Modernizing Payments

Building new partnerships

The payments ecosystem is undergoing a fundamental shift, driven by rapid digital change, evolving customer expectations, and the emergence of AI‑enabled and embedded commerce models. For banks and retailers, payment modernization is no longer a back‑office exercise, but a strategic priority tied directly to relevance, trust, and growth. Organizations that fail to adapt, risk falling behind as legacy infrastructure struggles to keep pace with new rails, methods, and experiences.

Partnering for payment modernization explores how leading banks and retailers are responding to this disruption. Based on insights from 1,000 banking and retail executives globally, the report highlights three priorities shaping progress: building strong partner ecosystems, innovating around customer needs, and embedding agility into payment strategies, infrastructure, and operations. Leaders are no longer modernizing in isolation — they are collaborating across ecosystems to accelerate innovation, reduce complexity, and unlock new sources of value.

The report serves as a call to action for organizations seeking to unlock the future of payments. By focusing on partnership‑driven modernization, customer‑led design, and flexible, future‑ready platforms, banks and retailers can move beyond incremental change toward lasting competitive advantage in an increasingly dynamic payments landscape.

Partnering for payment modernization

How leading banks and retailers are unlocking the future of payments

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Key findings and insights

Executive summary

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What our people have to say

AI is really helping banks re-imagine the whole payment process and applying the technology in areas — like investigations — that have traditionally been a heavy lift for their operations teams. The hot topic now is how agentic payments are expected to transform the ecosystem, the re-imagining of payments operations, and what steps will need to be taken to help ensure it is safe, efficient and cost effective for both banks and their customers.

Courtney Trimble

Global Lead of Payments, KPMG International

Head of Payments, KPMG in the US

Banks and retailers are both working to ensure that the consumer remains loyal, so the more effectively they can work together to share data, collaborate on new technologies and deliver new options to consumers, the stickier the relationship becomes. If the banks, the service providers and the retailer can cohesively work towards the needs of the consumer and bring in personalization, the stickiness of the consumer towards all these service providers, including the retailer, increases multifold.

Puneet Mansukhani

Head of Global Retail Digital Technology and Transformation, KPMG International

Co-Lead Consumer & Retail, KPMG in India

Three key actions for banks and retailers based on the survey

Prioritize partnerships

To keep pace with rapid technological change and shifting customer expectations, banks and retailers must build dynamic ecosystems that bring together partners to accelerate modernization and create competitive advantage.
Focus on the customer

Leading organizations start by deeply understanding customer needs and expectations, using those insights to rapidly shape and deliver payment options that are simple, relevant, and trusted.
Create agility

As the payment ecosystem continues to evolve, embedding agility into payment strategies, infrastructure, and operations is essential to enable future flexibility, scalability, and ongoing evolution.

Methodology

KPMG International surveyed 500 banks and 500 retailers between the 8 September and 30 October 2025, to assess their progress on payment modernization, as well as their motivations, objectives, investment expectations and challenges.

Our survey asked respondents to rate their levels of progress against a range of modernization pillars, and we used their responses to calculate their overall maturity with respondents in the top 20th percentile ranked as ‘leaders’ and those in the bottom 20th percentile ranked as ‘beginners’. In both the banking and retail sectors, the leaders tended to be those with revenues greater than US$10 billion. In the banking sector, neobanks reported the highest proportion of leaders and in the retail sector, it was e-commerce platforms that were most likely to rank as leaders.

Forty percent of retail respondents were based in Asia Pacific, 35 percent in the EMEA region and 25 percent in the Americas. The banking sample represented 36 percent of respondents from the Americas, 34 percent from the EMEA region and 31 percent from Asia Pacific.