The Credit Reset: How Unified Platforms Are Replacing Legacy Lending Infrastructure

Dependability can often mask a fundamental limitation: an inability to evolve. Just as legacy mobile platforms like Nokia and BlackBerry were displaced by architectures designed for rapid innovation, traditional lenders now face an infrastructure “reset.” As consumer demand for flexible credit accelerates—with the United States alone seeing a 9% increase in average monthly credit balances in late 2025—issuers’ ability to capture growth depends on moving beyond rigid, batch-processed systems.

Consumers increasingly expect credit and loan products to behave like programmable, application programming interface (API)-driven financial tools that are configurable and adaptable in milliseconds. For issuers and lenders, the gap between “legacy” and “advanced” is now defined by purpose-built, credit-native ledgers. This Tracker examines the momentum for diverse credit products, why legacy stacks are becoming a bottleneck for time to market, and how unified issuer-processing and automated credit ledgers are closing the gap.

Demand Is Rising for Credit, Flexibility and Value-Dense Experiences

Legacy Credit Infrastructure Is the Bottleneck

Unified Platforms Solve for Speed, Configurability and Scale

Modernize Infrastructure to Capitalize on Credit Momentum

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Demand Is Rising for Credit, Flexibility and Value-Dense Experiences

Credit demand is rising as products evolve beyond revolving balances alone. Consumers are using credit more frequently as platforms incorporate automated installment options and personalization that align with event-based behavioral triggers.

Credit momentum is strong.

Credit is holding its ground as a core engine of consumer spending. PYMNTS Intelligence research finds that among the 81% of U.S. consumers who have credit or store cards, the average monthly balance as of November 2025 was $3,564, up 9% from just two months prior.

TransUnion data further shows that bank card originations rose nearly 12% year over year in Q4 2025, marking the strongest annual growth in three years. Similarly, unsecured personal loan originations attained a record 7.2 million that quarter, up from 5.8 million in Q4 2024.

74%

of U.S. credit cardholders in 2025 said they would be more likely to use a credit card that offers an installment plan.

Flexibility and personalization are becoming fundamental expectations.

Consumers no longer view credit as a one-size-fits-all instrument. Instead, they expect choice in how they pay and repay, including the ability to manage revolving credit and fixed installment loans under a single repayment method. This shift is driven by event-based behavioral triggers—real-time alerts and actions based on notable changes in a customer’s spending, such as a large purchase or a sudden shift in creditworthiness.

For example, Mastercard reported in a recent survey that 74% of U.S. credit cardholders in 2025 said they would be more likely to use a credit card that offers an installment plan. Virtually the same share, 73%, said they would be more likely to make a larger purchase if their credit card offered the option to pay over time.

PYMNTS Intelligence data further shows that installment-based credit card purchases surged 46% during the summer travel season, with consumers using installments across both discretionary and essential spending categories. That behavior extended into the holiday season as pay-later options increasingly shaped how consumers financed year-end spending. At the same time, rewards remain a critical driver of card choice across generations, particularly among Gen X and baby boomers, while younger consumers increasingly value installments as both a budgeting and a credit-building tool.

Willingness to pay reflects demand for value-rich experiences.

Consumers recognize that self-service, high-control credit experiences—such as paycheck-aligned due dates and automated installment conversions—deliver tangible value in the form of improved liquidity management. Moreover, they are willing to pay for this value-add. PYMNTS Intelligence finds that the typical consumer would pay close to $100 for access to these features.

This willingness to pay signals that such credit features are not viewed as add-ons but as core product attributes. Cards that lack flexibility and greater control increasingly struggle to compete.

Issuers are innovating to retain relevance—but infrastructure determines who can move.

In response to shifting consumer expectations, issuers are embedding installment functionality directly into credit cards to compete more effectively with buy now, pay later (BNPL) providers. U.S. Bank recently launched the installment-based Split World Mastercard, positioning the card as an alternative to BNPL offerings from Klarna and Affirm. At the same time, BNPL providers are pushing in the opposite direction: Affirm has partnered with Fiserv to bring installment functionality to debit cards, underscoring how competition is converging around flexible repayment at the point of purchase.

Whether issuers can respond effectively to these dynamics, however, depends largely on their underlying credit infrastructure—a constraint that increasingly separates institutions that can capitalize on rising credit demand from those that cannot.

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Legacy Credit Infrastructure Is the Bottleneck

As credit products grow more complex, fragmented frameworks make it costly and time-consuming to add new features.

Legacy platforms were not built for modern credit complexity.

Card issuers’ outdated, fragmented frameworks

make it costly and time-consuming to add new features, as noted by Paymentology.

Issuers face a growing structural challenge: Traditional systems were designed for a simpler era of credit, when static billing cycles and limited sets of features, like basic revolving balances, defined the product. Today’s credit, by contrast, must support hybrid models that blend revolving balances, transaction-level installments, rewards optimization and real-time controls.

