Payment Expert’s editorial team take a look back at the last 12 months, taking stock of some of the biggest trends shaping the payments industry
Payments had a busy year in 2025. Whether it was a clarifying one is harder to see in the headlines.
There was no shortage of activity. New products arrived, old ones were rebranded, and the industry’s fondness for acronyms remained undiminished. Yet much of what mattered happened away from the launch cycle. Long-standing assumptions about responsibility, risk and resilience were tested, often without ceremony. The distance between how payments firms presented themselves and how they were increasingly treated by regulators, partners, and customers narrowed.
By year’s end, the industry felt less youthful. Not because innovation slowed, but because the consequences of scale became harder to ignore. In 2025, the industry was reminded that infrastructure is judged not by how quickly it expands, but by how rarely it fails.
Editor’s reflections: The perimeter tightens
Payments has always lived with a degree of ambiguity. Firms have been able to describe themselves as technology providers, financial intermediaries or neutral infrastructure, depending on circumstance. That ambiguity narrowed in 2025. Not through a single intervention, but through a series of decisions that shared a common assumption that when money moves instantly and at scale, responsibility cannot remain diffuse.
In Europe, this was most visible in the political agreement on the Third Payment Services Directive and the accompanying regulation. The public emphasis was on consumer protection, particularly fraud and fee transparency. But behind that language sits is a regulation designed to reduce national discretion.
Fraud explains much of the urgency. Scams have become more sophisticated and more costly, particularly in instant payments. European policymakers are increasingly unwilling to treat these losses as the unavoidable by-product of digital finance. The implicit judgement is that system design, incentives and controls play a role, and that consumers should not be expected to carry the burden alone.
The parallel build-out of Europe’s new anti money laundering framework reinforced the point. The Anti Money Laundering Authority now has a timetable and a mandate that includes direct supervision of selected firms from 2028. Even at a distance, that prospect changes behaviour. It pushes firms towards more consistent controls across markets and reduces the scope for compliance that works well in one jurisdiction and poorly in another.
The American story was messier. Open banking became an illustration of how regulatory uncertainty can shape markets as effectively as regulation itself. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s decision to move towards an interim final approach on consumer data rights, after funding constraints and legal challenges, left firms planning around an unfinished framework. Questions about data access, liability and pricing remain unsettled, and that uncertainty carries real commercial cost.
Stablecoins, by contrast, moved closer to definition. The passage of the GENIUS Act, followed by the conditional approval of national trust bank charters for several crypto firms, signalled Washington’s preferred approach. Rather than keeping crypto at arm’s length, parts of it are being absorbed into the payments system through supervision, governance and capital requirements.
None of this suggests that payments is becoming less innovative. It does suggest that it is being treated more like infrastructure.
Callum Williams reflections: Stablecoins & AI agents
2025 has been a year where so many of the major players such as Visa, Mastercard and a litany of global banks began to understand the value of digital currencies.
Stablecoins were no longer an idea, but became a realisation of how to solve the instant cross-border settlement time traditional institutions have been searching for. Payouts in USDC are now becoming available to the gig economy with Visa Direct, and Mastercard is enabling direct fiat-to-crypto conversions in a June partnership with Chainlink.
With stablecoins offering instant, low cost and transparent alternatives to traditional fiat currencies, it begs the question… why did it take so long for the traditional finance world to take notice?
However, mass consumer adoption of stablecoins still remains low in comparison to business interest, especially when it pertains to payments as many individuals continue to hold stablecoins to stave off inflation and hold value.
AI agents hold the key to commerce
Agentic commerce was not on many people’s radar at the start of the year, but it quickly became one of the industry’s hottest trends to close out.
In just the last three months, major players such as Stripe, PayPal, Checkout.com and Worldpay have either adopted or created their own agentic commerce protocols, allowing customers and businesses to make payments with direct help from AI agents.
This is in reaction to the surging amount of customers leveraging AI chatbots and Generative AI apps for shopping queries and recommendations, which is why it may have come as no surprise the surge in industry interest to agentic commerce grew before Christmas.
Agentification in general has been deployed across multiple levels to many finance firms’ infrastructure’s, but it is agentic commerce tools that have so far seen meaningful action.
Kieran O’Connor reflections: Progress on fraud
Last year, the UK payments sector was full of arguments about fraud, what’s driving it, how to stop it, and, most of all, who should be held responsible.
When the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) introduced its new 50:50 reimbursement rule for victims of authorised push payment (APP) fraud, the reaction was a mix of criticism and pessimism. Many doubted the rules would make any meaningful difference.
2025 has proved some of those sceptics wrong, with APP fraud showing early signs of improvement. However, while the industry continues to argue over where responsibility should fall, fraudsters are adapting. International payments have been hit particularly hard, with cases surging 81% to nearly 6,000 and losses almost doubling.
We’ve seen some creative responses trying to combat fraud this year, Singapore has offered some bold ideas, but the real solution keeps staring us in the face: collaboration.
Europol proved this point with Operation Chargeback, an investigation which exposed three criminal networks allegedly attempting to steal more than $860m across three continents and deep inside the payments industry.
Emerging markets are competing
While Europe continues to shout at the clouds about sovereignty and reducing its reliance on US payments firms, other regions have made real progress this year.
Latin America has become a global testbed for alternative payment methods, leading the way on instant bank‑to‑bank transfers and wallet‑based ecosystems. This momentum has attracted serious attention from global processors, fintech investors and Big Tech, all eager to tap into a market where adoption curves appear to move faster than regulation.
The Middle East, meanwhile, is emerging as a genuine contender in digital payments and not simply as a “second‑chance” market for firms squeezed out of Europe or the US.
Abu Dhabi’s openness to crypto firms, including Binance’s presence in the emirate, has shown a willingness to embrace new models, while the UAE’s Digital Dirham project has further proven the region’s ambition to build modern, interoperable payment rails.
Crucially, the Middle East offers something many markets struggle with, which is fast, predictable licensing processes, regulatory consistency across political cycles and a coordinated push to align public and private‑sector innovation.
