i2c Says the Next Chapter of Payments Is Always On, Always Trusted

Watch more: What’s Next: i2c, Seth Perlman

When it comes to the future of payments, the stakes are high and unforgiving.

Consumers expect services to be available around the clock, fraudsters are more sophisticated than ever, and regulators are keeping a watchful eye on every innovation. In this environment, the line between what counts as table stakes and what counts as true competitive differentiation is moving with dizzying speed.

“Everything has to be always on, always available. And if it’s not, if your app is down, your customer service center is down, that really instills seeds of doubt,” Seth Perlman, global head of product at i2c, told PYMNTS during a discussion for the September edition of the What’s Next in Payments series, “From Trend to Table Stakes: Mapping the Next Payment Priorities.”

The industry once spoke proudly of “four nines,” 99.99% uptime, as the benchmark of reliability. Today, anything less than “five nines” looks antiquated. The margin for error in today’s landscape has, in effect, collapsed to zero.

“Do you know how much time 99.999% uptime allows you to be down during the course of a year?” Perlman said. “About five minutes and 15 seconds. If you’re pushing a billion dollars of volume, that’s a million dollars of lost volume right there.”

In an industry built on invisible flows of money and data, trust is the most valuable commodity, he said.

In Payments, Trust Is the Only Currency That Counts

In practice, trust not a marketing slogan or a compliance certificate. Trust in payments can look like a composite of resilience, security and transparency, delivered consistently.

It is a merchant believing their acquirer will not fail on Black Friday. It is a consumer knowing their digital wallet won’t vanish their paycheck into the ether. It is a regulator confident that systemic risks are contained.

From the consumer side, two factors dominate: uninterrupted availability and robust authentication.

“We’re becoming quickly accustomed to additional authentication and security, [such as] two-factor authentication, fingerprint ID, face ID,” Perlman said. “Apps that don’t have those will erode trust.”

The new baseline includes 3D Secure authentication and new tools like artificial intelligence-driven fraud detection and payment passkeys. Ultimately, the goal is layered protection, some visible to the consumer, others invisible. Both matter equally in building trust.

By the end of 2025, Perlman said he believes digital issuance and tokenization will be universal.

“You’d be surprised how many clients we speak to where their current processor can’t provide tokenization,” he said. “That’s table stakes now.”

Other features, like card controls and alerts, are also becoming must-haves.

“If you can provide a consumer experience where they determine when they want to be notified, how, and which channel, that’s really become table stakes,” Perlman said.

“Any consumer-facing application for banking should offer real-time push capabilities and multiple ways to receive money,” he added. “On the B2B side, at least one, if not multiple, real-time networks are essential, with enhanced rich data to handle buyer-supplier relationships.”

This integration of speed, connectivity and data richness is becoming an expectation.

When asked what innovation will most unlock new use cases, Perlman said cross-border payments.

“Cross-border payments are still generally extremely expensive, particularly for remittances but also in the corporate world,” he said. “For U.S. issuers, access to enabling networks has been limited. Lighting up those networks is going to be a big acceleration heading into 2026 and beyond.”

Technology’s Paradox

Ironically, the same technologies that enable resilience also introduce new vulnerabilities.

Cloud infrastructure offers redundancy and scale but concentrates systemic risk in a handful of providers. Real-time payments offer instant liquidity but also instant contagion when something goes wrong. APIs allow for interoperability but create new attack surfaces.

Technology, though, is only half the story. Organizational culture matters just as much. In an industry where milliseconds and margins define success, it is easy to let efficiency eclipse resilience. Yet the most resilient firms cultivate cultures that value openness, candid postmortems and cross-functional collaboration.

“The trust differentiator when it comes to financial institutions is being proactive about communication,” Perlman said. “Being open and honest about where the problem lies and how we can jointly work to fix it. That’s a differentiating factor from a client service point of view.”

In other words, the way a company handles its failures may matter more than how rarely those failures occur. The true contest is in resilience that anticipates failure, transparency that earns respect, and trust that compounds over time.