What happens when you ask someone who speaks, breathes, and negotiates payment deals across three continents ... Short talk with Dr. Thomas Fromherz, Fellow at G+D Netcetera, about the real drivers of change in payments - from why fraudsters can take credit for innovation to how identity is becoming the new payment rails.
1. You are constantly jet-setting between Singapore, Europe, and the US. Which market is teaching the payments industry lessons it doesn’t even know it needs yet?
APAC, hands down. It’s the petri dish where commerce behavior mutates first, and payment systems have to evolve or die. Still, there are some common denominators.
Stablecoins? Used very differently across regions but already normalized. Agentic Commerce? The US is the loudest, but Europe is starting to understand the structural consequences. Instant payments? Europe’s shouting in 27 accents without agreeing on a rhythm. And SRC? That’s the quiet gravitational pull in card payments no one feels yet - pulling everything from e-commerce to EV charging, tolling, parking, or agentic toward one unified rails layer.
Tie it all together with modern SSI-based digital identity, and you have the invisible operating system of future commerce.
2. Now that Money 2020 Las Vegas is wrapped up, it seems like everyone’s talking about AI and instant payments. What’s the trend nobody’s discussing that will blindside the industry in 18 months?
Issuer-driven, identity-grade payments. The line between “authenticate” and “pay” is dissolving into one motion: passkeys → tokens → network identity rails → checkout evaporates. The card isn’t the product anymore, the identity is.
But if you want the real sleeper hit: Agentic Commerce. Shops, PSPs, fraud tools, loyalty systems - everything we built for humans becomes irrelevant when your customer is an agent that doesn’t need UX, emotion, or conversion nudges. Merchants will need both an API interface for agents and a UI for humans - and only one of them will scale effectively.
3. You walk into a room of CFOs who think payments = cost center. 30 seconds. Go.
“I’m not here to sell you payments. I’m here to sell you the revenue you’re currently losing."
Payments are the last step before money happens - or doesn’t. So yes, we can optimize a cost center…
…but if you’d like to recover the 4–7% of checkout revenue that evaporates today, let’s talk conversion and scalability, not card fees.”
(Then casually mention SRC scaling in-car EV charging and tolling - the CFOs lean forward every time.)
4. Who’s really driving the payments revolution? Is it demanding customers, ambitious fintech, or cautious regulators? And please don’t say all of them.
Part of me wants to say it’s actually fraudsters. Many breakthroughs in payments are basically playing defense against increasingly sophisticated bad actors. Biometric authentication? Response to identity theft. Real-time fraud scoring? Response to instant payment scams. Tokenization? Response to data breaches. Criminals are the unwitting research and development department of our industry.
But the other part says it’s the fintechs. Because they’re the only ones arrogant enough to believe they can rebuild the rails, and occasionally they do. And if we’re talking card payments specifically, the international networks still move the tectonic plates. But every seismic event starts with a hoodie, a backend repo, and someone muttering, “This shouldn’t be that hard.”
5. SMEs want global scale but drown in local payment preferences. What’s the one move they’re missing?
Outsource payments strategy to an orchestrator, not just processing. Not for lower fees (that’s tactical), but for conversion intelligence: Regional checkout behavior, payment-mix optimization, intelligent routing, checkout logic tuning.
Global growth isn’t about adding 20 APMs. It’s about building a checkout that behaves like a local - everywhere.
And one bonus: What separates companies that adopt new payment tech from those that transform with it?
The transformers don’t “install” tech, they listen to it. They trust their checkout data, follow expert guidance, focus on what matters, and let the insights reshape the entire customer journey. And in cards specifically, they trust an aggregator who can keep up with dozens of fast-evolving schemes and emerging protocols, instead of pretending they can chase all of them in-house.
The adopters upgrade a feature. The transformers upgrade a business model.
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