Year of the CEO.”

CEOs should be partnering closely with their CFOs to ensure that payment methods, cycles and data integrations are optimized not just for efficiency, but for insights that drive better business outcomes, Leavitt said.

Boost’s own role in the smart economy positions it not just as a technology provider but as connective tissue in a digital world still straddling the line between manual and automated processes.

“Our job as a company that is uniquely positioned as a bridge between AP and AR is to make sure that both sides of that equation are properly equipped to optimize the way in which they pay and get paid,” Leavitt said, adding that this includes the seamless movement of money and data.

As enterprises race to digitize accounts payable and accounts receivable workflows not just for the sake of modernization but for real-time decision-making, fraud mitigation and working capital optimization, that bridge is more important than ever.

Navigating Uncertainty and Unlocking Opportunity

Digital transformation is no longer a strategy; it is becoming core to business survival amid ongoing uncertainty. Artificial intelligence, shifting macroeconomic conditions, fragile supply chains and evolving customer expectations have reshaped business into a high-stakes balancing act.

Especially in B2B payments, the mandate is to simplify the journey from analog to digital, where ongoing frictions exist not just in payments but in the surrounding data flows, reporting tools and integrations that enable automation and insight at scale.

“Our focus is always on how can we develop something to fix those frictions,” Leavitt said.

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

After all, the transformative potential of digital payments has arguably only come into focus for CEOs recently, with payments becoming not just transactional mechanisms but levers for balance sheet control, forecasting accuracy and liquidity orchestration.

“It used to be that last-minute afterthought,” Leavitt said. But “the way in which you pay and get paid … is now in and of itself a really important strategic element in your business,” especially in the wake of tightening liquidity and higher capital costs.

Leadership in a Shifting Digital Economy

Leadership in the digital age isn’t merely about being tech-literate, but about orchestrating transformation at scale. Finance is becoming inseparable from technology, innovation is increasingly inseparable from risk, and leadership is increasingly inseparable from learning.

The promise and pitfalls of AI have put an exclamation point on this reality.

“If you trust AI blindly, you do so at your own peril,” Leavitt said.

But the inverse stance is just as dangerous.

“If you ignore it and don’t incorporate it into your own business strategy … you do so at your own peril,” he said.

Boost sees AI not as a silver bullet, but as a dynamic, evolving tool, he said.

“We’re probably at the two-yard line … in terms of what its true capabilities will ultimately be,” Leavitt said, underscoring the imperative for CEOs to strike a balance between innovation and execution.

Broad mandates like “AI transformation,” at the end of the day, are frequently too ambiguous to steer focused execution. Success comes not from chasing what is novel, but from scaling what is useful.

The Frontier of Cross-Border Payments

While AI capabilities work their way up the field in payments, Boost is seeing hockey-stick growth from its flagship products like the Boost 100XB cross-border card-to-account solution and its payments-as-a-service (PaaS) model.

Both have “enjoyed meteoric growth,” Leavitt said, adding that PaaS, in particular, positions Boost within the wider FinTech ecosystem, empowering acquirers and software partners to lean on Boost’s settlement and data platform for supplier enablement.

As global enterprise payment volumes surge, so does the market’s appetite for cross-border settlement and working capital tools. Leavitt said he believes this evolution is “certainly becoming very important across all B2B eCommerce globally.”

Still, while stablecoins and other new mechanisms for “transfer of value” may hold promise in some consumer or retail settings, B2B is governed by different rules, he said. Access to credit, data fidelity, regulatory compliance and structured reporting are paramount.

“We’re always focused on the broader picture,” he said, framing Boost’s cross-border strategy as one that balances speed, optionality and value-added data. For enterprises, the payment instrument itself must serve more than one function; it must create operational leverage.

“Working capital is an important piece of that puzzle,” Leavitt said.

Unlike stablecoin transfers, credit-backed payment rails can deliver that leverage where it matters most.

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