Payments may happen in seconds, but the work around them stretches far beyond the moment a customer taps a card or presses pay. Once money has been taken, businesses still have to reconcile it, manage refunds and payouts, move funds across currencies and keep track of fraud and risk.
In the latest The Power 50 podcast, The Future of Fintech, host Theodora Lau, founder of Unconventional Ventures, is joined by Victor Padee, chief revenue officer at Aevi, Joaquim Marques, sales director, strategic accounts at Mangopay, and Hugo Horton, head of partnerships at Sokin, to discuss what businesses need from the next generation of payments.
Choice is one of the big themes. Merchants can now choose between more providers, payment methods and hardware, but every extra option can bring another integration to build and maintain. Victor argues that businesses should think about how easily they can change those choices later, whether that means adding a payment method, changing hardware or entering another country without rebuilding their payments setup from scratch.
Listen to the Power 50: The Future of Fintech.
The panel also looks at why new payment methods still have to give people a reason to use them. Account-to-account payments can be cheaper for merchants, but cards are easy, familiar and come with protections and rewards. Stablecoins may have a clearer role in business payments, particularly when money needs to move across borders quickly and at any time.
There’s also a lot of talk about data. Victor’s view is that businesses already have plenty of it; the harder part is joining it up and deciding who is responsible for acting on it. AI may make that data easier to use, but it doesn’t remove the need for someone to own the decision.
That becomes even more important if AI agents start choosing how and where to pay. The panel asks who is responsible when an agent gets it wrong, and what that means for consent, liability and consumer protection. Looking ahead, they expect more modular payment setups, wider use of stablecoins for cross-border payments and more focus on managing the whole payment journey rather than simply adding more ways to pay.
