The payment industry is rapidly evolving with new trends that will shape its future. Recent research by Capgemini highlights the key trends that will define digital payments in 2025. One of the primary trends is the growth of open finance, which will increase as regulatory bodies improve access to financial data. This will encourage competition in the market through innovation in the products and services offered by banks to customers.
Additionally, an inclusive and connected financial ecosystem will allow banks to promote greater customization of banking products and services. However, according to The World Payment Report 2025, 62% of banks are not prepared for the necessary transformation to adopt open finances.
Instant Payments and Bigtech Wallets
The rapid global adoption of instant payments is another significant trend. This shift affects cards, while Bigtech wallets consolidate their domain, significantly impacting the profitability of payments. With the preference for instant payments over checks and debit cards globally, banks can benefit from reduced transaction costs. The shift of small transactions to instant account-to-account (A2A) payments, which are low-cost and without intermediaries, can stimulate the adoption of micropayments among consumers.
The traceability offered by instant payments helps small businesses shorten cash conversion cycles, so merchants hope to benefit from rapid and affordable transactions. Furthermore, customers can enjoy greater flexibility with more payment options, such as digital wallets or fractional payments through financing options like the B2B modality “Buy Now Pay Later” (BNPL).
Payment Innovations
Payment innovations at the point of sale (POS) are necessary to improve merchants’ ability to accept payments and increase consumer payment options. POS innovations offer low maintenance costs and a minimum initial investment. They help sellers reduce fraud and gain faster access to funds. Customer flexibility also improves with more payment options, such as digital wallets or fractional payments through financing options like BNPL.
Multiterritorial Instant Payments
Multiterritorial instant payment runners are improving cross-border payments, providing companies with greater speed and efficiency. New cross-border payment models, such as Central Bank digital currency (CBDC) and distributed ledger technology (DLT), reduce dependence on intermediaries and minimize exchange commissions. This allows banks to offer lower transaction costs to merchants and companies.
Multiterritorial corridors of instant payments facilitate cross-border transactions in real-time, significantly reducing settlement deadlines for merchants and companies. By offering faster transactions, banks can effectively compete with Fintech companies that offer this payment modality.
Cloud-Based Payment Centers
Composable payment centers based on cloud offer unified, profitable, and consolidated processing functions. Native cloud architecture reduces operational costs and improves interoperability and transaction success, boosting customer efficiency and experience while reducing risk. Additionally, it helps companies improve scalability and reduce overall infrastructure, software, and maintenance expenses.
By managing all payment operations in a native, modular center in the cloud, organizations can adapt technological innovations that improve productivity and comply with regulatory changes.
Multi-Rail Payments
Multi-rail payments will increase flexibility and offer different payment methods through a single interface. The data obtained through a multi-payment system are assets that banks can use to obtain multichannel information. The wealth of data allows banks to customize product recommendations and make cross-sales of relevant financial products or services to boost customer commitment.
A multi-channel-based approach offers banks strategic coverage by protecting income flows from traditional payment sources while new sources of value continue to emerge, such as instant payments. Moreover, banks can collaborate with card operators to launch new payment solutions.
Regulatory Agencies
Regulatory agencies are prioritizing operational resilience to foster confidence in a future without cash in markets and economies. Banks need solid operational resistance to comply with new regulations, such as the Digital Operational Resilience Law (DORA), scheduled for January 2025 in the EU. This requires banks to reinforce risk management frameworks, incident notification, and resistance tests to ICT interruptions.
Given the importance of external service providers for computer functions, banks must conduct due diligence and apply contingency plans for the most critical computer functions and suppliers.
Decentralized Digital Identity
The decentralized management of digital identity fights fraud and helps customers control their personal data. By using a network of cryptographic organizations and methods, decentralized digital identity solutions provide a safe environment for banks to store and verify user information. Through the implementation of decentralized digital identity solutions, banks can offer customers greater control over their digital identities, encouraging greater confidence between banks and their clients.
Evolution of Remittances
The evolution of remittances is reconfiguring the world financial landscape, characterized by the fall of costs and the speed of transfers. The UN Sustainable Development Objective seeks to maintain remittance transaction costs below 3% and eliminate runners that exceed 5% by 2030 to guarantee financial equality among countries.
Regulatory agencies in the banking sector can improve remittance sending processes by establishing bilateral agreements with main sending countries and promoting associations with Fintech companies. This approach allows for precise funds and competitive exchange rates in real-time.
Payment Data
Payment data drives innovation and creates new sources of income. The ISO 20022 standard allows banks to have more complete data to provide services such as better-quality reconciliations, real-time payments, and automated billing, optimizing business processes and generating commissions for services.
Banks can use alternative data sources, such as tax records or social network data, to improve customer knowledge, optimize financial products, and boost innovation in service supply to generate additional income.