The Pay360 event just wrapped up, and we gained valuable insights into the overall state of the payment industry with its focus on AI, robust infrastructure and architecture for applications, the need for FinTech-Bank cooperations, and more strict regulations. The event shed light on what changes payment companies must make and how they should adjust to new market conditions to stay in the flow. Below are the industry’s pressing issues we found the most mind-stirring during the event and their role in the entire payment ecosystem.
AI’s Ripple Effect on Payments
The Pay360 speakers, including Ronan Carter from Google Cloud, Georgios Kolovos from NVIDIA, and Eva Zhang from Ali Pay UK, pushed the AI discussion further than AI chatbots and fraud detection, which were hot topics several years ago. Now companies look for ways to implement AI in payments to predict the most stable currencies, batch transactions more cost-effectively, reduce fees for consumers, and offer customers hyperpersonalization. This means that AI is evolving into foundational models that analyze complete transaction data.
Another important message concerned the myth of having perfect data: there will always be silos, or the generated results will require human oversight. We support this message, as streamlining data is one of the most common challenges in our work on projects. While it might sound pessimistic, it is important to highlight that it offers the foundation for robust data governance and data processing measures, which not only helps to improve data quality in the long run but also ensures adherence to compliance.
For example, when working on a project for our client, a global financial data and software firm, we needed to overcome poor data quality and implement a data preprocessing pipeline. The main reasons for building this pipeline were raw data cleansing, normalization, and enrichment. Our team created an AI-driven platform for a client, which analyzes global investment data in large volumes (the algorithm is processing around 60,000 news topics a day) and extracts insights from it for further decisions.
Also, one of the benefits of this ongoing need for data improvement is the fact that AI is transforming roles within the industry rather than simply replacing jobs. In our project described above, AI allowed decrease manual data processing workload by 50%. While this is a huge help with manual tasks, the human efforts are still valuable.
From Partnerships to Productization: FinTech-Bank Collaboration Matures
One of the panel discussions was centered on the evolving nature of bank–FinTech partnerships. Such a cooperation can be based on the following main models: traditional supplier or white-label arrangements, “rent-a-product” models, and the emerging co-creation approach where banks and FinTechs collaboratively develop solutions. Speakers also raised the question of partnerships involving academic and research institutions. This allows the fuse and alignment of innovative FinTech solutions with the core objectives of banks. The dialogue emphasized that while supplier partnerships are more straightforward, co-creation is complex due to challenges such as data sharing, trust, and cultural differences between the organizations involved.
The panel further touched on the topic of operational challenges, particularly the difficulties large banks face with siloed data and the lengthy process of onboarding FinTechs. In one of our projects, we helped our client Mogami to perform the integration with the MX platform. This feature-rich solution we delivered allows financial providers to quickly verify financial data and mitigate risks connected to fraud and identity theft. Integrating the app with MX allowed Mogami to offer its platform for banking institutions to utilize and, thus, unlock new business opportunities and increase revenues.
The Importance of Adaptive, Trusted, AI-Ready Architecture
Many speakers repeatedly emphasized that digital transformation isn’t merely about adopting new technologies or launching flashy digital features but rather about making smart, strategic investments that align with core business objectives. They highlighted that many digital initiatives fail due to misaligned goals, compliance gaps, and technology that can’t scale. It was stressed that the future belongs to FinTechs that invest in adaptive, trusted, AI-ready architectures.
For one of our clients operating in the financial services niche, we migrated a low-performing legacy platform to the cloud and introduced scalability with a serverless infrastructure. This allowed us to create more advanced features like investment analytics and market comparison and ensure that the platform is capable of withstanding around a million users daily.
The Need for Trusted, Localized Data Infrastructure
The Pay360 speakers stressed that European apps are working on non-European cloud and software providers (e.g., Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, etc.). The reasons for such a dependence on these cloud infrastructure providers are evident: they are the industry’s proven giants.
However, it might be high time to overcome this overdependence for two reasons: balancing with heightened prices due to geopolitical events and strengthening payment software security by using infrastructure solutions designed in Europe’s legal framework.
The latter is especially important when it comes to children’s data because GDPR imposes parental consent and age-appropriate privacy policies to create additional layers of protection in case children’s data is collected or processed. From our experience, we can say that even though incorporating legal requirements of GDPR, PCI DSS, OFAC, and regulations might require additional efforts, clients always stress the importance of protecting sensitive data, preventing identity theft, or minimizing the chances of cyber attacks.
Regulatory Pressure: It’s Not Slowing Down
While compliance requirements remain crucial for the implementation of payment solutions, they are also becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with. Such domains as correspondent banking, cross-border investments, and payments are subject to even tighter regulations than several years ago.
For example, the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) has such requirements as secure customer authentication and strong third-party oversight. Another important legal requirement comes from the 6th Anti-Money Laundering Directive (6AMLD), which demands tighter reporting and recordkeeping for any suspicious transactions. Despite pressing complexities, complying with regulations is possible through encryption, strong customer authentication, and clear policies for handling sensitive data. In our project, we implement those measures alongside automated checks for ongoing regulatory monitoring.
Conclusion: The Signal from the Noise
After two days of discussions, we can extract several recurring themes that were addressed by several speakers. The future of the payment industry depends on strategic collaborations, robust infrastructures, AI-driven value-targeted improvements, and designing compliance-first solutions.