How Payments Firms Can Win Gen Z Without Chasing Every TikTok Trend

In an age where consumer expectations evolve at the speed of a TikTok trend, financial institutions and payment providers face an increasingly complex question: how do they build systems, strategies and experiences for a generation that hasn’t even fully formed its preferences yet?

“At the center of everything we’re doing — financial or otherwise — it’s a person. A human, attached to a household, with one or more bodies. What are they doing? What do they need? Where do they need to move money or assets?” David Durovy, senior vice president and head of enterprise transformation at i2c, told PYMNTS during a discussion for the May 2025 edition of “What’s Next in Payments Series: The Alphabet Strategy.”

Rather than anchoring strategy to any single trend, Durovy argued that the smarter move is to create frameworks and platforms capable of adapting and growing alongside the end-users’ needs.

When financial leaders over-index on potentially speculative trends, they risk building for a future that never materializes, misallocating resources that could have been spent preparing for real shifts.

“Not everything is destined to go the way of the metaverse, and it doesn’t mean some of those trends won’t have staying power … but we need to be very careful of where we’re placing those bets,” Durovy said. “We’ve built a platform that is integrated, but allows you to have that future flexibility, whether it’s through API connectivity, more traditional data I/O or the AI-driven data universe of the future.”

This means clients can customize products down to the individual use case, a necessary capability in an era where consumer cohorts splinter faster than ever before.

Designing for Seamlessness so Payments Feel Like Magic

The implication of the generational shift in payments is shining a spotlight on the proposition that firms must abandon legacy development cycles and monolithic architectures in favor of agile, modular solutions. It’s not enough to react quickly when instant is an expectation; modern financial services will reach the frontier when they are pre-wired for constant reinvention.

For Durovy, the future of digital commerce lies in creating experiences so integrated that the act of payment itself fades into the background. Think of Uber’s frictionless checkout or Amazon’s Just Walk Out stores.

“The further we go towards allowing the digital to speak to the analog … that really creates the set of experiences users want and expect,” he said.

This screen-first paradigm has enormous implications for customer experience, compliance and even design. Brands seeking long-term loyalty need to understand where, how and why younger users place trust — and meet them there.

“When I was in school, I learned from books, from people in front of me, real people face-to-face,” Durovy recalled. “Fast forward to today … is that where younger generations are taught and how they trust information? I would say they’re really not.”

Instead, trust today is built through screens, the same channels where younger users learn, shop, bank and communicate.

“If you send me a printed disclosure, but I applied through a digital channel — am I at odds?” Durovy said. “If I have a physical interaction, am I less likely to trust it because of human error?”

Why Absolutes Always Age Poorly With Innovation

When asked about the role of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain, Durovy didn’t hesitate. “These are no longer the frontier,” he said.

“If you’re not already executing, developing, maturing, expanding [with AI], then you are absolutely behind against the industry. And we’re not just talking U.S. market, we’re talking global markets,” he added, emphasizing that the greatest value in AI today may not lie in splashy applications, but in invisible efficiencies that free up clients to focus on growth and customer experience.

As technology transforms interfaces, new rails and protocols will emerge. But at the center of all these changes will remain a familiar constant: the human being.

That’s why Durovy identified generational stereotyping as a pitfall — specifically, the tendency to speak in absolutes about what Generation Z, Generation Alpha or millennials want.

“We started to optimize around this belief of, ‘Oh, this set of users doesn’t like credit cards’ or ‘They don’t want loans’ … very emphatic, declarative statements,” Durovy said. “But millennials grew up. They had children. They got married. They wanted to buy a house.”

The lesson? Preferences evolve with life stages. The danger lies in over-correcting for early behaviors without recognizing that context changes.

“As an industry, we can adapt and offer the right services at the right time,” Durovy said. “It’s not that the products will change dramatically … but how we offer them, underwrite them and customize them will.”

At the end of the day, it’s not about one model replacing another. It’s about creating flexible combinations that adapt to both merchant strategies and customer preferences in real time.