By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions.
Payments have become the proving ground for services that reduce fraud, increase conversion rates and nurture customer loyalty. Interchange spreads are thinning, regulators are circling fees and software firms are encroaching on banks' turf. To stay relevant, processors, banks and FinTechs are weaving fraud prevention artificial intelligence (AI), lending offers, analytics dashboards and loyalty engines directly into the moment of payment.
"We think of optimization in four pillars: consumer, cost, conversion and risk," says John Winstel, vice president of product management at Worldpay. In 2025, those pillars are no longer perks; they are the competitive battlefield.
Worldpay's four pillars capture the sector's pivot from pipes to platforms. Throughout the past year, Worldpay has folded account-updater tools, network tokens and -- through its purchase of United Kingdom fraud specialist Ravelin -- a single dashboard that unifies 3D Secure, dispute management and login defense.
"Fraud does not discriminate," Winstel warns, adding that chargeback spikes slash issuer approvals as surely as data breaches.
That logic mirrors at Maverick Payments, where Vice President of Product Justin Downey says merchants now "want a one-stop shop for everything." A decade ago, retailers juggled separate contracts for gateways, POS software and chargeback vendors. Today, Maverick bundles real-time account updating, advanced fraud models and alternative payment methods into one stack aimed at a "frictionless checkout experience" that keeps abandonment rates in check. Consolidation trims integration headaches -- and locks in clients who would rather focus on merchandise than reconcile billing relationships.
Integration also flips processors into full-blown product studios. "Payment processors are expanding into areas that are close to payments, but not exactly payments -- like embedded finance," Downey notes. By parlaying an existing distribution network into adjacencies, Maverick turns its core rails into a launchpad for loan offers, instant payouts and real-time treasury tools -- services with margins two or three times richer than basic acquiring.
Galileo Financial Technologies has taken the studio metaphor literally. Chief Product Officer David Feuer says clients want "micro-moments when you show up wherever the customer expects you to be," whether on an Apple Watch in Ohio or an Alexa device in São Paulo. Galileo's co-brand debit program, introduced in February, sits on a scaffold of sponsor banks, Cyberbank Digital APIs and AI-driven risk scoring known as the "Galileo Score." The beauty, Feuer says, is that adding features carries "a low incremental cost -- often just a new endpoint and a new report." That lowers the barrier for clients to test, fail fast and iterate without six-month build cycles.
The same appetite for seamless extensibility fuels Thredd. Product lead Brandon Ferris reports that brands now demand "one set of APIs and an integrated experience" that covers card issuance, native wallets and spending controls. Thredd builds most capabilities in-house but vets partners ruthlessly. The company focuses on "what will work through our existing stack, so we don't create a disjointed client experience." Artificial intelligence's "fraud as a service" surrounds each transaction with device fingerprints, dynamic CVV and behavioral analytics. The payoff: fewer false positives, higher approval rates and stickier clients.
Thredd's longer-range ambition is geographic as much as functional. Clients that launch in Europe want to expand to the United States or Latin America without ripping out infrastructure.
"They want partners that can support them across regions," Ferris says.
That goal pushes processors to invest in multicurrency settlement, local BIN sponsorships and compliance toolkits -- table stakes for cross-border commerce in an era of instant gratification.
If plumbing has morphed into platforms, data has become their lifeblood.
ValidiFI Senior Director Eric Stratman mines real-time account behavior to tailor lending and payment recommendations. The firm's vAccount+ verification suite taps Early Warning and deposit-performance feeds from 2,500 institutions and can validate 85% of U.S. accounts at the point of sale. Machine-learning models sift "hundreds of thousands of transactional patterns," Stratman says, to weed out fraud and raise approval rates without manual review queues. The same analytics power hyper-personalized offers that deepen "the sense of connection and loyalty" between merchant and shopper.
Splitit uses data orchestration to reshape the buy now, pay later battlefield. Head of client success John Beisner calls consumer education step one. Shoppers must know they can split a card transaction without a new loan. Step two is invisibility. The option should sit inside the checkout flow, online or in-store, without a second of extra friction. Splitit's platform withholds the full purchase amount on the original card and lets customers pay it down over time. This preserves the merchant-customer relationship instead of handing it to a third-party lender.
A forthcoming wallet integration will allow a shopper to enter any storefront, regardless of whether the merchant is signed up with Splitit, and decide on the spot how to break up payments. The firm is also piloting cost-sharing arrangements in which merchants fund part of the financing incentive. Beisner says the model lifts conversion and encourages "upgrades" to higher-margin items, because consumers see available spending power rather than a lump-sum price.
