Inside the Technology Shifts That Reshaped Payments and Risk in 2025

Whether the focus was automation in receivables and payables, real-time money movement, embedded finance, fraud orchestration or agentic artificial intelligence (AI), the same underlying truth surfaced again and again. Digital capabilities stopped functioning as bolt-ons and began operating as shared architecture, deeply embedded in workflows, decisioning and customer experience.

This year-end Tracker distills the five themes that most clearly defined that transition. Together, they reveal how institutions on the leading edge moved beyond point solutions toward integrated systems. Meanwhile, those that did not risked structural disadvantage in an increasingly real-time, AI-driven economy.

1. The Digital Divide: From Tools to Infrastructure

“Financial agility is no longer optional—it’s a necessity to keep up with rising capital costs, customer expectations, financial fraud and other variables that might arise without notice.”

Carey O’Connor Kolaja
CEO, Versapay
“From Friction to Flow: AR Automation in 2025,” in collaboration with American Express

In payments, 2025 was the year digitization and automation became foundational.

Across banking, consumer payments and countless business verticals from hospitality to advertising, the Trackers repeatedly told the same story: Paper-based and manual payment tools were no longer enough. The industry directive switched from “Add automation” to “Rebuild the operating backbone,” relying on ever-more-sophisticated technologies to power finance. Payments, data and workflow were increasingly treated as a single system rather than disconnected functions.

Recurring signals:

• Advanced technology reshaped both retail and member banking journeys. Trackers from Cantaloupe showed how self-service commerce powered by AI and the Internet of Things (IoT) transformed inventory management, loss prevention and real-time operational control. Meanwhile, Velera Trackers emphasized how digital onboarding, personalized engagement and mobile-first tools became essential to attracting and retaining both Gen Z credit union members and small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs).
• AP and AR evolved from back-office functions into strategic revenue engines. American Express and Edenred Pay Trackers showed how accounts receivable (AR) and accounts payable (AP) automation in business-to-business (B2B) payments improve both working capital management and revenue opportunities, driving organizational success. Finexio and FIS extended these themes, reframing AP and AR as growth levers that strengthen supplier relationships and cash-flow predictability.
• Virtual cards became a structural layer in modern finance stacks. Trackers from American Express and WEX described how virtual cards became foundational to modern AP and expense workflows, embedding spend controls, data and automation directly into supplier systems, turning payments themselves into programmable infrastructure.

Why it mattered: Institutions that treated digital as the operational bedrock—not an overlay—unlocked scale, speed and resilience. Those that didn’t risked falling behind, no matter how many point solutions they deployed.

2. The Instant Shift: From Differentiator to Default

“We’re seeing a steep rise in interest across every banking and business sector for real-time payments. Where banks once asked which customers wanted it, now customers expect it and ask why it’s not available. This shift is driving banks to invest not just in receiving instant payments but also in letting customers originate them, opening new opportunities.”

Jim Colassano
Senior Vice President, RTP® Business Product Management, The Clearing House
“The Real-Time Rush: FIs’ Race to Keep Up With Instant Payments Innovation”

 

Real-time payments crossed the psychological threshold in 2025.

What began as a special feature in earlier years became a baseline expectation. Across consumers, SMBs and large enterprises alike, faster money increasingly meant better experience—and anything slower felt broken.

Recurring signals:

• Real-time rails expanded from receive-only to full send-and-receive models. Trackers from Galileo and The Clearing House showed institutions moving beyond inbound-only use cases toward end-to-end real-time payment capabilities.
• Multi-rail strategies replaced single-rail bets. The Clearing House emphasized optionality across the RTP® network, the FedNow® Service and card rails as institutions prioritized resilience, reach and redundancy.
• Liquidity, certainty and availability redefined trust. Ingo Payments Trackers highlighted how real-time payouts in construction, government, insurance, lending, property management and transportation reshaped trust by guaranteeing not just speed but also certainty of funds.

Why it mattered: Speed alone stopped being the headline. Choice, reliability and liquidity became the real competitive edge, separating scalable real-time strategies from pilot programs.

3. The Embedded Evolution: From Consumer Magnet to B2B Standard

“The embedded finance revolution that transformed consumer payments is now reshaping B2B commerce—with far greater stakes. In 2025, businesses are embedding working capital, virtual cards and automated workflows directly into their platforms, turning financial operations into growth engines.”

Sandy Weil
Chief Revenue Officer, Galileo
“The Next Frontier: Why Embedded B2B Finance Is Breaking Out in 2025”

 

Embedded finance moved from consumer convenience to business as usual.

In 2025, embedded payments, lending and B2B finance showed clear signs of maturity—particularly when aligned to specific verticals and workflows rather than deployed as generic platforms. The most successful implementations were nearly invisible, integrated directly into the systems where users already worked.

