Business at its simplest is a series of levers you try to pull at the right time to initiate growth. If you had an extra lever, and you knew it would work, would you pull it?
The answer seems obvious, but there is a lever for growth that many businesses are not prioritising. That lever is your payments strategy, a function which still sits in the back office at too many businesses.
Today, for any bank or merchant with global ambitions, payments are a frontline growth lever. The diversity of payment options you offer your customers directly influences conversion and can make or break the feasibility of you entering new markets. But many C-suites and business owners have yet to match their payment strategy to what consumers want at checkout and it’s becoming a significant drag on revenue.
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The limits of a card-first mindset
This drag is most visible in the persistence of a card-first mindset. Credit and debit cards have underpinned most consumer commerce in markets like the US and Europe for decades and remain essential in the payments mix. But consumer behaviour has moved on; in many of the world’s fastest growing ecommerce markets – from India to Southeast Asia and parts of Latin America – local payment methods (LPMs) have become the default way to pay.
This is thanks in large part to advances in technology which have enabled new, seamless purchase options like instant bank transfers, mobile wallets, carrier billing, and account-to-account (A2A) schemes. Now you only need a mobile phone to buy the things you want.
LPMs now account for 52% of e-commerce globally and will reach 59% by 2028, even as overall e-commerce grows 65% in that period, to a market value of $10.6tn. Cards, meanwhile, will shrink to just 29% of transaction volume by 2028. In regions like APAC, where schemes such as India’s UPI or Thailand’s PromptPay are now the dominant mode, LPMs already drive the majority of transactions, leaving card-centric strategies mismatched and costly.
Prioritising card-based payments only means missing the consumers who aren’t reachable through card rails, and the gap is most acute in the markets that should be fuelling growth for merchants. Put that alongside the growing area of AI-enabled and agentic commerce, and a card-only approach leaves significant growth on the table.
Why the card-first trap persists
Payments have long been viewed as a function rather than a feature, operational plumbing owned by specialist teams and managed through legacy infrastructure. Traditionally, payment rails only get discussed when something has broken. Also, the patchwork payment systems that have been built up over decades can make it slow and expensive to add new methods.
Change is also hindered by the ever-tricky issue of internal siloes. While product and growth teams focus on acquisition and engagement, finance teams are heads down on cost, risk and reconciliation and payments teams are measured on uptime and compliance.
Without cross-functional ownership, the payments strategy defaults to familiar, which for many is the card-first mindset. Leadership gaps play a role too. C-suites are often expert in home markets like the US but less attuned to payment nuances in regions like Asia-Pacific and Latin America. The result is a payments stack which is optimised for yesterday’s consumers.
Consumer expectations demand local-first payments
Consumers, meanwhile, have clearer expectations than ever: seamless, familiar, secure payment options. A shopper in Thailand using PromptPay, an Indian consumer via UPI, or a Brazilian gamer topping up a local wallet is every bit valuable as a New York cardholder. But many merchants and global payment platforms haven’t adapted to these preferences, and where consumers can’t pay the way they want to, they often simply don’t.
An LPM-first strategy matches the consumer reality to boost conversion and growth. Studies show offering preferred local methods can lift conversion by up to 30%, – and LPMs expand reach into under-banked segments and high-growth markets where cards can’t cover the consumer base on their own.
Done right, this happens through networks that aggregate and unify LPMs behind a single integration. Resilience follows too: diversified rails reduce dependence on any one network, which is critical as regulators and local schemes gain influence. There is also the coming wave of agentic commerce to consider.
Much of the conversation around agentic focuses on transforming discovery and checkout, making it easier for consumers to find and buy what they want. But agentic does not remove the need for underlying payments infrastructure. Authentication, authorisation, and licensed access to funds still sit behind every transaction, and that complexity remains by design. Merchants need to build their infrastructure in readiness, or risk creating seamless agentic experiences that cannot reliably complete the transaction.
Elevating payments to the C-suite
If merchants want to achieve market expansion, payment strategy needs to become a C-suite topic not just a specialist one. Which methods to support, how to integrate them, and how to balance cost, risk and conversion – these are now C-suite decisions because they are business outcome decisions. CFOs need line-of-sight into how LPM performance shapes unit economics per market, and Chief Growth Officers and product leaders must quantify checkout friction’s impact on acquisition.
For retail banks serving global merchants, this is a partnership opportunity. Those equipping clients to evolve from card-first to local-first, method-agnostic architectures become strategic allies, rather than being seen as just payment processors.
The path forward
Cards won’t vanish; they’re still one of the levers in play. Now though, consumers prefer to pay with a mix of options, and payment infrastructure should align with those preferences. The time is now to bring payments into product and market-entry discussions and turn the payments function into a fuel for growth.
Stuart Neal is CEO of Boku
