2025 Turned Uncertainty From Surprise Into Strategy

By year-end, one conclusion from PYMNTS Intelligence’s The Certainty Project series is hard to miss: Uncertainty rarely arrives as a single shock.

It compounds, as we saw this year, jumping from cyber risk to payment fraud to shifting trade rules. Then it shows up in the most practical places, like delayed tech rollouts, higher supplier prices, thinner margins and consumers trading down at the checkout.

Across the 2025 report series, PYMNTS Intelligence surveyed middle-market decision-makers, typically 60 executives per edition, spanning chief financial officers, heads of payments and product leaders at firms based in the United States with $100 million to $1 billion in annual revenue.

The results trace a year that began with internal risk management and ended with companies treating tariffs and missing macro signals as core planning variables. Consumers responded to the same pressures with broad-based spending changes.

Early in the year, uncertainty was less about forecasting demand and more about protecting operations.

In January, cybersecurity risk emerged as a direct inhibitor of innovation. Overall, 42% of middle-market CFOs reported high concern about cybersecurity threats. However, among high-uncertainty firms, that share more than doubled to 88%. The knock-on effects were tangible, as 81% of high-uncertainty firms said cybersecurity challenges frequently forced them to delay or cancel innovation or technology initiatives over the past 12 months.

February’s findings broadened the picture. Cyber risk wasn’t only an IT problem; it was embedded in payment workflows. Only 28% of firms reported using automated procurement fraud detection systems, versus 50% relying on staff training. Yet firms were likelier to call automation the most impactful fraud-reduction strategy (71%) than training (27%). Under higher uncertainty, the costs escalated, as 87% of high-uncertainty firms reported very or extremely significant customer losses tied to procurement fraud, versus 67% overall.

The through-line from winter was that when predictability is low, executives shift spending toward defenses that prevent immediate losses, even if it delays the upgrades that would build longer-term competitiveness.

Spring: Signs of a Tariff-Driven Divide

By March, the Certainty Project lens widened from risk containment to competitive posture and policy volatility.

Product leaders increasingly described a market squeezed from both ends. Thirteen percent of middle-market product leaders named startups as their primary competitors, up from 5% six months earlier. Meanwhile, regulatory uncertainty intensified, as 30% cited policy changes as a primary competitive obstacle, up from 17%. The main villain from the prior year, cost pressures, faded as the dominant driver of uncertainty, declining from 33% in July 2024 to 15%, while technological-advancement concerns rose from 3.3% to 20%.

Then tariffs moved from background risk to operating reality. In the March tariff edition, CFOs were distributed across uncertainty levels, including 22% high uncertainty, 42% medium and 37% low. While 55% of CFOs expected workflow and operational uncertainty to improve over the next 12 months, 6 in 10 also expected tariffs to heighten uncertainty and planning challenges, and that rose to 77% among high-uncertainty firms.

Perhaps the most consequential spring finding was readiness. Only 8% of high-uncertainty firms had contingency plans in place, while 46% hadn’t started planning at all. The early tariff response leaned tactical, as 65% of goods sector CFOs planned to negotiate with suppliers, and 45% expected to increase prices, although only 5% said price hikes would be the first response.

As the year progressed, one of the more revealing certainty indicators wasn’t inventory or pricing. It was financing strategy.

In May, half of low-uncertainty firms said they mostly or always used financing as a strategic tool in the prior year. Among high-uncertainty firms, only 1 in 4 said the same. Even as embedded finance proliferated in consumer contexts, only 20% of middle-market firms preferred embedded lending over traditional options, falling to just 7% among high-uncertainty firms. For the most uncertain firms, familiarity and clear terms were the selling point, as 27% cited clarity of terms and conditions as the top reason for sticking with traditional lending.

For banks and FinTechs, the implication is that in uncertain environments, certainty features such as transparent pricing, predictable repayment and trusted controls function as product differentiators, not mere hygiene.

