More changes are expect to the payments landscape during 2025. Looking back at 2024 – the sector has seen the rise of real-time payments, greater cross-border growth and the acceleration of digital wallets.
So, what can we expect in 2025? Nick Campbell, Chief Product Officer of Payments at Xplor Technologies, a company that integrates SaaS solutions, embedded payments, and growth technologies, has shared key insights with CI on important developments.
Our conversation with Nick Campbell is shared below.
Crowdfund Insider: What major shifts are you predicting in the payments landscape for 2025, and what’s driving them?
Nick Campbell: One of the most significant shifts in payments is account-to-account or instant bank payments in the U.S. The technology enabling account-to-account payments is becoming widely available, alongside widespread uptake among consumers and businesses. Much of that has been driven by consumer and merchant expectations for faster money movement, and a frictionless experience. In 2025, we expect more consolidation in the number of tools we use to move money.
The second significant shift is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in every aspect of the payments landscape. At Clearent by Xplor, we’re already using AI to build chatbots for better customer service and incorporating AI in our product testing, enabling us to build a more secure and robust payment processing platform, much more quickly.
Finally, AI’s ability to augment fraud detection and protection practices is profound. With the ability to assess greater bodies of data more quickly, payments providers now have access to better decisioning, more accurate risk assessments, and improved management of exceptions. Underwriting and risk teams are now able to sharpen their focus towards real fraud rather than potential fraud, and that means better outcomes for consumers and businesses alike.
Whether for account-to-account payments or commerce in general, consumers and businesses can expect greater control and access to their money in 2025.
Crowdfund Insider: How are consumer expectations around speed, security, and convenience evolving, and how are payments companies adapting to meet them?
Nick Campbell: Consumer expectations around speed and convenience continue to rise, especially as we shift away from cash. Consumers are placing greater value on tools like Zelle and Venmo for their immediacy and wanting the same experience from their bank. We see the same with shopping habits – if the online checkout process isn’t smooth and quick, then shoppers will abandon their purchase in favour of one that is.
The growing consumer desire for immediacy is forcing innovation from businesses, banks, and payments providers and this has a direct impact on security. We’ve seen a huge rise in the maturity of two-factor authentication solutions, and their success rates for keeping money safeguarded. The challenge is administering dynamic, new fraud protections without introducing extra friction into the process. Consumers and businesses expect that their payments are secure, and that systems just work the way that they’re supposed to. And the industry has more work to do to make this a reality.
At Clearent by Xplor, we’re adapting by providing frictionless tools that meet consumers where they are using embedded payments ecosystems – so consumers don’t need to jump from one tool to another. We’re also embedding security into every part of the payment lifecycle. Leveraging both AI for fraud detection and biometrics for authentication means we can deliver on frictionless, fast, and secure solutions, which is always a balancing act.
Crowdfund Insider: With fraud and cyber threats growing, what advancements in security are you focusing on for next year?
Nick Campbell: AI is playing a big role in our fraud and underwriting tools for both onboarding merchants and ongoing fraud detection. Our goal is to bring merchants onto our platform and help them take payments more quickly. Our automation efforts have reduced our underwriting and onboarding process from four days to one.
In the fraud and risk management space, we’re using AI to better understand payment transaction risks and minimizing our customers’ risk exposure. When assessing fraud, AI is allowing us to consider a greater amount of context that wasn’t available to us before – with this context, we’re able to make better judgements on what fraud, and exceptions, look like.
Balancing security and speed is important. Cash flow is the most important driver of an SMB success, and withholding funding for a risk that isn’t real can have a detrimental impact on a business. Our goals are to have better fraud detection, provide more cash flow to businesses, and keep their risk exposures as low as possible.
While AI is an incredibly helpful tool for combating fraud, it’s also a very powerful tool for committing fraud too. A big focus for our security and risk teams in the next year will be ensuring we stay connected to the best practices identified in cyber fraud and maintain the integrity of our payment’s infrastructure.
Crowdfund Insider: As cashless payments become more common, how do you foresee financial inclusion challenges evolving, and how is the industry addressing them?
Nick Campbell: As we move towards a cashless society, the issue that’s spoken about the most is the risk to those in society who are unbanked. The best way the industry can solve this is by meeting people where they are. We’ve seen this happen in India, where payments technologies are now available on all phones, not just the latest iPhone, to ensure these tools are accessible.
There are also payment tools that allow people who work one day to get paid on that same day. In the past, if these workers didn’t have a bank account, then they wouldn’t have been able to get paid. Or these payments would have been made in cash. But now these workers can be paid with options outside of the traditional banking network getting immediate cash flow.
The charitable donations sector is another great example of where payments technology is bringing back cashflow and making it a more accessible space. With tap-to-pay, QR codes, and other options for donations, charities are no longer hampered by the fact that people are no longer carrying cash and change for donations. Technology is meeting people where they are and widening access as a result.
Crowdfund Insider: How are new regulations (e.g., PSD3 in the EU, or FedNow in the U.S.) expected to influence payments innovation in 2025?
Nick Campbell: The impact that faster money movement is going to have across the entire value chain of payments cannot be underestimated. From a consumer point of view, faster money movement offers peace of mind and gives people more confidence and control over their money.
From a business perspective, the benefits are even more pronounced. Businesses live and die by their cash flow so the moves we’re seeing in faster authorization and settlement timeframes are enabling companies to optimize their operations and future-proof their business.
With the shifts made in the last 12-18-months, much of the skepticism about whether regulatory changes like FedNow and RTP will achieve critical mass has now disappeared. More and more traditional banking players and payments technology companies are engaging with these tools, for the benefit of consumers and businesses alike – and 2025 will bring even more into the fold.
Crowdfund Insider: What’s one under-the-radar trend or technology that you think could have a big impact on payments in 2025?
Nick Campbell: The biggest under-the-radar trend is the concept of payment orchestration, and the impact that a single layer of integration will have on a company’s ability to operate and trade in multiple markets.
Recently, I spoke with an independent software vendor who had ambitions to move into the UK, Europe, and Canada. He showed me a long list of payments providers his company would need to integrate with to enable his company to enter those markets. This is where the issue lies. Every company is looking to scale their business, but has a finite set resources, budget, and time to do so. So, they need solutions that will enable them to access new markets with the least technical overhead.
Effective payment orchestration is the solution to this problem. The concept demystifies new market entry for companies by making payment technologies much more accessible. Solution providers have now evolved to offer a whole range of payment acceptance tools for companies through a single layer of integration.
At Clearent by Xplor, our number one focus for product development and innovation is payments orchestration. Why? Because we know that payments are complicated, and that technology is only impactful if people can access it.
Many companies, especially software platforms, are seeing addressable markets outside the U.S. and thinking, “How do I access that? What are my barriers to entry?”. With widespread adoption of global payment orchestration, we will see more companies accessing global markets that used to be unavailable to them.
