Several emerging technologies are reshaping the payments landscape, but what is set to genuinely change in the next year? To find out, we caught up with leading executives from our top 100 cross-border payment companies and asked them about their short-term predictions for the space.

In a new video, we share answers from a number of leaders at a range of companies, including global banks such as Société Générale and Barclays; digital asset companies including BVNK and Fireblocks; as well as other cross-border payments specialists including Adyen, EBANX, Ebury, PingPong and XTransfer. 

Here, we share key takeaways from our conversations, which you can click above to watch in full. 

  • The continuing quest for real-time payments: A number of the experts we spoke to expect the speed of payments and payouts to increase. Adrian Davis, Managing Director at Adyen, predicts that we will see “instantaneous payments that are either made into the bank account or onto a virtual card”. 
  • Improving compliance processes: Marie-Elise Droga, CRO at EBANX, explains that compliance requirements will remain “really important” in the short-term, particularly for the largest merchants. Mark Hewlett, Group Head of Banking & Infrastructure at Ebury, adds that AI can help to reduce the cost of transaction monitoring and sanction screening.
  • Tokenised deposit growth: David Messenger, CEO of PingPong, notes that the industry will increasingly leverage tokenised deposits to help manage liquidity across complex global networks. He also explains that this solution should be particularly influential in emerging markets, where cross-border flow and FX are more challenging. 
  • Expecting rapid virtual asset developments: Unsurprisingly, stablecoins were consistently referenced in response to our question. According to Michael Shaulov, CEO of Fireblocks, now that many major banks globally are developing stablecoin solutions, we should begin to see some of these being rolled out in the next 12 months. Edwin Hartog, Société Générale’s Head of Global Transaction Banking in the Netherlands, also noted that the development of virtual asset solutions in Europe could cause a rebalancing of the market slightly away from the US, which currently leads and dominates the space.
  • Agentic payments leveraging stablecoins: BVNK’s Co-Founder Chris Harmse told us that he is looking forward to seeing how stablecoins and agentic payments come together in the coming year. “Issuing an agent a [stablecoin] wallet is a great way to programme permissioned access to that wallet and allow that agent to spend and interact in the payment ecosystem,” he says.