Payments Leaders Say Strategy Mattered more Than Scale in 2025
NEW YORK – November 27, 2025 – As the payments landscape fractured into a multitude of rails and technologies in 2025, leading financial institutions and fintech firms prioritized strategic deployment and seamless client experience โover sheer scale, according to recent interviews with key executives โpublished by PYMNTS.com. The focus shifted from simply having access to payment options to โensuring those โฃoptions facilitated business and mitigated risk for clients.
Citi’s Global Head of Clearing โand โFI Payments, Rishi Patel, succinctly captured this sentiment in PYMNTS’ “What’s Next in Payments: From Trend to Table Stakes” report. “Helping our clients actually do business is the priority. The rest, rails, APIs, AI, are tools toโค get there,” Patel stated. He emphasized the โimportance of complete coverage and frictionless transactions, adding, “First and foremost, it’s actually ensuring that youโข have coverage. and then it’s about making sure that in the wayโ that you deploy those solutions,a consumer or a business customer can transactโ asโ seamlessly as possible. Those are the โฃtable stake features โthat are critical for our client to just get business done.”
Bank ofโค America‘s head ofโ Global trade and Supply Chain Finance, Geoff Brady, echoed this client-centric approach, highlighting the broader role of financial institutions โin enabling commerce.โ In a PYMNTS interview, Brady explained their focus: “we’re here to facilitate global commerce. That includes everything from transactional mechanicsโฃ between buyers โand sellers to โขfinancing, risk mitigation andโค working capital optimization.”
The needโ for collaborative strategies extended into theโ realm of fraud prevention. Entersekt’s Chief Product Officer, Pradheep Sampath, described modern fraud defense as a “team sport” inโ PYMNTS’ data sharing coverage, emphasizing the critical role of data. “it’s a team sport. And the thread that binds โus all together is data that’s actionable, shared in good faith, and governed responsibly.”
This strategic emphasis on proactive defense was especially evident in the adoption โฃof โคartificial intelligence.Block’s Chief Risk Officer, Brian Boates, revealed the โขcritically important impact ofโ AI-driven fraud prevention, stating in PYMNTS’ AI/fraud coverage and eBook, “At Block, we’ve witnessed this evolution firsthand. Our AI-powered scam prevention systems have protected customers fromโ over $2 billion in potential fraud losses since 2020, with our confirmed scam rate remaining below 0.01% of all โpeer-to-peer transactions. The real story isn’t just about the money saved, but how AI is expanding โขwhat’s possible in real-time fraud detection andโข prevention.”
These insights suggest that in 2025, successโฃ in the paymentsโค industry wasn’t determined by the breadth of services offered, but by the bright submissionโค of technology and โฃa laser โฃfocus on delivering value to clients.