Key Points 

• From Cost Center to Revenue Engine: Driven by real-time rails, digital assets, and agentic commerce, payments have shifted from back-office plumbing to a primary driver of revenue growth and client experience.
• The Modernization Framework: Institutions must execute across three core pillars: Run Smarter (operational efficiency), Move Faster (real-time rails and ISO 20022 readiness), and Protect Better (instant fraud detection and regulatory compliance), rather than tackling them in isolation.
• Adapting to Machine Payer Risk: The rise of agentic AI transactions and regulated stablecoins requires financial institutions to update risk models and fraud orchestration for instant, non-human payment behaviors.

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Payments used to be plumbing. It sat behind the products a bank actually sold, judged on whether it worked reliably and cost as little as possible to run. That framing no longer holds. Payments has become one of the fastest-growing profit pools in financial services, the front line of customer experience, and, increasingly, the surface where fraud, financial crime and regulatory exposure concentrate. For the COO, CIO, CRO and Chief Compliance Officer sitting across the same operating committee table, payments has quietly become one of the highest-stakes conversations in the institution, and that is not a one-year phenomenon. It is a structural shift that will keep compounding as real-time rails, digital assets and AI-driven payment operations mature.

This piece lays out why that shift is happening, backed by the data behind it, and offers a simple framework any payments, operations or risk leader can use to organize a modernization roadmap regardless of which technology or vendor sits behind it.

Why Has Payments Become a Growth Engine Instead of a Cost Center?

The scale of the shift is easiest to see in the numbers. Global payments revenue reached roughly $2.5 trillion in 2024 and is projected to approach $3 trillion by 2029, making payments one of the largest and fastest-growing revenue pools in the entire financial services industry^[1]. That growth is not coming from transaction fees alone. Digital wallets, embedded finance and platform-based commerce are reshaping how consumers and businesses transact, and institutions that treat payments as differentiated infrastructure, rather than a cost line to minimize, are the ones capturing a disproportionate share of that growth.

That reframes the mandate for payments leaders across financial institutions globally. A payments operation judged purely on cost-per-transaction will optimize itself into irrelevance while competitors use the same infrastructure to win share, deepen relationships and unlock new revenue lines built on top of the rails themselves.

What Is Driving the Shift Toward Real-Time and Account-to-Account Payments?

Real-time, account-to-account payments are moving from novelty to core infrastructure faster than most institutions’ technology roadmaps assumed. The Federal Reserve’s FedNow Service has grown to more than 1,700 participating financial institutions, while The Clearing House’s RTP network now processes roughly 128 million transactions worth $480 billion per quarter^[2]. That volume is still a fraction of card network activity, but the direction of travel is unmistakable: lower cost, instant settlement and frictionless experience are pulling volume away from multi-day settlement cycles, and every institution still routing transactions through legacy batch processes is accumulating a widening experience gap against competitors already live on instant rails.

For a CIO, that gap matters less as a technology question than a sequencing one. Real-time rails are not a future upgrade to plan around a core replacement. They are current infrastructure that institutions are already being measured against.

Are Stablecoins and Digital Assets Becoming Real Payment Rails?

Digital assets have moved well past the experimentation phase. Stablecoins processed roughly $27.6 trillion in transfer volume in 2024, a figure that exceeded the combined transaction volume of Visa and Mastercard for the year^[3]. That volume still skews heavily toward trading and settlement activity rather than everyday consumer payments, but the regulatory groundwork for mainstream use is now in place. The GENIUS Act, signed into law in the United States in July 2025, established the first federal regulatory framework for payment stablecoins, requiring full reserve backing and bringing issuers under the Bank Secrecy Act’s anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance obligations^[4].

That combination, real transaction volume plus a federal compliance framework, is what turns a speculative technology into a channel a bank or payment processor has to have a considered position on. Institutions that treat stablecoins purely as a crypto-market curiosity are likely to find themselves reacting to client demand rather than shaping the strategy around it.

How Is Agentic AI Changing the Way Payments Get Made?

The most consequential shift in payments right now may not be a new rail at all. It is a new kind of payer: the AI agent acting on a person’s or business’s behalf. Visa and Mastercard have both launched dedicated agentic commerce infrastructure, Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay, built around tokenized credentials that let an AI agent transact within defined spend controls without exposing underlying card data. The adoption curve has moved quickly: AI agent traffic on US retail sites rose 805% year over year on Black Friday 2025, and AI agents influenced roughly $67 billion of global Cyber Week 2025 sales, close to 20% of all orders^[5].

