Partnering for payment modernisation

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 modernisation is no longer a back‑office exercise, but a strategic priority tied directly to relevance, trust, and growth. Organisations that fail to adapt, risk falling behind as legacy infrastructure struggles to keep pace with new rails, methods, and experiences.

Partnering for payment modernisation 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 modernising 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 organisations seeking to unlock the future of payments. By focusing on partnership‑driven modernisation, 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.

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

Our survey asked respondents to rate their levels of progress against a range of modernisation 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.