Companies operating in the cryptocurrency space will gain large revenues in 2025 that will enable them to focus on formalising this sector from a regulatory/legal perspective. A similar process that happened in the BNPL space might be applied in the cryptocurrency space. Firstly, consumers will need to be properly made aware of what they are buying and where the money is going. New issuance of cryptocurrencies should be regulated to some level (and should be seen as an investment), so some kind of rating might be placed on new issuance that can later help customers make educated decisions.
We will probably see traction from card schemes pushing network tokenization. As card schemes aim to make network tokenisation mandated to a certain level, this will push the industry into adoption. Network tokenization will open doors to new innovations in how people are paying and will enable card schemes to achieve their goal – the removal of manual entry of card details for ecommerce transactions.
Merchants using legacy systems and providers will face even bigger challenges. The deployment of new payment methods like Blik, Pix, Wero, and functionalities like network tokenization will come into forefront in 2025. If companies won't be able to quickly and efficiently deploy these new functionalities, they might see an impact on their revenue and operating costs.
DORA – to become DORA-compliant might prove a difficult and costly task for some organisations.
Orchestration platforms, but not just payments which is what everyone thinks of, but also risk orchestration.
AI will have the biggest impact over the next five years in many different ways.
AI regulations, increased costs, and further fragmentation away from major schemes in how people want to pay including, more A2A, will represent the main challenges for the merchant payments ecosystem.
The landscape will be dominated by a mix of agile fintech innovators, tech giants entering payments, and collaborative partnerships between traditional financial institutions and startups.
AI-driven fraud prevention and dispute management are set to take the centre stage, ensuring enhanced security and efficiency. Meanwhile, seamless checkout experiences, powered by innovations like biometric payments and digital wallets, will elevate the consumer journey to new levels of convenience and satisfaction.
Balancing fraud prevention with customer convenience. Managing the costs of friendly fraud chargebacks with evolving regulations, and increased volumes of cases. Ensuring interoperability in an increasingly fragmented payments ecosystem.
It will be interesting to see the regulatory changes PSD3 brings and whether it adopts a similar approach to regulating push payment scams as seen in the UK. These updates could influence how consumer protection and payment security evolve in the coming years
PSPs and orchestrators – the specialists providing local acquiring and APMs will be incredibly valuable to ecommerce merchants in 2025 and beyond.
The payments providers building a full stack will deliver the flexibility that gives merchants simplified, streamlined, and secure payment solutions that are fit-for-purpose for optimised conversion. The growing range of one-click payment options and tokenization are increasing security and convenience, while Open Banking, POS finance, and Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) offerings are maturing and growing in popularity as they simplify checkouts and increase accessibility.
Although we are seeing signs of gradual improvement, it is unlikely consumer demand will increase as much as merchants would like. In fact, there is likely to be an 18-month lag before consumers begin to increase their spending. For example, in the UK economy, 2024 has been a tough year with the likelihood of continued challenges in 2025, as businesses face increased national insurance employer contributions. These will not only bring broad implications for wages and, therefore, spending but they could also impact merchants’ own ability to invest in solutions that will enable them to grow and remain profitable.
Consolidation in the orchestration space is also inevitable, following a busy year of new players entering to make it an overcrowded market. As economic challenges remain, investors and businesses will likely reassess and potentially pivot to ensure continued profitability. As a result, we expect 2025 to bring in the replacement of the individuals – the innovators and entrepreneurs – who launched the disruptors, in favour of more experienced and revenue-driven leaders.
In 2025, the UK and the EU payment regulations will focus on enhancing trust, security, and reliability across the financial ecosystem. Key initiatives include expanding Confirmation of Payee protocols in the EU, combatting fraud, and balancing modernised embedded finance with secure data sharing and interoperability requirements.
As consumers expect faster, more immersive payment experiences, merchants have to ensure that they can continue to adapt and meet shifting consumer demand with dynamic, future-proof services that will keep customers coming back for more. This is where modular technology providers will enable new services, products, compliance, verticals, and new customer use cases. It’s imperative that merchants ensure their technology platforms are ultra-resilient and can integrate new payment methods and optimisations, anti-fraud measures, risk monitoring, and other value-added services that can boost their bottom lines. Partnering with expert providers that can bend and flex in response to changing demands and regulations will offer numerous opportunities for innovation, collaboration, and unbeatable competitive advantages.