That shift changes what a fraud model has to distinguish between. A legitimate AI agent making an authorized purchase and a bad actor abusing a compromised credential can look structurally similar to a scoring engine that was never built to evaluate machine-initiated transactions. Fraud and risk teams built entirely around human behavioral patterns are already encountering traffic that does not fit those patterns, whether or not their institution has consciously opted into agentic commerce yet.

Why Does Faster Payments Also Mean Faster Fraud?

Every gain in payment speed has historically come with a corresponding gain in fraud speed, and instant, irrevocable settlement removes one of the traditional safety nets: the multi-day window in which a suspicious transaction could be caught and reversed before funds actually moved. As real-time and account-to-account payments scale, financial institutions are having to invest in fraud detection that works at the same speed as the payment itself, using behavioral analytics, biometrics and real-time risk orchestration rather than batch-based review that assumes a delay exists.

Regulatory expectations are rising in step with that pressure. New payment regulation across major markets is increasingly holding institutions accountable not just for preventing fraud losses, but for demonstrating that their controls, monitoring and consumer protection measures meet a rising bar, which is turning compliance from a defensive cost center into an operational capability institutions are judged on directly.

A Simple Framework for Payments Modernization: Run Smarter, Move Faster, Protect Better

Given how many fronts are moving at once, real-time rails, digital assets, agentic commerce, fraud and regulation, it helps to organize a modernization roadmap around three questions rather than trying to solve every trend individually. These three pillars map to the actual decisions a payments, operations or risk leader has to make, regardless of which specific technology or vendor sits behind them.

Run smarter. This is the operational efficiency pillar: cost per transaction, straight-through processing rate, exception and repair volume, and the ability to scale with volume growth without a proportional increase in headcount. Most payment organizations still lose meaningful efficiency to manual processing, siloed workflows across clearing, settlement and investigations, and a lack of standardization across payment types. The institutions closing this gap are the ones treating exceptions and repairs as a design problem to eliminate, not a permanent cost of doing business.

Move faster. This is the rails and readiness pillar: whether the institution can actually support real-time settlement, ISO 20022 messaging, embedded finance integrations and, increasingly, stablecoin or tokenized-money rails, without waiting for a multi-year core modernization program to finish first. Speed here is measured less by technology capability and more by how quickly a new payment type or rail can go from pilot to production inside the existing operating model.

Protect better. This is the trust and compliance pillar: fraud loss ratio, false-positive rate, alert remediation turnaround, and the ability to produce an audit-ready explanation for how a decision was made. As payments get faster and payer identity gets more complex, thanks to agentic commerce and digital assets, this pillar is where regulatory and board scrutiny is concentrating fastest.

An institution rarely needs to solve all three simultaneously, but a program that only addresses one, cutting cost without improving fraud controls, or chasing new rails without addressing exception backlogs, tends to create a new bottleneck exactly where the old one used to sit. This is the operating logic behind Sutherland’s FinPay360 offering, which brings intelligent operations, digital engineering, advanced analytics and agentic AI together across the full payments lifecycle, onboarding, processing and settlement, fraud and financial crime, and disputes, specifically so that efficiency, speed and protection are designed as one connected system rather than three separate initiatives competing for the same budget.

The Payments Question That Isn’t Going Away

Real-time rails, digital assets and agentic commerce will keep evolving, and the specific numbers behind each will look different next year than they do today. What will not change is the underlying discipline this requires: an institution that can run its payments operation efficiently, move at the speed its customers and counterparties now expect, and protect every transaction with controls that hold up under regulatory scrutiny, all at the same time, on the same infrastructure.

That combination, not any single rail or technology, is what will separate the institutions that treat payments as a growth engine from the ones still treating it as plumbing.

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Sources

1. McKinsey & Company, 2025 Global Payments Report — global payments revenue and 2029 growth projection
2. Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, “FedNow and the Development of U.S. Fast Payments,” Economic Brief No. 26-28, August 2026 — FedNow and RTP participation and transaction volume
3. CEX.IO, “Stablecoin Landscape: What 2024 Reveals About 2025” — 2024 stablecoin transfer volume data
4. Congressional Research Service, “Stablecoin Legislation: An Overview of the GENIUS Act of 2025 (P.L. 119-27),” Congress.gov — GENIUS Act summary and enactment
5. Adobe Analytics (Black Friday 2025 AI agent traffic) and Salesforce (Cyber Week 2025 AI-influenced sales), as reported by Digital Commerce 360, 2026