As 2025 winds to a close, we wanted to take a look back at the themes that defined the year across trade, treasury, payments, and risk, and to share a few predictions for what we think 2026 might bring. 

In this year-end conversation, Deepesh Patel, editor-in-chief and managing director of Trade Treasury Payments (TTP), is joined by Carter Hoffman, TTP’s trade and technology editor, to discuss five main themes that shaped 2025 and outlining four predictions for 2026.

The five themes that defined 2025

1) Tariffs and fragmentation

Deepesh Patel (DP): Let’s get into it. Five themes. First: tariffs. Explain.

Carter Hoffman (CH): You can’t talk about 2025 without talking about tariffs. Last year, this was mostly niche coverage, but now it’s all anyone is talking about.

Since the Trump administration came into power, we had the “Liberation Day” tariffs, and the broader knock-on effects.

The World Bank reported that in the first 10 months of 2025, 2,500 additional trade restrictions were imposed globally. That ties into fragmentation and shifting trade flows where we are seeing more blocs, more reshoring, and more rerouting.

We also saw an acceleration in alternative pathways: “connector nations”, new corridors, and attempts to get goods from A to B without getting trapped by the latest round of restrictions.

At the same time, not everything was negative. We saw movement on trade agreements and cooperation frameworks too: the ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement, updates to the UK–India and UK–Korea FTAs, India–Oman’s CEPA, and other partnerships among mid-sized, rule-based economies.

So the story is a bit mixed in that we’ve seen more fragmentation, but also more deal-making to manage it.

DP: I remember the jaw-dropping “Liberation Day” moment: the tariff screen, the theatre of it. Maybe we’ve become desensitised. But it did accelerate that “bloc mentality”: countries clustering, and then building frameworks to trade within those clusters.

You had a great example from Johannesburg, right?

CH: Yeah. At the SME ministerial in Johannesburg, I spoke to someone running a chocolate manufacturing company. A tariff hit one ingredient in one of their recipes, pushing the cost up enough that they had to substitute the ingredient and change the recipe for the product.

That’s what people miss. Tariffs don’t only reshape macro trade flows. They can literally change the products people buy day-to-day, because manufacturers have to re-engineer inputs when costs spike.

2) Liquidity engineering and fraud

CH: Let’s move onto the second theme: liquidity engineering.

DP: We’ve managed nearly 20 minutes without saying “private credit”, so here we go.

2025 was a calamity year for fraud, especially across supply chain finance, receivables, and credit. I won’t go into every detail, but one of the biggest cases was the Midwest auto parts supplier First Brands Group (maker of brands like FRAM) filing for bankruptcy amid revelations tied to alleged large-scale supply chain finance fraud.

The filings showed $11 billion in debt financing, including just over $6 billion on balance sheet. A lot of it is suspected to be backed by non-existent invoices and double-pledged inventory collateral. These are allegations and we’ll have to wait for investigations to run their course, but the spillover has been significant.

And closer to home in commodities the Gupta nickel case involving Trafigura. That one became public in late 2022 and early 2023, but the consequences kept running through markets. The containers didn’t contain nickel at all, and Trafigura took a major write-down.

We also saw telecoms receivables fraud using fabricated invoices, fake websites, domains, and email infrastructure, involving operators like T-Mobile, AT&T, Telstra, and BICS, among others.

And then there was the trade finance platform story via a SPAC: regulators stepping in over allegations of misleading investors and fabricating platform claims. That case is still ongoing.

But the core lesson is bigger than the individual cases, and the main theme that we’re taking away from it all this year is verification.

3) The corporate treasurer under pressure

DP: We don’t talk enough about the end customer: the corporate treasurer. What kept them up at night?

CH: In 2025, corporate treasurers faced pressure both internally and externally.

Externally, there has been a lot of volatility in terms of FX swings, supply chain disruptions, and other macro shifts that have forced treasurers to manage uncertainty in real time. Internally, they are facing credibility pressures in terms of performance, controls, and the expectation that treasury will deliver demonstrable value.

And on the tech side, there was a stark statistic in 2025 that 30–40% of treasury technology implementations failed, which creates reputational and organisational pressure.

At the same time, you’re seeing the AI conversation shift. The experimentation phase is winding down, and people are trying to move AI into production. But doing that well means governance, controls, and a making sure that we develop a clear sense of what “success” looks like.

