In 2025, you’d think payments would move as fast as the businesses they power. But for many digital-first companies (especially marketplaces, lenders, and online platforms) the basic task of reliably moving money in and out is still a daily struggle.
This shouldn’t be the case. The industry has made huge advances in consumer UX, credit innovation, and embedded finance. But when it comes to back-end operations, FinTech has left too many problems unsolved. The result? A silent drag on growth, unnecessary labour costs, and a persistent erosion of customer trust.
Broken Payments, Broken Business
When payments are slow or opaque, everything suffers. Vendor payouts get delayed. Customer refunds take too long. Internal teams lose hours manually checking for confirmation or chasing missing funds. And while the friction is operational in nature, the consequences are strategic: damaged relationships, regulatory risk, and lost revenue.
Take reconciliation, for example. Many businesses still use spreadsheets to match payment events across bank accounts, payment processors, and internal systems. Others run Slack channels to manually track funds. This makes things slow and leads to a complete lack of real-time, reliable visibility.
This complexity becomes a serious burden when transaction volumes scale. Time zone differences, batch file delays, poor API support, and siloed software can all contribute to failures or mismatches that cause downstream chaos. According to Modern Treasury’s 2025 Payment Operations report, 98% of businesses still run some payment operations manually, and 49% use five or more systems, making reconciliation slow, error-prone, and expensive.
The Core Problem: No One’s Talking to Each Other
It’s not payment initiation that’s broken; it’s what happens after. Money gets sent, but teams don’t know if it landed. Banks don’t notify businesses. Systems don’t talk to each other. In many cases, there’s no real-time feedback loop to confirm what worked, what failed, and what needs action.
This disconnect is a byproduct of legacy infrastructure and siloed design. Most banks don’t expose real-time payment events, and their APIs (when they exist) are often outdated, cumbersome, or not developer-friendly. This leaves businesses stuck in a limbo where payments can go missing, get delayed, or trigger compliance issues, and no one knows until it’s too late.
What Better Systems Look Like
FinTechs are uniquely positioned to solve this, not with dashboards, but with infrastructure that integrates directly into the tools businesses already use.
Plug-and-play APIs and webhooks are the key. When embedded into CRMs, ERPs, and accounting platforms, they can push real-time payment updates exactly where they’re needed. No more spreadsheet-based tracking, and no more switching between portals.
The best systems will feel less like platforms and more like invisible plumbing, meaning that they’re always running, always syncing, always up to date. Businesses won’t want to log into yet another dashboard. They’ll expect payments to “just work” within the flows they already operate in.
Cards Help, But They’re Not the Solution
Modern business cards can improve control on the front end (think: spend visibility, real-time limits, cash flow planning). But they don’t solve the backend challenge of inter-system communication or reconciliation. What’s needed is a shift in how we think about payments infrastructure. We need to insist on and build for clarity and control after the money moves.
Why FinTech Hasn’t Solved This Yet
For years, payment operations have been seen as ‘boring’. That’s why so many startups have chased flashier front-end use cases: crypto, neobanking, buy now/pay later, and super apps. But that neglect is catching up with the industry.
As the ‘Decoupled Era’ of banking continues to fragment the value chain, the complexity of payments behind the scenes only grows. And with instant payments in the EU projected to surge 10x by 2028 (McKinsey), reconciliation needs to happen in real time, 24/7, without manual input.
This isn’t a nice-to-have anymore. It’s an operational baseline.
The Competitive Edge No One Talks About
Payments should be boring, because they should work flawlessly in the background. But for too many fast-scaling businesses, they’re still one of the most complex and error-prone parts of operations.
Ultimately this will create a divide. Businesses that build on flexible infrastructure will outpace and outperform those who constantly hit limits and choose to stick to more manual transaction tracking and the guesswork that comes with it. Pulling ahead of the competition isn’t always a matter of out-innovating them. Smoother operations are a way to steadily and quietly outcompete. Fintech is in the position to build this better, and to give smart businesses the edge they deserve
Raman Korneu is CEO and co-founder of neobank myTU, a fully automated, AI-powered and cloud-first digital bank offering smart, secure, and affordable financial services. With over 25 years of experience in banking, Raman has held senior roles across finance, including consulting roles at Ernst & Young and PwC, where he worked on over 100 projects for over 50 major banks and companies, including Merrill Lynch Securities and Raiffeisenbank. Raman holds prestigious qualifications including an EMBA from Judge Business School at Cambridge University, the prestigious Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA), and ACCA membership. Driven by his passion to tackle problems in traditional banking, Raman leverages his extensive expertise to lead myTU in delivering innovative financial solutions.
- Digital Payments
- Neobanking