Five Payment Predictions Impacting Merchants in 2025

IXOPAY and Glenbrook’s Drew Edmond got to sit down and talk all things merchant payments in 2025 last week. While our team could easily have spiraled out on any single topic, the main points we touched on were:

• Open Banking for Merchants: A2A Payments and Data Sharing Opportunities
• Payment Methods: Strategy and Standouts in 2025
• Omnichannel Payments: More Efficient Than Ever
• IoT and New Device Payments: Contextual Omnichannel
• Multi-PSP Architecture & Best Practices

Open Banking for Merchants: A2A Payments and Data Sharing Opportunities

Open banking, while more mature in Europe, is gaining global momentum in both its capacities for account-to-account (A2A) payments and in open data sharing among financial institutions. Walmart made headlines this year by announcing its commitment to a pay-by-bank option for customers in partnership with Fiserv. 

For US consumers, credit cards are established, rewards-heavy, consumer-friendly for disputes, and have an embedded line of credit. These characteristics have and will continue to deter penetration by A2A payments. While merchants see clear benefits in processing costs and disintermediation, cardholders must see those benefits passed onto them at checkout. These benefits don’t apply to debit card payments, which is a more likely point of expansion for A2A payments from the niche sectors they already operate in, like utilities and government. 

From a data-sharing perspective, open banking seems like fuel for banking and fintech firms, but it’s important to remember that these are directly tied to broader merchant segments. Downstream, better consumer-credit underwriting, tailored finance products, and enhanced consumer profiles will all be a net positive for merchants. 

Payment Methods: Strategy and Standouts in 2025

Whatever approach merchants take to adding payment methods, adopting and testing new payment methods has never been easier. Whether optimizing existing market presence or offering preferred local payment methods in a new geo, merchants have more flexibility than ever. 

New entrants like Paze are rounding out their first year as an offering. While it had the instant enablement of over 100 million card accounts at launch and the full backing of EWS, payment methods need a clear value proposition to users. For merchants, enabling existing preferred payment methods with a dynamic checkout and local currency enablement across regions is a more important area to focus on than integrating a new, undifferentiated offering. In other words, first, meet the customer where they are, then adapt from there. 

Omnichannel Payments: More Efficient Than Ever

True omnichannel payments have long been a thorny problem for both merchants and service providers. Legacy omnichannel payment providers are not known for their flexibility and have tied merchants to a single provider, while multi-processor omnichannel structures have been difficult to reconcile. There are also more token formats and payment methods based on a single card account (ecommerce, digital wallet, PAN, network token, etc.) that have added complexity to the concept of omnichannel.

The coming year promises an easier omnichannel experience than ever. The adoption of Payment Account Reference (PAR) allows merchants to securely link a card payment method across all token formats and channels, simplifying accurate customer tracking and delivering personalized rewards programming. At the same time, SoftPOS and CPoC capabilities are turning the items in your pocket into point-of-sale devices. 

In 2025, merchants can track cross-channel payments in a multi-processor environment better than ever with the right toolset. 

IoT and New Device Payments: Contextual Omnichannel

A better term for “IoT payments” would be “Contextual Omnichannel.” Specific areas for devices to drive payments focus on in-car payments, gas stations, and televisions as commerce channels.

Merchants should think critically about their customers and where inserting payments into their lives makes sense. Paradoxically, merchants want payments to be both invisible and omnipresent—to never be in the way but never out of the way. Where can your goods or services (and the related transaction) live in consumers’ day-to-day routines? Whatever your answer, I think we can all agree that having to do any typing-related activity on a TV remote needs to go away. 

Mid-Decade Check: Multi-PSP Architecture & Best Practices

Whether by design or not, merchants are increasingly relying on a multi-processor architecture. The multiple PSP approach supports a wide range of payment methods, manages risk and chargebacks, improves performance/uptime, and enables localization. Heading into 2025, there has been an inflection point: for the first time the conversation is less about whether to use multiple processors and more about how to best use multiple processors to build optimization, redundancy, and negotiating leverage.

Historic questions on whether to build payment architecture in-house or work with an orchestrator still exist. Still, as an organization scales linearly, the resources needed to optimize payments tend to grow exponentially. This is where platforms like IXOPAY come into play, where you can house your own data outside of the PSPs and embedded rules engines, facilitating the payment experience based on customer attributes or routing the payment request to the appropriate PSP.

Working with an orchestrator to manage multiple PSPs allows custom checkout experiences, risk and fraud capabilities, additional payment methods, A/B testing, omnichannel tracking, reporting/reconciliation, and optimization of costs and acceptance rates. The market for Payment Orchestration has been growing significantly and 2025 should be at or above forecast for many of the reasons we’ve discussed today.