In 2025, SoftPOS will liberate merchants across a growing number of verticals from clunky POS hardware that can no longer keep up with the pace of innovation and changing customer demands. It makes no sense any longer for merchants to not have mobile in-store acceptance through SoftPOS-enabled smartphones or other devices. Tribe’s own research shows that 28% of merchants say the biggest limitation of their POS systems is the difficulty in supporting multiple payment methods, including alternative options like digital wallets. SoftPOS is an all-in-one payment and data analytics solution that’s slashing queue times, easily integrates with CRM and stock inventory systems – and helping merchants deliver more personalised customer experiences. SoftPOS enables untethered payment acceptance anywhere in-store, wherever the customer is.
Customers want merchants to offer pricing in their local currency and accept local payment methods. Merchants need an acquirer with extensive knowledge of international markets and data on payment habits within those locales to help merchants boost their conversion rates and shopper growth. Too often, merchants struggle with a lack of visibility of payment methods and overall customer data and trends. Merchants will need to go above and beyond in 2025 by leveraging hyper-personalisation. Whereas personalisation is typically the use of historical data to tailor and offer future experiences, hyper-personalisation takes a big leap further – it’s richer and offers the customer more instant gratification, including very precise messaging in close to, if not, real time.
It leverages an expanded pool of data to make predictions and I expect that, in 2025, we’ll see more merchants looking for dynamic data analytic capabilities in their techs tacks to help them understand spending trends and create more intuitive and targeted incentives and offers that keep customers coming back for more.
The National Payments Vision from the UK government has just landed. Let’s hope that a few of the key promising takeaways come to fruition, such as plans to hold big tech and social media platforms accountable for their role in enabling APP fraud, which harms merchants and their customers.
PSD3 will take into account new challenges around fraud, digital payment transformation, and access to payment systems. The introduction of PSD3 also marks a new era in Open Banking, with the potential to significantly enhance the performance of Open Banking APIs and increase the adoption of Open Banking services among merchants and their customers. DORA will lead to major system overhauls and investments for payment providers and, by extension, their merchant customers.
As fraud and cybersecurity threats multiply and creaking legacy systems suffer outages more frequently, operational resilience needs to be at the top of everyone’s list, irrespective of whether it is critical infrastructure or not. Financial inclusion is incredibly important, and we need to look at infrastructure beyond payments to prevent further outages to banks, supermarkets, and other merchant categories.
Omnichannel payment orchestration platforms like BridgerPay, which enable merchants to manage, unify and optimise payment flows across all their channels will play a significant role in 2025, along with local payment providers that addressing the growing demand for localised solutions (big fintech leaders like Stripe, Adyen, and PayPal, alongside regional disruptors driving local innovation). Embedded finance solutions, integrating payments seamlessly into merchant ecosystems, will also be of great importance in the following year. Collaboration among these players will be essential for merchants to navigate the complexities of the global payments ecosystem.
Omnichannel payment orchestration platforms that are centralising and optimising payment flows for increased conversions and revenue At the same time, AI and Machine Learning (ML) are enhancing fraud prevention, improving approval rates, and personalising customer experiences. The blockchain technology is simplifying cross-border payments with faster, more secure solutions, whereas APIs and Embedded Finance enable seamless payment integration across platforms and services.
Rising fraud and security threats – merchants need advanced tools to combat increasingly sophisticated fraud schemes.
Regulatory compliance – adapting to regional and global compliance requirements will remain a significant challenge.
Customer expectations – merchants will have to continuously innovate to meet demands for faster, more flexible, and localised payment options.
Cost pressures – managing transaction fees and maintaining profitability in a competitive market.
In 2025, data privacy regulations will boost standards for data protection (e.g., GDPR-like policies worldwide) that will require merchants to prioritise compliance. Increasing regulation around international transactions will push merchants to adopt compliant, scalable solutions when it comes to playing by the cross-border payment rules. Finally, mandates for faster payment processing and settlement will challenge traditional payment infrastructures in terms of real-time payments (RTP) standards.
