Inside the future of payments: Anton Kornilov on what comes next

 

Payments advisor Anton Kornilov shares his perspective on today’s payments landscape – from key challenges and regulatory shifts to cross-border friction, team dynamics, and the future of stablecoins.

Anton, could you start by telling us a bit about yourself and your professional background?

If I had to describe myself in two words, they would be payments and teams. I’ve spent more than 25 years in the payments industry, holding regional and global leadership roles at Mastercard and American Express. During that time, I’ve worked across the full spectrum of payments — domestic and cross-border, card-based and account-to-account, consumer and B2B — with much of my work centred on regulatory change, market expansion, and revenue diversification.  As the founder of Kernel Acumen, I advise organisations on end-to-end payment transformation. My focus spans go-to-market design, partnership strategy, commercialisation, and aligning innovation with regulatory expectations.

Teams have been a defining thread throughout my career. I’ve built, led and learned from diverse, multicultural teams around the world. But that passion doesn’t come only from business. I’m also a long-standing volleyball player, coach, and currently a Board Member of Volleyball England. Volleyball has been a constant in my life and has shaped how I think about leadership, resilience, and collective performance.

To me, payments is now unquestionably a team sport. The organisations that will shape the next phase of payments are those that can translate strategy into scale through partnerships, interoperability, and shared problem-solving. No single player can do it alone anymore.

What are the most pressing challenges banks and fintechs face in today’s payments ecosystem?

Most of the challenges shaping today’s payments ecosystem are not new; they’re structural issues that reappear as technology evolves, regulation intensifies and customer expectations change. Banks and fintechs experience them differently, but the underlying themes are consistent.

First, technology modernisation remains a fundamental constraint.  Banks still carry significant legacy complexity. BCG’s 2025 research shows that over 60% of bank tech spend goes to maintaining existing systems, leaving limited room for transformation. Fintechs move faster but must retrofit resilience and controls as they scale.

Second, regulatory and compliance demands absorb a disproportionate share of resources. Compliance is now continuous. BCG estimates that more than 10% of bank IT budgets are consumed by regulatory mandates, and that burden resurfaces with every new requirement. Fintechs face different pressures — licensing, capital expectations, operational resilience — but the friction is similar: regulation keeps expanding faster than simplification.

Third, customer expectations and access to customers are evolving faster than the ecosystem can adapt.  Consumers and businesses expect instant, intuitive, low-friction payments across every channel. At the same time, access to the customer has become more competitive. Banks must meet a broad spectrum of expectations across diverse segments; fintechs can specialise deeply but must fight for distribution in an increasingly crowded landscape. In payments, controlling the customer experience shapes both trust and economics.

What do you see as the main challenges in cross-border payments today?

Cross-border payments have seen real progress, but the gap between ambition and reality remains. As the G20’s latest progress report shows, issues around speed, cost, transparency and access persist despite meaningful advances across multiple global initiatives.

The ecosystem itself has become more complex. Cross-border payments now involve banks, PSPs, mobile money operators, regional schemes, wallets and emerging token-based models. This creates more choice, but also more fragmentation, particularly across the first and last mile.

Technology promise is moving faster than real-world integration.  Innovations such as stablecoins and tokenised money carry genuine potential, but most remain early in their production journey. They still rely on liquidity, compliance and interoperability with domestic systems — or require substantial shifts in consumer and business behaviour — before they can address cross-border challenges at scale.

Finally, structural differences between jurisdictions continue to create friction.  Cross-border payments depend on alignment across multiple regulatory and market environments, yet AML requirements, data-privacy regimes, licensing models, capital controls and FX rules vary widely between countries. Domestic payment-system maturity also differs considerably, as do the needs and behaviours of end users. Sending markets like the UK, EU and US are digital-first and highly banked; receiving markets often rely on cash-out networks, mobile-money ecosystems, varied identity regimes and different trust dynamics. These diverse conditions make it impossible to solve cross-border payments with a single rail or technology.

Are there any topics or trends you feel the industry is overemphasising – or underexploring – right now?