According to Paymentology research, attempting to support real-time limit management and category-specific controls on infrastructure originally built for deposits or debit creates persistent friction. Credit products require sophisticated ledger logic, including automated interest accrual, minimum payment calculations, automated grace period management, multiple balance types (such as revolving balances alongside purchase-specific installments) and statement-cycle processing. While legacy systems can theoretically support complex logic, doing so involves manual ticket-driven changes for engineering teams and slow batch processing that limits agility. As a result, issuers operating on these systems struggle to deliver the flexibility and feature velocity modern cardholders expect.

Retrofitting debit-centric systems slows innovation and fragments experience.

Many issuers have attempted to layer new credit features onto existing debit-oriented platforms, but this approach often produces fragmented customer experiences and slow development cycles. Legacy processors typically require extensive custom development to launch new features, delaying time to market and increasing operational costs.

Paymentology notes that without a purpose-built credit ledger, even issuers using more modern card processors remain constrained in how quickly they can configure products or experiment with new offerings. This limitation becomes more pronounced as competition intensifies from FinTechs and neobanks built on cloud-first architectures designed specifically for digital credit.

Infrastructure choices determine long-term issuer performance.

Infrastructure limitations affect more than just product launches; they shape long-term economics. PYMNTS Intelligence research shows that issuers with higher customer lifetime value (CLTV) are more likely to partner with issuer processors offering advanced capabilities such as flexible credentials, tokenization and enhanced data analytics. By contrast, lower-CLTV issuers tend to rely on baseline functionality, leaving them at a competitive disadvantage as expectations evolve.

These findings underscore a widening gap: Issuers with flexible, credit-native infrastructure can innovate continuously, while those constrained by legacy systems face mounting technical debt, slower iteration and diminishing differentiation. As credit demand rises and flexibility becomes table stakes, infrastructure is no longer a back-office concern: It is either a strategic enabler or a limiter.

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Unified Platforms Solve for Speed, Configurability and Scale

Unified, cloud-first card-issuing platforms are emerging as a growth lever by integrating issuing and credit-ledger capabilities within a single architecture—enabling real-time limit updates and event-based triggers.

Unified credit platforms replace fragmentation with configurability.

Cloud-first credit platforms are designed explicitly for hybrid credit models, combining card issuing and credit-ledger functionality within a single architecture. This unified approach allows issuers to configure pricing and repayment logic directly through APIs, replacing manual workarounds typical of legacy systems with self-service configuration tools. Paymentology’s PayCredit program exemplifies this model by pairing a credit-native ledger with issuing capabilities, enabling issuers to modify credit programs more quickly without rebuilding core infrastructure.

45%

of all credit cards are expected to be issued on unified infrastructure by the end of the decade.

This architectural shift materially changes how quickly issuers can respond to market demand. Product launches and feature updates that once took months can now be launch-ready in days, with platforms allowing for six months of loan product behavior to be simulated in 30 minutes for testing and refining products continuously. Infrastructure that was once a constraint on innovation becomes an active driver of speed, experimentation and differentiation.

Data, analytics and scale define best-in-class issuing platforms.

Beyond speed and flexibility, modern platforms differentiate themselves through data. PYMNTS Intelligence finds that card issuers increasingly define best-in-class issuing platforms by their ability to deliver advanced analytics, profitability tracking and customization at scale. More than two-thirds (67%) cite enhanced performance and profitability metrics as a defining capability, while 31% point to advanced customization that supports personalized cardholder experiences.

These capabilities are becoming nonnegotiable as issuance volumes shift toward newer platforms. Juniper Research projects that cards issued via modern card-issuing platforms will grow by 108% between 2025 and 2030, rising from 756 million to nearly 1.6 billion globally. By the end of the decade, almost half (45%) of all credit cards are expected to be issued on unified infrastructure, reinforcing a structural shift away from legacy processing models.

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Modernize Infrastructure to Capitalize on Credit Momentum

Credit demand is rising, but capturing its full value requires infrastructure built for flexibility, speed and scale. As credit products evolve beyond simple revolving balances, issuers must support real-time configuration and continuous optimization across the product life cycle.

PYMNTS Intelligence recommends the following actionable roadmap for issuers to remain competitive as credit use expands:

Prioritize a self-service credit engine. Configure interest and fees through an API-first, agile foundation to give customers flexible credit options on their terms.

Ensure a compliant and real-time ledger. Utilize event-based postings and daily accruals to deliver accurate balances while maintaining strict compliance control.

Unify the credit portfolio. Launch revolving credit, BNPL and installments from one platform to drive new revenue and eliminate fragmented customer experiences.

Accelerate time to market. Build, test and iterate products via APIs and user-interface testing capabilities to respond to consumer preferences in days rather than months.

As expectations continue to rise, infrastructure decisions will increasingly determine which issuers can capitalize on renewed credit momentum—and which remain limited by systems no longer fit for the automated, event-based credit market.

Credit is entering a new phase where flexibility, speed and precision are no longer differentiators—they are expectations. Issuers cannot deliver real-time installments, dynamic limits or personalized repayment options on infrastructure that was built for a different era. The institutions that will lead this next chapter of credit growth are those that modernize at the ledger level, unifying issuing and credit processing into a single, configurable architecture. When you remove operational friction and give teams the ability to launch and iterate in weeks, infrastructure stops being a constraint and becomes a strategic growth engine.”

Rob Macmillan
Group Product Manager, Paymentology