Payments Leaders Get Candid: The Boundaries That Defined 2025

PYMNTS has built its editorial engine around a simple proposition: the people building the connected economy should be heard in their own voices, in real time, while decisions are still being made. That means executives. It also means the operators, the regulators and the infrastructure stewards who rarely get the spotlight but decide what scales. Across 2025, our interviews kept returning to one theme: the tech stack and regulatory picture is changing, and it is changing faster than most institutions are willing to admit.

Theme One: AI

Here’s a stunner: artificial intelligence (AI) was the headline. But it wasn’t the headline in the usual “we launched a chatbot” way. What emerged instead was AI as a governing layer that changes how customers discover products, how merchants convert demand, and how risk and compliance get executed.

At Pinterest, the ambition is not simply better search. It is compressing the journey from inspiration to transaction. Dana Cho, vice president of design, described the core behavioral signal like this: “A Pin is a declaration of intent.”

That single sentence explains why AI models trained on “taste” data can become commerce engines, not just recommendation systems. Pinterest’s mandate is to “collapse the distance between ‘love it’ and ‘own it.’” “Technology has nailed the buying part,” Cho said. “Now, we’re bringing the joy back to shopping.”

On the merchant side, PayPal framed AI less as magic and more as layering value across channels. Executive vice president Frank Keller put it plainly: “The card isn’t disappearing, but we can layer value through financing offers and cross-channel loyalty.” The subtext across multiple interviews: AI is becoming the glue that makes identification, personalization, financing and rewards feel like one continuous experience, not a set of disconnected tactics.

Theme Two: Scoping the New Commerce Landscape

This is where the most provocative executive positioning showed up. For example, Affirm CEO Max Levchin didn’t talk about buy now, pay later (BNPL) as a coupon or a credit workaround. He talked about it as a network and a mindset shift in how consumers experience control. “The sense of clarity of when [payments] start and end is powerful,” Levchin said. And then he made the claim that turned heads: “We’re a payments network … We are, today, in the world of network comparable to a company like American Express.”

That framing matters because it recasts competition. It is no longer BNPL versus cards. It is networks competing to own the consumer’s financial “moment” at checkout, with AI increasingly deciding which offer appears, which option feels safest, and which brand earns loyalty.

Pattern, fresh off its IPO moment, offered a parallel argument from the brand-enablement layer of eCommerce. CEO Dave Wright summarized Pattern’s operating thesis as a rebuttal to the roll-up era: “We were really just tech first. At our core, we’re really a technology company.” Translation: in a world where discovery and conversion are being rewritten, the storefront is no longer a site. It is an adaptive system.

Theme Three: Loyalty Becomes Economic Leverage

Expedia’s interview put an unusually sharp edge on loyalty: points are not a perk. They are a consumer coping mechanism and a partner bargaining chip. B2B President Alfonso Paredes described how frugality changes the math: “When you’re in this economy of trying to save money, you’re going to look more into the details on who gives you more points.” He also quantified the behavior in a way that should make any issuer or travel partner sit up: “Eighty-five percent of customers are looking to redeem … during the different paths of the shopping experience.”

The controversial implication is that loyalty is drifting toward utility. If the rewards experience fails to show up at the exact moment the consumer is making tradeoffs, the “program” becomes dead weight. In that environment, AI-driven personalization stops being a growth lever and starts becoming table stakes.

Theme Four: Real-Time Meets Cross-Border

PagBrasil’s Pix expansion story reads like the next chapter of account-to-account payments: scale domestically first, then export the experience across borders without exporting complexity. The quote that captured the economic driver was disarmingly human: “Argentines are big travelers,” said PagBrasil CEO Ralf Germer. But he immediately turned that into a friction narrative: “At the end, tourism is all about people spending money … There is a friction … and this is what we are solving.”

Germer’s most pointed claim was behavioral: “People will spend more because there are no constraints now.” That is a direct challenge to card economics in high-tax, high-FX friction corridors. And it reinforces a theme we saw repeatedly in 2025: the winning rail is the one that disappears into the background while improving trust, speed and cost.

Theme Five: Crypto Grows Up

Chainalysis’ conversation highlighted the maturation that traditional finance has been waiting for: compliance narratives that can be measured, not merely asserted. CEO Jonathan Levin directly confronted the illicit-use trope: “It started off much higher, but now it’s consistently below 1% of the transactions” tied to certain bad actors, he said. And he made the pro-enterprise case more bluntly than most crypto executives do: blockchain can help with “enterprises identifying risky activity” and enable law enforcement “being able to hold scammers to account.”

Levin’s optimism about AI was pragmatic, not hype: “I’m very optimistic about the potential for AI to actually contextualize … transactions and concepts for people.” The subtext is unavoidable: the next phase of crypto adoption is less about ideology and more about tooling that makes compliance legible at scale.

Theme Six: Regulation

Two interviews—one with a state regulator and one with a former federal banking regulator—crystallized the year’s most important governance argument: you cannot scale innovation without credible guardrails.

New York DFS Superintendent Adrienne Harris pushed back on the tired binary of consumer protection versus growth. “Too often we set up a false choice in financial regulation,” she said. Her thesis was explicit: “You can protect consumers and markets and be good for business at the same time.”

Michael Hsu, newly moving into the venture world, took aim at distance and abstraction.

“I don’t want to be in an ivory tower writing papers about it,” he told PYMNTS. His transition captured a broader 2025 phenomenon: the boundary between builders and rule-writers is becoming more porous, because the stack is too consequential—and too fast-moving—for either side to operate alone.

All in all? AI was the accelerant. The story underneath was infrastructure: networks repositioning, loyalty becoming currency, real-time rails going cross-border, crypto becoming auditable and regulation evolving from a brake into a stabilizer. The year’s most controversial moments were not outrageous. They were clarifying. Executives stopped pretending the old frames still worked.

If 2025 was the year leaders described the new operating conditions, 2026 will be the year they prove which architectures actually scale. PYMNTS will keep doing what it does best: putting executive voices on the record, pressure-testing claims against reality, and translating the signals early, while there is still time to act.