At the Payments Leader Summit, conversations quickly moved past surface-level metrics. It wasn’t just about conversion rates or checkout flows—it was about the infrastructure behind them, the bottlenecks slowing global growth, and the real-life roadblocks that payment leaders are still battling every day.
Across dozens of sessions and hallway conversations, five consistent pain points emerged—some old, some evolving, but all still unresolved in too many organizations. Here’s what we learned, and why it matters.
Orchestration came up again and again—not as a shiny feature, but as a fundamental business need.
The reality? Many enterprise teams are juggling multiple PSPs without a true control layer. They’re managing retry logic manually, switching providers with help from engineering, and patching routing issues reactively.
This creates operational complexity, higher processing costs, and most importantly, lost approvals when traffic isn’t routed optimally. A lack of smarter routing, vendor prioritization, and checkout cost optimization means orchestration is often the silent revenue blocker no one has time to fix.
Smarter payment orchestration should allow teams to switch PSPs without friction, prioritize vendors based on performance, and consolidate visibility—without requiring engineering every step of the way.
Almost every team at the summit said they want to be data-driven. But when you dig deeper, you find the same issue: payment data is fragmented across tools, PSPs, fraud providers, and platforms.
Without unified analytics, leaders struggle to answer even basic questions in real time:
Why did approval rates drop last Friday?
Where is retry logic failing?
Which APMs are actually performing best per region?
Manual reporting slows down finance, ops, and growth teams—hiding growth blockers and delaying action. And without real-time dashboards and predictive insights, companies are stuck reacting to problems instead of preventing them.
The teams making real progress are leaning into AI-assisted decision-making, building systems that surface performance gaps early, and automate insights across checkout, fraud, and payments.
Fraud prevention used to mean blocking as much as possible and hoping conversion wouldn’t suffer too much. But that trade-off is no longer acceptable.
Risk teams are now being asked to reduce fraud while preserving conversion—and do it across multiple regions, payment methods, and customer segments. What’s holding them back?
The most forward-thinking companies are moving beyond rigid rules by embracing real-time fraud insights and adaptive logic that adjusts dynamically to user behavior and threat patterns. As we explored in Day 1 of the Payments Leader Summit, AI-powered fraud prevention is helping teams strike a better balance between protection and performance—catching threats earlier, reducing false positives, and preserving revenue without compromising customer experience.
When it comes to global expansion, localization isn’t optional—and payments are at the center of that.
A surprising number of companies still lack alternative payment methods (APMs) in key markets. The result? Poor user experience, lower conversion rates, and underperformance in entire regions.
The cost of integrating APMs one-by-one is high, and many teams struggle to even track APM performance by region. Without centralized reporting or optimization tools, it’s nearly impossible to know what’s working and what’s not.
But when APMs are embedded into your payments stack strategically, they unlock conversion, trust, and readiness to scale—especially in markets where cards aren't dominant.
Subscription and recurring models continue to grow—but with them comes a hidden threat: involuntary churn due to failed payments.
Many leaders we spoke to admitted they don’t have reliable visibility into recovery rates, retry performance, or churn attribution caused by payment failures. And while retry logic exists, it’s often static, hard-coded, or buried in engineering workflows.
That means subscription revenue is leaking silently, month after month. With better tools, teams can deploy automated retry solutions, track results in real time, and recover revenue proactively—not reactively.
The best payment recovery strategies today don’t just fix failures—they anticipate them and act before the customer ever notices.
The real takeaway from the Payments Leader Summit wasn’t a new product or framework—it was a mindset shift.
Growth in 2025 won’t come from adding more vendors or dashboards. It’ll come from investing in payment infrastructure that reasons, adapts, and acts on its own—across orchestration, fraud, localization, and analytics.
Because the most dangerous problems aren’t the ones we see. They’re the ones happening silently, in the background—every time a retry fails, a fraud rule blocks a good user, or a local payment method is missing from checkout.
If we want to move faster, scale smarter, and serve customers better, we need real-time systems that don’t just report what went wrong, but help us fix it—before it happens again.
