The payments industry has entered a defining era. An era where control, visibility, and speed are no longer optional but are now essential.
Today’s merchants face unprecedented complexity. Whether that be scaling internationally, launching into new verticals, or adapting to consumer shifts, they need payment systems that can evolve just as quickly. But many are still constrained by unyielding legacy infrastructure, third-party bottlenecks, and fragmented data.
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I believe that we’re at a tipping point. And the merchants who thrive in this next phase won’t be the ones with the most partners, but they’ll be the ones with the most control.
What’s broken in payments?
Traditional payment stacks were built for stability but not for change. They rely on intermediary processors, hardcoded systems, and slow integration cycles. They hide transaction data behind layers of abstraction, making optimisation nearly impossible. And they require merchants to fit into existing processes rather than letting them shape their own.
This is risky, let alone just plainly inefficient. When approval rates drop, customer experience suffers. When data is delayed, fraud prevention lags. And when global expansion demands a new acquirer, it often means months of technical work instead of days.
What does control look like?
Control doesn’t mean in-housing everything or building a full payments team from scratch. It means having the tools, data, and agility to make decisions that serve the business on your terms.
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By GlobalDataTake Bolt, for example. As one of Europe’s fastest-growing mobility platforms, Bolt expanded rapidly from ride-hailing into food delivery, micromobility, and car rentals. Each service added layers of payments complexity.
To stay ahead, Bolt rebuilt its payments architecture to route transactions directly to card networks, unify internal systems, and gain real-time access to transaction data. This allowed its teams to manage key elements like transaction routing, approval optimisation, and fraud signals internally and without relying solely on third-party timelines or black-box metrics.
As Jüri Laur, who leads payments at Bolt, put it: “Our goal is to manage key data elements internally to better understand and influence payment flows, rather than depending on third parties.”
That’s what control enables: ownership over the outcomes that matter.
The bank as a platform: A new model emerges
This trend isn’t limited to tech disruptors. Even traditional institutions are reimagining how payments should work. Deutsche Bank recently rolled out a new, cloud-native acquiring solution across Europe. By moving away from legacy systems, they were able to onboard merchants faster, improve authorisation rates during peak periods, and provide real-time chargeback APIs that removed manual dispute processes altogether.
The result? Merchants gained a more tailored experience. One that lets them adjust settlement timing, transaction routing, and reconciliation workflows based on their business needs. The bank, meanwhile, created a unified platform combining core treasury, cash management, and payments services.
This is a powerful signal: large institutions are realising that agility, not just scale, is what their clients demand.
From fragmentation to flexibility
Many large merchants still operate in payment environments filled with third-party gateways, legacy acquirers, and regional service providers. This fragmentation makes growth harder, not easier.
By shifting to flexible, API-driven models, merchants can unify their payment stack across markets, reduce operational overhead, and gain clearer insights into performance. More importantly, they regain the freedom to experiment, optimise, and move faster than the market. In the coming years, I believe we’ll see this mindset become the default.
Leading through change
The payment infrastructure of the past 30 years wasn’t built for today’s world of instant commerce, embedded finance, and global platforms. But change is happening, and it’s being driven by merchants who are no longer willing to wait for their systems to catch up.
This is the merchant’s moment. Those who step up and take control will turn payments from a cost centre into a source of insight, efficiency, and competitive edge.
Robert Kraal is co-founder, Silverflow
