The next evolution of financial services is value movement

The 2025 edition of Money 20/20 made it abundantly clear that three converging forces are reshaping the financial services ecosystem. First, there is the long-running push to move money faster, cheaper, and with richer data. Second, digital assets, wallets, and tokenization are becoming integral components of financial infrastructure. Third is the constant and escalating threat from financial crime, identity fraud, and mounting regulatory pressure. You could feel the convergence theme everywhere at the event, from main-stage keynotes to vendor mix at the booths to lunch conversations. For enterprise leaders, this convergence presents an opportunity to rearchitect value movement across business models and geographies, cementing their positions across the banking and financial services value chain.

Payments are breaking out of the back office and into the boardroom

For years, payments quietly kept global commerce running in the background, reconciled overnight, batched in the back office, and only noticed when something broke. However, that approach is no longer sufficient. A clear theme that echoed across conversations and sessions at the event was frustration with incumbent rails, particularly around cross-border money movement. The focus was on creating a trifecta of “richer data + tokenization + real-time infrastructure” for seamless cross-border payments. The aim is to elevate payments from “cost of doing business” to “source of business advantage.”

Payments are now seen as a core enabler of growth, innovation, and risk management across the financial services ecosystem. That shift, from cost center to competitive weapon, was the most critical pivot point that echoed through the event.

Orchestration layers, which are platforms that sit above multiple domestic or foreign rails, wallet networks, and offer rich data integration, were the other (related) hot topic. Think of them as control towers for money movement, routing value across networks without touching the rails directly. This orchestration layer is becoming a new domain of value. Together, payments modernization and orchestration are shifting the narrative from “How do we fix payments?” to “How do we embed payments into the business value chain?” Payments have now become a business imperative instead of a technology stack.

Digital assets, wallets, and tokenization are no longer experiments; they are in active deployment

The purely speculative crypto hype may have started to cool off, but the shift toward regulated, tokenized, and fiat-linked assets is gathering momentum. Tokenization of payments is advancing rapidly, supported by early pilots in stablecoins and digital fiat models, as well as current government initiatives and legislation. Both retail and institutional ecosystems are now scaling their proofs of concept around asset tokenization, wallet networks, and programmable money.

Deloitte estimates that by 2030, one in four large-value international transfers could move across tokenized rails. However, the real pivot lies in how wallet ecosystems are expanding into B2B value platforms. It’s no longer about “Can we build a wallet?” but about “How do we make the wallet a source of value, trust, and revenue?”

Despite the rapid scaling of tokenization, regulatory clarity and infrastructure maturity remain significant friction points. Interoperability, licensing, and standardization are key constraints that must be addressed. Enterprises want to expand their wallet ecosystems and embrace tokenization, but most organizations admitted they are operating half-blind without standardization and governance frameworks. Without better intelligence and orchestration, faster payments just mean faster fraud in the age of AI and deepfakes.

Fraud, identity, and compliance are core design principles now

As payments and tokenization evolve and become more digital, faster, and more complex, financial crime and compliance is becoming a major focus area. Without robust threat intelligence, increasing transaction volumes, velocity, and complexity will significantly expand the risk surface. Anti-money-laundering, sanctions, and fraud controls are existential priorities that can’t be abstracted away. The battle against financial crime is intensifying as value flows become faster, and AI is now deeply embedded in the tools used to detect and manage threats. MasterCard announced its AI-driven threat intelligence platform for payments at the event. This platform combines MasterCard’s fraud data with Recorded Future’s cyber insights to increase the precision of fraud detection and prevention.

AI is being deployed in increasingly sophisticated ways across threat detection, identity orchestration, and sanctions screening. Simultaneously, regulators are tightening scrutiny around these AI tools. “Black box” AI in compliance is being challenged, and explainability is becoming a must-have. Enterprises across the payments ecosystem must blend automation with human oversight to maintain regulatory trust. The message is clear: fraud prevention and threat intelligence must be embedded into a modern financial stack alongside orchestration and data integration as part of a unified delivery model.

Traditional approaches to payments and integration services aren’t going to cut it

Conversations at Money20/20 signaled a deeper convergence of payments, compliance, and data intelligence. Whether you’re a bank, a fintech, or a services provider, the expectations have changed. Organizations need platforms that unify domestic and international rails, digital wallets, tokenized assets, and compliance tooling. The future belongs to those who can connect rails, wallets, tokenized assets, and compliance systems through modular orchestration platforms.

Tokenization, wallets, and digital assets demand not just updated systems but new service models. Enterprises require infrastructure, licensing support, and integration architectures that can effectively handle tokenized value across various use cases. Real-time anomaly detection, AI/ML for fraud, sanction screening, identity orchestration, and explainability demand embedded intelligence in the platforms. The ability to balance global capability with local delivery and help enterprises navigate regulatory, licensing, and infrastructure nuances on a country-by-country basis is critical. Enterprises that build tokenization pilots without compliance, governance, and interoperability at the core risk creating a new form of legacy before the old one is even gone.

Services-as-Software™ in the form of repeatable platforms, integration APIs, and packaged capabilities that blend software and operations are the mandate. Enterprises expect providers to deliver end-to-end value from onboarding to orchestration, asset flow, and fraud detection, playing across the full value chain, not just plugging gaps. The payments stack has become the strategic nervous system of global enterprises, and it is in active disruption. The future belongs to organizations that

• Treat payments as a core enterprise platform, not a third-party dependency.
• Build orchestration and intelligence into every transaction.
• View tokenization and wallets as foundations of business value, not technical curiosities.>
• Make security and transparency central to customer experience.

The Bottom Line: The future of payments lies in moving value, not just money, and orchestrating this ecosystem is where the success lies.

Enterprises don’t need another payments vendor; they need a payments vision. The winners will be those who can elevate it into a strategic platform that spans orchestration, tokenization and wallets, intelligence and compliance, and ecosystem enablement. Those who act now will define how value moves in the digital economy. Those who wait will simply pay for the privilege of catching up.