The key players will include acquirers and payment facilitators that can complement payment acceptance with other merchant services. The keyword for both SMEs and large merchant services will be ecosystem, keeping in mind that the types of complementary services and related capabilities differ significantly.
Issuers and consumer wallets will continue to offer opportunities for leveraging synergies for large players with the appetite and capability to operate on both sides of the transaction. On the other hand, regulators will play a role in shaping the landscape as their focus shifts back to acquiring, particularly regarding fees and commissions.
AI and APIs above all else. Although the financial services and payments industries have among the longest track records of implementing ML and AI in strategy and operations, merchant acquiring is now being swept by a long wave of AI-driven automation. Across various sectors, AI in payments has moved well beyond the pilot and testing stages, progressing into large-scale industrial deployments. On the other hand, while APIs may not be entirely new, they remain instrumental in VAS (Value-Added Services) integration and are at the very core of the convergence of retailing and payment technology, as well as business model modernisation.
Competition between incumbents and new entrants, particularly those leveraging retailer services, will remain fierce, pushing traditional players out of their most profitable merchant segments. The proliferation of payment interfaces is already well known within the industry, but the inevitable convergence of retailing and payment value propositions — and the associated technologies — will continue to add pressure on traditional players, especially those with outdated back-end and front-end capabilities.
The major regulatory challenge emerging globally is the capping, or disclosure obligations, of MDR and POS fees. Regulators have a long history of intervening in the payments industry and altering its economic structure. While these measures are often well-intentioned, some have the potential to disrupt the financial stability of the industry, with significant consequences for business models — especially for small merchants, from the perspective of monoline acquirers and, if within regulatory scope, PayFacs. In Europe, PSD3, with its provisions for financial data access, will also impact the industry.
According to The Paypers’ Fraud Prevention in Ecommerce Report 2024–2025, data has been compiled on multiple companies activating across all regions, and highlights the global players tackling various aspects of fraud prevention. The infographic in this report highlights all the key players. The players involved in the below fraud focus areas will be the key players in the ecosystem in 2025 – Fraud/risk management and decisioning platform, identity verification, bot risk management, chargebacks management, KYC, customer authentication, and behavioural biometrics.
AI and ML technologies are critical for detecting patterns and anomalies in ecommerce data in real-time. ML will not only help identify and prevent fraudulent activities as it happens, but these models will also adapt to new fraud tactics as fraud evolves. Digital identity verification and biometrics advanced digital identity tools, including behavioural biometrics and device intelligence, are becoming essential, now more than ever. For example, fraudsters can nowadays easily clone voices and faces, however, typing and swiping movements remain challenging for them to clone.
There is no doubt that fraud tactics will scale and become increasingly sophisticated. This can have a negative impact on user experience, as more sophisticated fraud can drive stricter mitigations to avoid significant losses. As a result, more good users are getting blocked. Finding strong and efficient fraud prevention strategies will become of essence to overcome this challenge. At the same time, many merchants are facing pressure to reduce costs while maintaining strong fraud prevention measures. As the sophistication of fraud grows, lowering the fraud fighting budget to adopt the right tools and technologies will open up vulnarabilities, which will be found by attackers. It will just be a matter of time.
Visa’s changes to its acquiring monitoring programme. The Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP), will come into effect on 1 April 2025. This new programme consolidates Visa's previous fraud and dispute monitoring programmes (the Visa Fraud Monitoring Program and Visa Dispute Monitoring Program) into a unified framework. VAMP introduces stricter thresholds for both merchants and acquirers, particularly regarding fraud and chargeback ratios. The revised VAMP programme measures reported fraud and non-fraud chargebacks together. Not meeting these stricter thresholds will bring penalties for exceeding thresholds.
Discover more at mpe 2025, Europe’s largest merchant payments conference, taking place in Berlin on March 18-20. Connect with 1,500+ industry leaders and 400+ top merchants while exploring the latest innovations in the payments ecosystem. Stay focused on every angle of merchant payments – from acquiring, Open Banking, and Embedded Finance, to digital wallets and AI-driven payments. Learn more at www.merchantpaymentsecosystem.com.
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