The evolution of payments

Payments may once have been a back‑office function, but today they sit firmly on the strategic agenda of corporate treasurers. Regulation, technology and geopolitical fragmentation are reshaping how money moves, reiterating the need for resilience, control, efficiency and interoperability.

That was the central theme of a discussion between specialists from ING Wholesale Banking and PwC Belgium, who came together to explore the future of payments in Europe. Drawing on Opens in a new tabPwC’s latest Global Treasury Survey and ING’s experience with large corporates , the conversation focused on where expectations still diverge from reality, and what treasurers can do now to stay ahead.

Payments are evolving and gaining strategic importance.  Payments are no longer just operational. They connect treasury with risk, technology and the wider organisation. Done well, payments can support optimisation of working capital, increase transparency in cross‑border transactions, raise data quality and reduce fraud risk. Done poorly, they introduce operational strain, allow missing out on change-driven opportunities and can lead to unnecessary risks. 

As part of the financial industry, we are witnessing a global focus on reducing friction and moving towards faster, cheaper, more transparent and accessible payments. 

One message is clear: the transformation of payments is not a future challenge. It is already happening. 

One of the most visible structural shifts is the rise of payment factories. Once mainly used for efficiency, control and scale, centralised payment models reflect how companies think about payment risk and governance. 

Opens in a new tabPwC’s Global Treasury Survey shows that nearly half of corporates operate a payment factory, up sharply from a few years ago. Importantly, this is no longer limited to the largest multinationals. Mid-sized corporates are also centralising payments to reduce risk, standardise governance and gain visibility across banks and entities. 

For many organisations, a need of control and preventing fraud incidents are what accelerates the move to centralisation. While a payment factory does not solve every upstream issue, it gives treasury oversight at the most critical moment: when cash leaves the organisation. In addition to efficient execution and strengthened governance, payment factories support streamlined downstream operations with increased consistency and higher automatic reconciliation rates. 

Instant payments are often discussed in terms of speed. From a treasury perspective, the focus tends to be different. Most corporates do not have a speed problem. Supplier payments remain planned and predictable. What instant payments change is availability: 24/7 execution, no cut‑off times and greater certainty that funds have reached the beneficiary. 

This opens new use cases, particularly for intercompany payments and liquidity positioning. At the same time, real‑time execution exposes instant payments to operational risks. Checks and controls by banks must be completed in seconds, and poor data quality leads to immediate rejection rather than delayed investigation. 

Corporates are adopting instant payments selectively, layering them onto existing schedules particularly for intercompany flows to avoid ‘cash in transit’. Clear rules for handling rejections, especially outside office hours, are essential. 

As payments become faster, automation and data quality take centre stage. Robust and structured data enables efficiency, especially with developments such as Verification of Payee (VOP) and the broader adoption of ISO 20022 messaging standards. 

Verification of Payee adds an important safety check, helping to mitigate the risk of invoice fraud, but it also introduces practical challenges. Early experience shows that mismatch rates can be high when counterparty master data is inconsistent. 

The implication for treasurers is clear. VOP is not a payments challenge alone, but a data governance one too. Many organisations can benefit from embedding VOP checks into supplier onboarding and periodic validation of master data, rather than applying them mechanically to every payment run. 

While the benefits of richer, structured data after migration to ISO20022 are well understood, progress across corporates has been uneven. Many assumed banks would absorb the impact of the upcoming requirements around structured address data. In practice, banks rely on the information provided by their clients for certain details, such as payee data. This means that enterprise resource planning systems, treasury systems and payment files all need to be ready to carry information and have the data available.  

The discussion also explores the growing relevance of stablecoins in corporate treasury. Stablecoins are gradually moving beyond an abstract digital asset concept towards potential use as settlement and liquidity tools. 

For treasurers, the attraction is not novelty, but the prospect of greater certainty. While still evolving  and not yet a mainstream treasury solution, stablecoins have the potential to enable near real-time settlement, 24/7 liquidity mobilisation and improved cash visibility in flows where traditional correspondent banking is slow or costly. Programmability adds further possibilities, allowing payments to be triggered automatically once predefined conditions are met, such as delivery confirmation, FX thresholds or intragroup approvals. 

Stablecoins may be most compelling where existing arrangements are inefficient, such as in complex cross‑border corridors, business flows where timing and settlement certainty are important and treasury operations requiring 24/7 liquidity repositioning across regions and legal entities. Moving to on-chain settlement requires careful redesign of controls, exception handling and audit processes. 

Without action, treasurers face higher risks of fraud and errors, mounting operational pressure and costly last‑minute remediation that could be replaced with controlled and planned ahead change execution. 

The way forward does not require a single, radical overhaul. It starts with the basics: clear decision rules when payment factory is in place, clean and structured data and a pragmatic approach to new instruments such as instant payments and stablecoins. 

As the ING and PwC discussion highlighted, for treasuries that actively shape their setup payments are becoming a source of strategic advantage. 

This article is based on insights from the joint ING and PwC white paper The evolution of payments: challenges and opportunities for corporate treasury.