Recurring signals:

• Embedded B2B payments and finance scaled inside AP and supplier networks. Finexio, Galileo and Worldpay Trackers showed how payments embedded within procurement and supplier workflows reduced friction and accelerated cash flow.
• Core modernization became popular through modular layers rather than rip-and-replace. Finix, FIS, Galileo, Velera and WEX Trackers emphasized how low-code platforms, payment hubs and modular architectures allowed institutions to modernize incrementally without destabilizing legacy cores.
• Vertical-first strategies outperformed horizontal “one-size-fits-all” models. Finix showed how verticals as diverse as education, healthcare and field services benefited from embedded payments and finance designed around industry-specific needs.
• “Buy, don’t build” became the dominant philosophy. Galileo and WEX demonstrated how institutions prioritized speed and specialization over ownership, outsourcing embedded capabilities rather than developing them internally.

Why it mattered: Embedded finance worked best when it disappeared into context, tightly aligned to use case, industry and user intent. In 2025, execution mattered more than ambition.

4. The Safety Mandate: From Trust to Optimization

“Fraud is evolving too quickly for merchants to rely on one tool or one approach. Fraud orchestration brings those signals and decisions together so teams can protect revenue without adding friction.”

Adam Hiatt
Vice President, Fraud Strategy, Spreedly
“Orchestrating Trust: The Future of Fraud Prevention in Payments”

 

Security stopped being a gatekeeper and became a growth lever.

One of the clearest shifts of 2025 was the reframing of fraud prevention. Rather than a defensive layer bolted onto payments, fraud management became part of experience design, revenue protection and trust.

Recurring signals:

• Fraud orchestration became a strategic necessity as false declines emerged as a business risk. Spreedly and Worldpay Trackers showed how unnecessary declines erode revenue and loyalty, prompting merchants to replace siloed fraud tools with unified orchestration layers that coordinate identity signals, risk scoring and payment decisioning in real time.
• AI-driven decisioning became standard across both consumer and B2B payments. Worldpay and The Clearing House highlighted how behavioral analytics, identity intelligence and real-time risk scoring converged into a unified decision layer, while Edenred Pay showed how AP teams increasingly rely on AI to detect anomalous supplier behavior and prevent invoice manipulation.

Why it mattered: The winners didn’t choose between security and experience. They engineered systems that delivered both—by design, not by compromise. That same convergence of trust, intelligence and orchestration set the stage for AI’s next evolution.

5. The AI Breakout: From Aid to Agent

“The story of agentic commerce is ultimately a story about confidence—confidence in technology, in partnerships and in possibility. As AI agents begin to transact for us, our collective responsibility is to ensure they do so safely, transparently and for the benefit of everyone.”

Haydon Croker
SVP of Strategy and Acquisitions, Worldpay
“Agents of Change: How Agentic AI Is Redefining Commerce”

 

AI graduated from support tool to active participant in commerce and payments.

Rather than simply surfacing insights, AI took on agentic roles—coordinating decisions, triggering actions and adapting in real time as conditions changed. This was especially visible in payments, fraud and checkout environments, where speed and context are critical.

Recurring signals:

• AI evolved from analytics to active coordination across B2B and consumer payment workflows. Edenred Pay, Finexio and FIS Trackers showed how AI now powers smarter invoice validation, supplier risk scoring, cash-flow forecasting and AR automation—turning data into real-time operational decisions. This shift laid the groundwork for the next phase of intelligence: AI agents.
• Agentic systems operated within live workflows. Spreedly, Visa and Worldpay Trackers highlighted how AI began acting autonomously within defined guardrails, responding dynamically to risk, intent and transaction context.
• Human intent, trust and explainability became as important as accuracy. Spreedly emphasized the need for transparency and human-aligned decisioning as AI systems took on more responsibility.

Why it mattered: Agentic AI marked a new milestone, where intelligence was defined not just by analysis and prediction but also by effective action and decision-making within controlled environments.

The Road to 2026

These five themes point to a broader inflection moment. In 2025, the payments and banking industry did not simply adopt new tools; it rewired how financial systems operate, make decisions and earn trust. Speed became expected, embedded finance became operational, security became strategic and AI became active rather than assistive.

Looking ahead to 2026, one signal looms especially large: blockchain’s gradual shift from experimentation to institutional infrastructure. As Citi’s blockchain Tracker underscored this year, tokenization, programmable money and regulated digital assets are no longer theoretical: They are shaping how liquidity, settlement and trust may function in the next generation of financial markets.

If 2025 was the year digital foundations solidified, 2026 may be the year those foundations support entirely new forms of financial coordination. The winners will be those who treat infrastructure, intelligence and trust not as separate initiatives but as a single system designed to scale.