Global banks are quick to adopt tactics pioneered by FinTechs. Bank of America surveyed thousands of small businesses and heard a consistent theme: Help us run the entire operation.
"They want more than just a transaction service," says merchant-solutions head Wally Mlynarski. Through partnerships, the bank now folds employee time tracking, inventory optimization and virtual-card payables into its package. The aim, Mlynarski says, is to "integrate into the financial lives of the merchants" so thoroughly that payments disappear into the background -- occasionally surfacing through AI-driven insights or biometric approval when risk models dictate.
Meanwhile, U.S. Bank is leaning into what head of Avvance Rob Seidman calls "co-opetition." The bank's acquiring arm plugs a "constellation of FinTechs" into its rails to deliver foreign-currency management, tokenized identities and wallet integrations on demand. Card-not-present fraud has moved those features from nice-to-have to mandatory. Seidman says merchants now judge processors on "speed to yes" in an environment where wallets, super apps and embedded finance compress checkout windows to seconds.
The prize is borderless commerce. Currency volatility, once a concern only for Fortune 500 treasurers, now bedevils sole proprietors selling cross-platform. U.S. Bank responds with hedge-light FX tools embedded inside its invoicing and payout workflows. Seidman predicts AI will soon triage which currency rail, fraud-screen or loyalty offer fires for each transaction, shrinking the approval process to milliseconds.
No firm is more bullish on embedded rails than Trustly. Vice President of Product, Enterprise, Vik Raman argues that processing economics are being squeezed by competition, regulation and merchant leverage. To escape the vise, processors must pursue "analytics, rewards and lending, where the margins are two to three times higher." Trustly's wedge is open banking pay-by-bank rails that bypass card networks, slashing acceptance costs and giving merchants direct access to account data.
The account link becomes a portal for services: real-time verification, personalized loyalty and instant refunds. Trustly is preparing to launch a one-time credential that ties a verified bank account to any merchant in its network. This will turn future purchases into true one-click events.
"When payments are integrated directly into consumer activities, it creates a frictionless, intuitive experience," Raman says, citing Starbucks' order-and-pay app and Instagram's one-tap checkout as templates that marry loyalty, ordering and settlement in a single gesture.
But technical pipes are only half the battle. Regulatory fluency -- across PSD2 in Europe, GDPR for data privacy, PCI for card security and local anti-money laundering codes -- is the ticket to global scale. Providers unable to navigate the alphabet soup risk being "boxed into a niche or regional role," Raman warns. He expects a cascade of "build-buy-partner exercises" as incumbents bolt specialist analytics or fraud modules into broader payment stacks, while aggregators stitch everything together for merchants. The friend-versus-foe lines will blur: In one market, processors and banks will be collaborators, and in another, fierce rivals.
Across nine companies -- Worldpay, Maverick Payments, Galileo, Thredd, ValidiFI, Splitit, Bank of America, U.S. Bank and Trustly -- a single theme repeats: Value now lies in what happens before and after authorization. Fraud scoring taps device telemetry and behavioral clues milliseconds before a purchase. Loyalty engines suggest tailored rewards seconds after. Lending widgets underwrite a micro-loan in the same heartbeat, while FX calculators shave basis points off a cross-border payout.
The connective tissue is orchestration. Processors once defended proprietary rails; today they must function as air-traffic controllers choosing in real time the cheapest, safest or most rewarding corridor -- be it RTP, card, ACH, wallet, crypto or a yet-to-be-invented rail. Worldpay's Ravelin models feed authorization decisions back into fraud defenses. ValidiFI's Early Warning data flows to Galileo's risk algorithms. Trustly enriches bank-ID signals that Splitit uses to gauge installment affordability. The ecosystem is starting to look like a neural network, each node firing data to the next in pursuit of near-perfect conversion and near-zero friction.
Consumers rarely notice these hand-offs -- and that is precisely the point. Bank of America's Mlynarski insists payments "should just happen." Maverick's Downey talks about checkout experiences that leave customers "unaware of the plumbing." When orchestration works, merchants see only higher sales and lower chargebacks; shoppers see a button that says "Pay."
Add-ons are no longer sprinkles on the processing cake; they are the cake itself. Whether it is a biometric-approved payout, an AI-scored cross-border settlement or a silent card-based installment plan, the value now lies in the data harvested and the decisions triggered around each transaction. The nine companies profiled differ in heritage and strategy, yet converge on one truth: Whoever owns, analyzes and acts on transaction-level data will own the future of payments. As value-added services shift from perk to prerequisite, the distinctions between processor, bank and software platform will blur -- and the winners will be those that make the transformation feel effortless to merchants and invisible to consumers.
