In 35 years working in payments, I have learned one fundamental truth: speed without trust is just faster failure.
Everyone wants faster payments. Instant settlement. Real-time everything. But here is what the industry does not talk about enough: as payments accelerate, the consequences of broken trust accelerate with them. A declined payment that once took three days to resolve now needs resolution in three seconds. A fraud pattern that had hours to be detected now has milliseconds. The infrastructure gap between what consumers expect and what systems can reliably deliver is widening, not closing.
2025 made this tension impossible to ignore. Real-time payment networks expanded globally. Stablecoin adoption moved from experimental to operational. Central banks advanced CBDC programs. AI-driven fraud detection became table stakes. These are not incremental improvements, they are fundamental shifts in how money moves, and they are all happening at once.
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The result? Trust is no longer a soft concept or a brand attribute. It has become the hardest operational requirement in payments. If consumers do not trust that their money will move as expected, they will find alternatives they can trust. If banks do not trust their infrastructure can handle real-time volume, they will not adopt new rails. If regulators do not trust the security frameworks, they will not approve innovation. Trust is now the constraint that determines what is possible.
The complexity trap
Recent years brought extraordinary capabilities to payments, but they also introduced complexity the industry has never had to manage at this scale. Consumers expect payments to work every time, in every context, on every device. Delivering that consistency is becoming harder, not easier. When major banks experience hundreds of hours of downtime, when sophisticated fraud bypasses traditional controls, when cross-border payments fail without explanation, these are not technical glitches. They are trust failures that erode confidence in the entire system.
Meanwhile, the foundations are under strain. Research shows 44% of payment leaders cite legacy platforms as the primary barrier to modernisation, yet only a quarter are actively retiring them. What does that tell you? The industry knows the problem but cannot move fast enough to solve it.
Many networks still operate on rails never built for real-time processing or modern security standards. As payments embed deeper into daily life, these cracks widen. More transactions happen between parties with no prior relationship, requiring instant trust establishment. Industry leaders see it: 77% now identify fraud and cybersecurity as the biggest obstacles to progress. These are not future concerns. They shape experiences today.
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By GlobalDataTrust requires infrastructure, not just intention
If trust is the defining challenge, then modernisation is the path toward rebuilding it. But modernisation cannot mean surface-level upgrades. It requires rethinking foundations.
Payments earn trust when the infrastructure beneath them is resilient, interoperable and capable of supporting the speed and intelligence modern commerce demands. That means moving from rigid, aging architectures toward flexible systems that scale with volume, route transactions seamlessly during peak demand, support multiple rails simultaneously and adapt as new payment methods emerge.
Infrastructure alone is not enough. As payments flow faster and carry richer data, trust and security become inseparable. Stronger identity frameworks, biometrics, device-based credentials and fraud models that detect anomalies before a payment completes are no longer optional. But these tools only work when supported by infrastructure designed to accommodate them. Without that alignment, security becomes fragmented and trust fractures.
Trust also demands ecosystem coordination. Payments rely on banks, fintechs, merchants, processors and regulators. Confidence in the system is only as strong as its weakest link. That 43% of industry leaders now identify partnerships as a primary driver of progress is not surprising. It is overdue. Collaboration ensures the system evolves together and remains worthy of the trust placed in it.
The choice ahead
Looking back on 2025, what stands out is how quickly expectations evolved. Payments are now woven into everything we do. The technological and structural changes of the past year made one thing unmistakably clear: infrastructure is no longer background. It is battleground.
Here is what I believe: the divide in this industry will not be between fast and slow, or between innovative and traditional. It will be between those who recognise that trust is built on resilient infrastructure and those who treat it as a marketing problem.
The institutions that strengthen their foundations now, that prioritise interoperability and security alongside speed, that coordinate rather than compete on trust, those are the ones that will define the next decade of payments. The rest will spend that decade explaining outages.
Trust is not established through a single initiative. It is earned through consistent, deliberate action. As we move deeper into 2026, the question is not whether trust matters. The question is whether leaders will build systems worthy of it.
Thomas Warsop, President and CEO, ACI Worldwide
