In 2025 Card Networks Reshaped Commerce While Banks Rewired Payments

No company leaned into that framing more consistently than Visa. Early in the year, Sam Hamilton, Visa’s head of AI and data, described generative AI not as an add-on feature, but as a force that will show up across the network’s value proposition. “I can’t think of one area that GenAI is not going to transform,” Hamilton said, emphasizing that the usefulness of that transformation depends on trusted inputs and governance.

Visa executives also returned repeatedly to the idea that consumer journeys are now designed “outside-in.” In a PYMNTS interview focused on merchant strategy, Visa Acceptance Solutions’ Matt Swatzell highlighted a basic reality that merchants often under-estimate: the sale might happen in-store, but the decision increasingly happens on a phone. That shift, he suggested, raises the bar for consistency across channels—pricing, inventory visibility, fulfillment options and payments all have to line up.

The implications went beyond front-end UX. In another 2025 discussion, Visa’s Nick Roberts described a card business where retention is won (or lost) long before the customer actually closes an account. “It’s always about starting and continuing the relationship,” Roberts told PYMNTS, arguing that issuers have to spot “silent churn”—the gradual shift of spend away from the card—before it becomes irreversible. The message: loyalty is now an analytics problem as much as a rewards problem.

Visa’s push toward “unified commerce” fit the same pattern. The company’s interviews this year framed unified commerce as less about new gadgets and more about removing operational seams—between in-store and online, between checkout and post-purchase service, and between payment acceptance and fraud defense. Visa’s point was straightforward: smaller merchants will not “out-scale” retail giants, but they can compete by collapsing complexity and responding faster.

Consumer Credentials

Mastercard’s 2025 interviews approached the market from a slightly different angle: shifting choice and control to the consumer, and building new toolkits for the middle market. In a conversation about Mastercard One Credential, Bunita Sawhney, the company’s chief consumer product officer, noted that consumers want help managing money across accounts and payment types. Many, she said, “have a high desire to have tools that help them become strong and confident money managers.”

On the B2B side, Mastercard’s Jane Prokop described a middle-market segment that gets underserved by products built for either very small firms or very large enterprises. “The lack of access to the right kind of capital to grow the business is a huge pain point in the middle market,” she said, arguing that richer data and more modern underwriting approaches are needed to match how these firms actually operate.

Discover’s most vivid 2025 interview moments landed in the AI-and-infrastructure conversation. In a PYMNTS interview with Discover Network’s Judith McGuire and Worldpay’s Ian Hillis, McGuire argued that AI’s biggest payoff comes when it turns transaction data into network-level visibility and faster decisioning. “AI is helping us unlock the power of data,” she said, tying that to fraud reduction and speed.

American Express, for its part, spent 2025 drawing a line between automation and brand identity. In a wide-ranging discussion about AI in servicing, Amex executive Gary Kensey summarized the company’s governing principle this way: “AI should work in service of people, not instead of them.” The point was less philosophical than operational—Amex wants AI to reduce internal friction (summaries, recommendations, workflow routing) while preserving human judgment when customers need reassurance.

And in the premium-card arms race, Amex’s interviews signaled that loyalty is still the north star—especially as annual fees rise and consumers re-evaluate what they carry. Raymond Joabar, Amex group president for global commercial services, told PYMNTS that cardmembers are asking for “more rewards” and “new sets of tools” that help run and grow their businesses.

Concora Credit, which plays in near-prime and non-prime segments, brought a different lens to loyalty: incentives have to be practical and immediately felt. In a PYMNTS interview, Chief Commercial Officer Rolando De Gracia said co-brand success starts with “alignment of incentives,” warning that mismatched objectives between issuer and brand can weaken the partnership before it scales.

Banking Roadmaps

In 2025, bank interviews on PYMNTS were notably unsentimental about “digital transformation.” The conversations were less about roadmaps and more about deadlines set by clients who now assume payments should move when business happens.

At Citi, Stephen Randall, global head of liquidity management services, framed the shift as a structural reset for treasury. “If you move to an always-on structure then effectively it is a continuous round-the-clock process,” he said, describing a world where liquidity is managed continuously rather than once per day.

Bank of America’s interviews stayed close to the mechanics of real-world disruption: tariffs, geopolitics and supply chain shocks. Geoff Brady, head of global trade and supply chain finance, described the bank’s role in simple terms: “We’re here to facilitate global commerce.” He then tied that mandate to financing, risk mitigation and working capital optimization—less a product pitch than an explanation of why trade finance exists at all.

Fifth Third Bank’s interviews offered a reminder that the digital economy still runs on physical processes. Robert Norman, the bank’s head of cash logistics strategy, described cash-handling as labor-intensive and exposed to loss. “They’re putting the cash aside and then counting it at the end of the day,” he said—an image that captures why automation in cash logistics is framed as both a security upgrade and a productivity tool.

HSBC’s Andrew Fullam, CFO for the U.S. and Americas, described supply chain planning under tariff uncertainty with a bluntness that matched the mood of many CFOs this year. “Uncertainty is probably the key word here,” he told PYMNTS, pointing to overlapping tariff regimes and carve-outs that complicate planning and widen the performance gap between resilient firms and exposed ones.

The New Economics of Speed

If banks emphasized continuous operations, processors and FinTechs emphasized continuous responsibility for fraud, compliance, customer outcomes and unit economics.

Maverick Payments’ Kyle Becker captured that tension in a PYMNTS interview about real-time fraud and bank oversight. “It’s an artful balancing act for sure,” he said, noting that sponsor institutions ultimately answer to both regulators and card brands. Maverick’s pitch was that processors are no longer simply vendors; they are increasingly expected to behave like risk-and-compliance extensions of the bank.

Ingo Payments CEO Drew Edwards made a similarly economic argument about speed. Too many companies, he suggested, treat instant payouts as a feature checkbox—inviting commoditization. “They’re going to be facing a race to the bottom,” Edwards said, warning that fee-per-transaction economics collapse without a broader strategy around value, risk and ecosystem design.

Velera’s 2025 interviews reflected credit unions’ search for partners in a tougher market. In a PYMNTS conversation, Velera’s Chris Corse pointed to macro uncertainty and a valuation reset from the “frothy” era—conditions that are pushing more disciplined partnership structures and risk-aware product planning.