World Payments Report 2025

The global payments industry is undergoing a seismic shift as consumers increasingly adopt digital transactions over cash. Supportive regulations and innovative industry initiatives, especially open finance and instant payments, are both playing key roles in this transformation.

The World Payments Report 2025, our 20th anniversary edition of this report, reflects the views of 600 corporate treasurers from across three industries: insurance, retail, and automotive. It also includes payments insights from focused interviews and surveys with over 200 senior payment executives of leading banks (Tier I and Tier II), financial service organizations, payment service providers, industry associations, and central banks representing all regions of the globe – the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific/Middle East. Key findings include:

• Banks need to adopt a multi-rail payments approach, protecting existing global payments revenue streams while exploring innovative instant payment services enabled by open finance
• Current corporate transaction banking and corporate cash management services fall short of expectations: PSPs should work toward real-time payment solutions and real-time cash visibility and helping drive operational efficiency
• Stop-gap tactical adjustments must give way to larger strategic shifts aimed at maintaining competitiveness and driving profitable long-term growth in the future of payments.

Gear up for the instant payments revolution

Our report offers insights and strategies to help banks and other payment services providers meet and exceed customer expectations and grow profitability during this transformative period for the industry:

Develop innovative and adaptive cross-product, multi-rail value propositions that deliver a superior experience for customers.

• Embrace both open finance and instant payments while driving synergies – building the business case to fund needed investments
• Agility is paramount, and cloud-based, composable platforms offer transformation flexibility and scalability
• Develop innovative and adaptive cross-product, multi-rail value propositions that deliver a superior experience for customers.