4) Payments and cash management

DP: Payments theme. For anyone listening who somehow wasn’t celebrating, the big weekend was 22–23 November, when SWIFT completed the CBPR+ migration, moving cross-border payments and reporting flows to ISO 20022 as the standard. Legacy message types were no longer supported for CBPR+ traffic.

From a programme management perspective, this is one of the biggest banking migrations in a long time. ISO 20022 is about richer, structured data, better transparency, and better interoperability.

It was a real test for big banks and small banks. The good news is we didn’t see widespread failures and most banks stayed live through the weekend, as the core rails held. By that measure you could say that the transition was broadly successful, and it’s certainly a major milestone for payment transparency and efficiency.

5) Fintech and the tech shift

CH: That brings us to our fifth and final theme for 2025: fintech and the tech shift.

First, AI. It’s been the elephant in nearly every conference room that I’ve been in this year, but the conversation has matured and is starting to move away from wish lists to practical deployment, and to the gaps that deployment can create.

One data point we cited: PwC put AI adoption at 14% in 2023, versus 74% in 2025 for organisations active with AI or expanding adoption.

But the more important point is uneven adoption. In the WTO’s World Trade Report, one key finding was the gap between high-income countries and lower- and middle-income countries is growing. Sector gaps are starting to crop up too as we are now starting to see manufacturing lagging while service led sectors like finance and insurance move ahead.

So the question becomes: how do you bridge those gaps before they become structural divides?

DP: What about stablecoins?

CH: Stablecoins really seemed to came back into focus this. The market cap was up 51% year-to-date in 2025. But a lot of activity is still crypto-native, or concentrated in liquidity management, rather than widespread “real economy” usage like corporates paying suppliers.

We also heard more about CBDCs. One number we pulled: 137 jurisdictions exploring CBDCs, covering about 98% of global GDP, up from 130 in 2023. Of those, 72 are in advanced phases.

The core point here is that stablecoins and CBDCs are beginning togenuinely be seen as future infrastructure, even if mainstream adoption is still uneven.

Predictions for 2026

DP: Let’s do predictions. Our first one for what we’ll see in 2026 is around verification.

In 2026, verification becomes a category in its own right. What failed in multiple fraud cases was not one party being careless; it was the market’s inability to verify at scale.

So I think we’ll see more registry-based controls for receivables, inventory, and guarantees. More obligor confirmation becoming mandatory and verification will be embedded into platforms, rather than just being bolted on at the end as an afterthought to the whole process.

From a distribution, insurance, and reinsurance participation perspective, I anticipate that verification will become central to pricing, confidence, and regulatory comfort.

CH: Next prediction is that treasury credibility will increasingly become a board-level priority in 2026.

After the failures we saw in treasury tech implementations, boards will be less interested in roadmaps and more interested in outcomes. I anticipate that will mean fewer “big vision” roll-outs, and more focus on implementation discipline, controls, and end-to-end auditability.

The treasurers who matter will be the ones who can deliver tangible outcomes under stress.

DP: For my next prediction for 2026, I’m going to be controversial: buy now, pay later.

In 2026, I suspect that we will see BNPL shift from an “innovation product” to being considered more of a balance sheet risk as It stops being treated as a convenient payments layer and becomes priced, regulated, and governed as credit.

We cited forecasts putting the BNPL market at $560 billion in 2025, up 30.7% year-on-year, and pointing to almost a billion users by 2030.

The product can certainly be a positive for treasurers in terms of predictability and working capital flows, but it also creates systemic risk if it scales without controls, and it can become a hidden dependency in the wider credit ecosystem.

CH: One final prediction for 2026 from me, on the tech side, is that we are going to see more digital rule-making, especially around AI, with Asia Pacific increasingly becoming a centre of gravity.

Digital trade succeeds or fails on distribution. If AI only improves the finance layer, frictionis only going to shift elsewhere in the transaction. The goal of rule-making is to reduce that friction across the system and prevent the benefits being concentrated among the largest players.

So I think we’ll see more effort to put rules and frameworks in place that make adoption more and more inclusive.

DP: That’s our wrap on 2025, a year that, you could say, exposed fragilities.  

We have seen tariffs come into play more than they have in nearly a century, fraud exposing verification gaps, treasury starting to move out of the back office, payments getting faster but also more fragile, and technology moving from concept into real infrastructure.

Here’s to 2026! 

Happy New Year.