I think we sometimes overemphasise technology “silver bullets” and underexplore shifts in demographics and consumer behaviour. A lot of innovation is still designed around the needs of Baby Boomers and Millennials, but it is Gen Z and soon Gen Alpha who will shape the next decade of payments.  Every generation reshapes payments based on its lived experience: Boomers embraced cards, Millennials drove ecommerce and wallets, Gen Z expects embedded, social, cross-border and even crypto-friendly experiences — and is more willing to share data if there is a clear return or personalised value. Gen Alpha will be instant, invisible and AI-native by default. These behavioural shifts are not spectacular, but they are irreversible — and they will determine which innovations scale and which business models endure.

What recent or upcoming regulatory changes are having the biggest impact on payments innovation?

Across the UK, EU, US and increasingly globally, three regulatory themes stand out.

First, consumer-focused regulation is accelerating.  We’re seeing a clearer push toward protection and rights: the UK’s APP fraud reimbursement regime, broader data-access frameworks such as PSD3/PSR, and the UK’s Smart Data work and the US Section 1033 rule (when it regains traction). All of these shift power toward the consumer — giving them more control over their data, more transparency, and more consistent protection across digital channels.

Second, regulation of the underlying rails is reshaping innovation.  Instant payments mandates in Europe, Faster Payments upgrades in the UK and the early momentum behind FedNow in the US are changing expectations around settlement speed and pricing for traditional rails. Meanwhile, stablecoins and tokenised money are moving into the regulated perimeter through MiCA in the EU, the GENIUS Act in the US and emerging frameworks in the UK and several Asian and Gulf markets. These rules will determine how new forms of digital value can safely interoperate with existing payment systems.
Finally, competition and sovereignty considerations are becoming more visible.  Interventions such as the UK PSR’s reviews of scheme and processing fees, US credit card interchange fee settlement and Europe’s push for greater payment sovereignty are reshaping the competitive landscape. They influence pricing, business models and the balance between global schemes, domestic rails and emerging alternatives. In many cases, competition policy is becoming as important as technology in determining where innovation can genuinely take hold.

Beyond technology, how are these shifts and regulations affecting people and teams inside financial institutions and fintechs?

The biggest impact is the need for much tighter collaboration across product, risk, compliance, engineering, treasury and operations. Initiatives such as APP fraud reimbursement in the UK, the EU Instant Payments Regulation or new stablecoin frameworks cannot be implemented in silos; they require end-to-end alignment on controls, customer journeys and economics. Teams increasingly need people who can translate regulation into design decisions, not just compliance tasks. It places a premium on teams that can work across boundaries — translating policy into customer journeys, controls into product choices and commercial goals into compliant solutions. Payments has always been a team sport, but today the level of coordination required is higher than ever. The organisations that succeed will be those that build teams able to navigate this complexity together.

How do you see stablecoins evolving in the payments industry — in terms of their current role, their transformative potential, and the business models most likely to scale?

Today, most stablecoin activity sits inside the digital-asset ecosystem.  They are supporting trading, treasury functions and platform-to-user payouts. Their use in mainstream consumer and business payments is still limited, and in many retail contexts traditional rails already perform well. The real opportunity emerges when stablecoins address a specific, persistent inefficiency for the end user.
That is why I see the greatest potential in B2B payments, a segment where friction remains high. Businesses operate on invoices, payment terms, partial payments, approvals and rich remittance data. In the US, where checks remain common, these inefficiencies are even more visible. With a regulatory framework now in place, the US could become a pivotal test case for stablecoin based innovation at scale.

My conviction is that stablecoins will reshape payments in areas where existing rails underperform.  Most likely in B2B domestic and cross-border flows. Their impact won’t come from replacing traditional systems, but from solving real workflow problems. When they meaningfully reduce friction and align payment, data and settlement more tightly, stablecoins can deliver improvements that traditional rails struggle to match.

About the author

Anton Kornilov is a senior payments executive and advisor with over two decades of leadership experience at Mastercard and American Express, now running his own advisory practice, Kernel Acumen. He has built and led high-performing teams while driving innovation in cross-border, domestic, consumer, and business payments across Europe and global markets. As a Board Director at Volleyball England and a juniors coach, Anton champions resilience and team culture — lessons that translate directly into navigating people, change, and digital transformation in payments.

 

About Kernel Acumen Ltd

Kernel Acumen is a boutique advisory firm helping fintechs, PSPs, and financial institutions scale intelligently across borders. We operate at the intersection of strategy, innovation, and regulatory change—translating insight into growth through go-to-market execution, ecosystem enablement, and payment transformation.