As 2025 comes to a close, the payments and fintech industry have seen growth and change in abundance. Looking back at the year, we’ve identified five key trends that have helped shape the year and are set to define the direction of the payments industry looking forward.
From AI to stablecoins, open banking options and instant payment networks, here’s what stood out in the industry this year.
Evolving digital wallets
Digital wallets underwent moderate change in 2025, with many leading providers leaning into the “all-in-one” approach to their products. Combining payments, buy now pay later (BNPL) options, loyalty schemes and credit options, wallets have emerged as unified financial hubs, vastly changing the way consumers can choose to pay. Digital wallets have led the market throughout the year, with payments from wallets such as Google and Apple Pay, along with the wider wallet market, accounting for approximately 50% of global payment transactions.
This evolution, combined with the rising popularity of digital wallets, made it possible for consumers to have multiple payment choices from one platform, reducing friction and ultimately speeding up the payment process for consumers. These changes also prompted a mobile-first approach from many e-commerce retailers (59% of global ecommerce sales are completed on mobile devices), with payment flows and post-checkout journeys more suited for these changed digital wallets and the alternative payment options they offer.
The multitude of options now available to consumers also saw BNPL (buy now, pay later) grow throughout the year, with finance options and instalments becoming more popular with consumers. Recent data from Black Friday showed that 95% of sales volume was financed through credit and BNPL options, which can likely be attributed to the wider availability and choices that wallets are now offering through these financial hubs.
Stablecoins and crypto
A change in consumer appetites saw cryptocurrency payments become widely accepted throughout the industry, with consumers more willing to pay with crypto in 2025, along with merchants now willing to accept digital assets. The trend has emerged as the furore of all-time-highs and more mainstream attention from the wider financial community has led to increased adoption and acceptance, despite cryptocurrency payments and stablecoin settlements are still very much in their infancy compared to other payment methods.
A selling point is instant crypto to fiat conversion, which many popular solutions provide. Merchants can accept cryptocurrencies without liquidity or cash flow issues with instant conversion, with the allure of instant transactions also meaning that merchants can get paid right away. Consumers also now have more choice, with most major cryptocurrencies accepted by merchants, along with stablecoins, cryptocurrencies that are pegged to the value of fiat currencies.
With the most popular stablecoins being USD and EUR based assets, merchants have found that stablecoin settlements have emerged as a viable option for an APM. Much like cryptocurrencies, settlements provide instant resolution and borderless options, while in some circumstances providing a more cost-effective method of moving money. The speed of settlements has also attracted a broader audience of merchants and consumers, with many now expecting “instant” as an industry standard - an important trend that we will touch on later.
Visa’s VAMP initiative
Visa went live with the Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP) in April 2025, and it quickly became one of the defining compliance shifts of the year for the payments industry. It replaced previous fraud monitoring programmes with a single, unified framework for card‑not‑present fraud and disputes.
After global card fraud losses reached an estimated $34 billion dollars in 2023, and forecasts that fraud will cumulatively exceed 400 billion dollars over the next decade, VAMP’s introduction signalled that acquirers and merchants should better manage risks, onboarding and fraud prevention with greater caution. VAMP created more globally aligned fraud thresholds for both domestic and cross-border card-not-present (CNP) transactions, which provided acquirers and merchants with more clarity and consistency.
As 2025 progressed, operational and strategic shifts happened across the payments ecosystem. Acquirers changed their approach to onboarding and monitoring, while merchants invested more heavily in fraud orchestration and 3DS optimisation. As a result of VAMP, 2025 saw a shift in perspective. Network rules and tighter guidelines were held with higher authority than consumer behaviour, which was typically a benchmark before the program was introduced. This in turn has redefined how merchants, acquirers and their respective businesses think about risk, revenue protection and customer experience in card‑not‑present payments.
AI and machine learning for fraud
AI is the hottest topic of 2025, and has captured the attention of the payments industry as advancements in AI and machine learning have made fraud prevention solutions a viable option for merchants. AI-powered fraud prevention solutions can analyse vast amounts of financial data and transactions in real-time, changing how companies recognise malicious actors. The evaluation of thousands of data points in real-time means that companies can monitor transactions as they happen, developing deeper insights into user behaviour and trends that can reduce losses and false positives when it comes to reporting. These touchpoints are extremely valuable to merchants, and have become a high-demand product.
Despite this, fraud remains a challenge for payment companies despite these advancements. A joint report from the European Banking Authority (EBA) and the European Central Bank (ECB) showed that payment fraud across the European Economic Area (EEA) amounted amounted to €3.4 billion in 2022, €3.5 billion in 2023 and €4.2 billion in 2024. The figure is expected to rise when 2025’s figures are released, as scams and payment fraud have become more sophisticated due to the same advancements in AI and how it’s deployed by bad actors.
Earlier this year, payabl. partnered with Sift, a fraud prevention platform that uses AI to deliver better identity trust for payments companies. With the emphasis on managing compliance and risk, these solutions show promise for merchants, and have grown in popularity and market attention as the year went on.Backed by AI-powered fraud prevention, merchants can reduce fraud and chargeback rates while improving approval rates. It also helps merchants increase conversion while maintaining compliance via greater eligibility for Transaction Risk Analysis (TRA) exemptions in the EEA and UK.
Instant payment networks
One of the biggest 2025 trends in the payments industry was the new base-line expectation of instant payments through whatever medium the merchant and consumer choose. With this, SEPA instant and other payment networks such as the US’s FedNow/RTP and UK’s Faster Payment System (FPS) grew in usage as merchants began to demand instant clearance and settlement. This push prompted a shift towards real-time liquidity management, and simultaneously made instant the default expectation.
This is extremely desirable for merchants, as they can manage multi-currency (EUR, USD, GBP) accounts and offer instant options, along with reducing payment delays. In October, payabl. became a licensed member of the European Payments Initiative (EPI) and a direct participant in Wero, a pan-European digital wallet. Built on SEPA Instant rails, the wallet clears payments in under 10 seconds on a cross-border basis, improving the account-to-account (A2A) payments experience for both parties.
This has also seen open banking initiatives grow, as users can settle transactions and reduce costs by sending via instant payment infrastructure rails. It enables merchants to initiate payments directly from a customer’s bank account, and bypass traditional settlement methods such as cards and direct debits - improving the flow and velocity for both parties.
Another reason is the improvement in liquidity and cash‑flow visibility, as funds settle in seconds while providing high-quality remittance data that can be used to improve checkout flows.
What do the 2025 trends tell us?
The trends tell us that merchants and the consumer want more from each other, and are getting it too. From all-in-one financial hubs that can handle multiple financing options to almost-instant payments and settlements, both parties are spoilt for choice with the multitude of options available to them.
The underlying emphasis on better fraud prevention and greater security also creates a better environment for money flow for the merchant and consumer, which could very well lead to increased volume and an uptake in figures due to the ease provided.
However, with these options, we’ve seen it’s becoming easier as a consumer to delay payments and rely on credit options, something which could see a rise in defaults and potentially failed payments over a longer period of time. Both parties need protection, and as we’ve seen throughout 2025, it’s clear that a priority has been placed on better security and prevention of fraud in this new era of credit financing and instant payments.