Summer: Confidence Breaks and Analytics Accelerate

By June, the tariff shock produced a divergence between goods and services firms, and between those with high versus low uncertainty. Fifty-four percent of goods firms said they were not confident they could adapt to supply chain shocks, up from 30% in February. Even more stark was that in May, zero companies with a high level of uncertainty reported being very or extremely confident they could handle tariff-related supply chain disruptions, down from 11% in April and from nearly 1 in 4 in February.

At the same time, firms didn’t freeze; they retooled. Nearly 8 in 10 goods firms were redesigning workflows in May (up from 62% in April), and 65% were using analytics for insight and forecasting (up from 48%). Artificial intelligence adoption also rose, as 35% of goods firms boosted AI use in May, up from 29% in April. Yet the ability to fund transformation was itself uneven, as 84.6% of high-uncertainty firms said tariffs had already limited their ability to fund AI or automation, versus 17.4% of low-uncertainty firms.

In other words, the same turbulence that motivated automation also restricted it, creating a two-speed market in resilience.

August’s findings underscored that uncertainty wasn’t only macro. It was operational and adversarial. Nearly every middle-market firm surveyed reported at least one payments-targeted social engineering incident in the previous 12 months. Vendor exposure was a recurring weak link. Among impacted firms, 38% of fake invoice scams and 43% of phishing incidents were attributed to compromised third-party partners.

By September, tariffs and softening demand squeezed the middle market from both sides. More than 70% of services firms and 90% of goods firms raised prices over the previous year due to macro conditions, including tariffs. But price increases were losing effectiveness as demand weakened, and product leaders increasingly turned to structural changes. One-quarter of goods firms discontinued products hit by tariffs, and 1 in 5 redesigned products to use alternative materials or production methods.

October quantified the “resilience gap.” Among firms heavily reliant on international suppliers (more than 30% of suppliers abroad), only 1 in 5 said 2025 had been a good or great year. Among firms with low reliance (15% or less), nearly two-thirds said the year was good or great. Despite widespread price hikes, 58% of businesses reported profit margins decreasing anyway. Highly exposed firms also reported pronounced demand declines, as 91% saw B2B demand fall and 86% saw B2C demand fall.

Year-End: From Shock to Integration

By November and December, a subtle shift appeared. Tariffs were no longer treated as a temporary disruption. They were being operationalized.

In November, CFO investment strategies split between caution and growth. Just over 1 in 3 took at least somewhat of a cautious approach, while 38% pursued a growth-oriented strategy. Yet goods firms were materially more likely to choose restraint. More than 8 in 10 CFOs said tariff effects were at least moderately integrated into annual budgeting, and nearly 4 in 10 said deeply integrated.

December’s product leaders described “peak uncertainty” shaped by tariffs, cooling demand and delayed macroeconomic data. Goods firms were hit hardest, with 47% of goods product leaders calling tariffs mostly or completely negative for business finances. Demand sensitivity was front and center, as 9 in 10 goods firms focused on B2C said macro conditions were cutting into demand, and three-quarters said the same about B2B.

Over half of product leaders said tariff disruptions pushed priorities away from long-term tech bets toward short-term operational fixes, while 60% said tariffs constrained their ability to fund AI and automation (and 71% of goods firms said the same).

Yet, a form of conditional optimism persisted. About two-thirds of goods product leaders and 8 in 10 services leaders expected tariffs to enhance supply chain resilience over time.

The Recurring Themes That Defined the Certainty Cycle

Several patterns repeated across the year’s Certainty Project editions:

Uncertainty divides firms into builders and survivors. Some firms invest in analytics and AI for advantage; others spend to stay functional.

When predictability falls, innovation gets delayed, unless tech becomes the only path to control. Cyber and fraud risks stalled initiatives early, while tariff pressure later forced workflow redesign.

Pricing power weakened as consumers adapted. Firms raised prices broadly, but margins still fell, and demand softened.

Resilience is increasingly correlated with supplier exposure and planning maturity. Contingency planning gaps early in the year foreshadowed the fall resilience gap.

Certainty features became a premium in financial products. Clear terms and trusted channels mattered most for high-uncertainty borrowers.