The payments landscape continued to evolve rapidly throughout 2025, with a focus on improving the speed, cost, and efficiency of transactions. The addition of new payment alternatives is creating an ecosystem that offers banks and their customers greater choice and flexibility. 

Four key priorities we have heard from our bank customers in the year ahead include modernising their platforms, accelerating the use of real-time payments, adopting new cross-border payment rails, and integrating generative AI-driven capabilities. Banks need to adopt a holistic and integrated approach that allows them to adapt to change quickly as they focus on delivering seamless, resilient, and customer-centric payment experiences.

 1) Payment modernisation

Legacy technology has long proven a pain point and is increasingly out of step with the demands of real-time processing, regulatory complexity, and customer expectations for speed and transparency. A shift toward modular, cloud-native platforms that offer greater flexibility, resilience, and scalability isn’t just about replacing outdated systems but about enabling smarter, more agile operations. 

Decoupling core payment functions like routing, validation, and compliance from the underlying technology layer is giving banks the ability to upgrade specific components without disrupting the entire stack. Banks that embrace modern, modular, API-based platforms will be better equipped to scale, respond to regulatory shifts, and lead in the next phase of payments evolution.

  2) Rise in real-time payments

Governments around the world have been on a mission to deploy real-time payments to meet demand for 24×7 resilient, mission-critical payments. Today, more than 80 countries across the globe have deployed instant payment schemes, and it’s estimated that by 2028, one in every four payments sent globally will be real-time.

Uptake for real-time payments in the US has grown significantly over the last two years. A recent report shows that some 58 per cent of US banks now use both RTP and FedNow for instant payments, with many banks no longer seeing adoption as a choice. 

The benefits for customers include instant payments that are faster, more affordable, and offer treasurers greater cash flow visibility and enhanced liquidity management. If banks are not already offering this capability, it needs to be a priority in the year ahead, together with ensuring they have the right capabilities in place to combat fraudulent payments in real time and comply with regulations. 

 3) Expansion in cross-border payment rails

The rise of alternative payment rails alongside SWIFT, such as Visa Direct, Mastercard Move and Thunes, plus regional cross-border immediate payment initiatives, is rapidly reshaping the way money moves across borders. In parallel, stablecoins are moving from the fringes of cryptocurrency to mainstream finance, offering increased flexibility, transparency and speed, with 24×7 secure settlement for fiat currency. 

The State of Crypto 2025 report from Andreessen Horowitz shows how stablecoins have matured in 2025, powering $46 trillion in annual transactions, rivalling Visa and PayPal. Looking forward to 2030, industry projections forecast that some 12% of cross-border transactions will be made via stablecoins. 

As banks navigate an increasingly complex web of networks and rails, offering more ways than ever to move money across borders, they need the ability to weigh multiple factors such as cost, speed, compliance, and availability in real time. The ability to easily connect to new networks through a payment-hub approach and dynamically select the best route for each transaction is becoming a key differentiator in allowing banks to optimise performance, manage liquidity more effectively, and respond quickly to disruptions or regulatory changes. 

As payment volumes grow and customer expectations rise, banks that embed routing intelligence into their infrastructure will be better equipped to deliver consistent value, adapt to change, and compete globally.

 4) Gen AI as a strategic enabler 

Going forward, we should expect to see banks increasingly embracing Gen AI not just as a tool for automation, but as a strategic capability that enhances decision-making and drives efficiency. One example on the horizon is the use of conversational interfaces within payments operations. The ability to interact with systems using natural language offers the potential to speed up payment investigations significantly, enabling staff to pinpoint anomalies and conduct repairs using real-time insights. 

Over time, further improvements in contextual understanding and predictive analytics can help operations teams not only identify issues but also anticipate them before they escalate.  As the technology evolves, its role in payments will shift from reactive support to proactive orchestration. Analysing transaction patterns, spotting irregularities and suggesting alternative payment routes are among a range of benefits that will help banks deliver faster, more transparent, and more personalised experiences.

Adopting a modern infrastructure approach will make it easier to integrate new payment rails, accommodate stablecoins, embed AI capabilities, and respond to market changes more quickly. Success will come from turning complexity into opportunity, using smarter systems to deliver faster, more transparent, and more resilient payment experiences. Institutions that embrace such transformation will be well positioned to meet rising expectations, respond to change, operate more efficiently, and stay ahead in a fast-moving global landscape.