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 over sheer scale, according to recent interviews with key executives published by PYMNTS.com. The focus shifted from simply having access to payment options to ensuring those options facilitated business and mitigated risk for clients.
Citi’s Global Head of Clearing and FI 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 to get there,” Patel stated. He emphasized the importance of complete coverage and frictionless transactions, adding, “First and foremost, it’s actually ensuring that you have coverage. and then it’s about making sure that in the way that you deploy those solutions,a consumer or a business customer can transact as seamlessly as possible. Those are the table stake features that are critical for our client to just get business done.”
Bank of America‘s head of Global trade and Supply Chain Finance, Geoff Brady, echoed this client-centric approach, highlighting the broader role of financial institutions in enabling commerce. In a PYMNTS interview, Brady explained their focus: “we’re here to facilitate global commerce. That includes everything from transactional mechanics between buyers and sellers to financing, risk mitigation and working capital optimization.”
The need for collaborative strategies extended into the realm of fraud prevention. Entersekt’s Chief Product Officer, Pradheep Sampath, described modern fraud defense as a “team sport” in PYMNTS’ data sharing coverage, emphasizing the critical role of data. “it’s a team sport. And the thread that binds us 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 of artificial intelligence.Block’s Chief Risk Officer, Brian Boates, revealed the critically important impact of 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 from over $2 billion in potential fraud losses since 2020, with our confirmed scam rate remaining below 0.01% of all peer-to-peer transactions. The real story isn’t just about the money saved, but how AI is expanding what’s possible in real-time fraud detection and prevention.”
These insights suggest that in 2025, success in the payments industry wasn’t determined by the breadth of services offered, but by the bright submission of technology and a laser focus on delivering value to clients.
