“The fan’s journey now extends so far beyond that ticket to get into the arena,” Brannon Desseyn, product manager at SeatGeek, told PYMNTS.

And this new fan journey, at least from the operator perspective, is one built atop persistent identity, real-time personalization, integrated payments and behavioral orchestration. The venue is becoming less a place where an event happens and more a managed commerce environment.

“We’re really going for these moments where the latency is so low that the fan is almost saying to themselves, ‘Wow, that was it? That’s all it takes?’” Desseyn said.

The result is a system that begins operating the moment a fan enters the arena. Once a ticket is scanned, SeatGeek can instantly recognize the attendee, trigger an offer, and push a virtual prepaid card directly into the user’s mobile wallet.

We traditionally used to think about an hour before the event, during the event, and then postgame,” Desseyn said. “But now we know that event life cycle is stretching even longer as these games and concerts become massive moments in a fan’s life.”

From Ticketing Platform to Venue Infrastructure

When the Cleveland Cavaliers entered the pressure cooker of the NBA playoffs this spring, fans arriving at Rocket Arena encountered more than postseason basketball. Behind the scenes, SeatGeek was quietly testing a broader thesis about where live entertainment is heading: a venue experience built around identity, payments and real-time personalization.

“The payments piece of this is a recent addition. Given the advancements in card issuing technology and the things that Apple and Google have been doing on the wallet front, it made it very easy for us to make progress here in a very quick amount of time,” said Desseyn.

During the Cavaliers test, selected fans received a push notification welcoming them to the game along with a $10 concession credit redeemable through Apple Wallet or Google Wallet within seconds.

The pilot’s emphasis on reducing friction reflects a larger transformation underway in sports and entertainment venues. Teams and arena operators see themselves not simply as hosts for a three-hour event, but as curators of premium, all-day experiences that blend hospitality, commerce and entertainment.

“One of the trends that we see in the sport and entertainment industry is this investment in teams to create premium experiences,” Desseyn said. “It almost takes on a Disney-like experience, where it’s not just like you’re going to a game for three hours. You’re spending the whole day thinking about the Cavs, being on site with the Cavs.”

Race for ‘360-Degree’ Fan View

For years, the live-event industry operated through a sprawling patchwork of specialized technologies. A modern arena might rely on one company for ticketing, another for concessions, another for access control, another for loyalty, another for CRM, another for mobile payments and yet another for operational analytics. Integration between those systems often existed in theory more than practice.

The problem, Desseyn argued, is not necessarily a lack of data but the fragmentation of it across vendors and platforms.

“We know the ticket identity,” he said. “How can we bring that payments information and the spending information closer to the ticketer?

“It’s great that we know 500 people have scanned in the past five minutes,” he added. “But how do we actually create a system that allows the clients — the Cavaliers or others — to then segment those users and target them with an offer or reroute them to a different gate when it’s backed up?”

By linking ticket identity to payment credentials, a reality that’s happening through mobile wallets, operators can begin connecting attendance patterns with real-time purchasing behavior. A fan is no longer simply “Section 112, Row F.” They become a dynamic profile.

The old model treated the game itself as the product. The emerging model treats the game as the anchor tenant within a broader entertainment life cycle, and that shift changes what venue technology must accomplish. Success is no longer measured solely by ticket throughput or concession sales. Operators are optimizing for customer experience.

A fan who waits 20 minutes for food misses part of the event. A fan who can move through entry, ordering and purchasing seamlessly spends more and reports higher satisfaction. The operational layer becomes inseparable from the emotional layer.

That 15-company list of firms with a market capitalization north of $1 trillion spans familiar technology titans alongside companies that, at first glance, may appear to have little in common. After all, should one put executives from other trillion-dollar-club firms like Eli Lilly, Walmart, Berkshire Hathaway, Broadcom and the dominant hyperscalers of the AI era all around a dinner table, it might be hard to see how the conversation might steer toward a single commonality other than that of the unprecedented value global capital markets have concentrated at their feet.

But beneath the surface, the world’s biggest firms are in fact linked by an emerging pattern. These companies are not merely large. They are not merely valuable. Rather, their scale and their value both stem from the fact that they occupy critical bottlenecks inside systems the rest of the economy cannot function without.

The 21^st century trillion-dollar corporation is not defined by a consumer brand success story or labeled fairly as a natural byproduct of globalization. Increasingly, crossing the $1 trillion market cap threshold is the economic reward for controlling an indispensable layer of infrastructure—be it supply, distribution, computation or trust—across what PYMNTS has for years termed the Connected Economy.

See also: Data Is Dead as a Competitive Advantage. 12 Executives Share What’s Next

The Age of the Chokepoint Corporation

Twentieth-century industrial giants often won by producing more cars, oil or steel than competitors. Today’s most valuable firms win by becoming unavoidable intermediaries. They sit at the center of networks that entire industries depend upon, creating economic gravity that compounds over time.

The market today is not just rewarding innovation. It is rewarding strategic centrality.

Samsung’s ascent captures the trend. The South Korean conglomerate is not simply a consumer electronics company. It is one of the world’s most critical semiconductor manufacturers, deeply embedded in the global supply chain for memory chips, displays and advanced hardware components. In an AI economy increasingly constrained by compute capacity and chip availability, that position has become extraordinarily valuable.

Nvidia offers perhaps the clearest example of chokepoint economics in action. Its GPUs became the essential hardware layer for the AI boom almost by accident, after years of investment in gaming and parallel computing architectures. Once generative AI exploded into the mainstream, the company found itself controlling access to the scarce computational resources required to train and deploy frontier models.

Healthcare is experiencing a similar concentration effect. Eli Lilly’s market capitalization surge has been fueled by blockbuster obesity and diabetes treatments that are reshaping both medicine and consumer behavior. But the company’s value is not only about drug sales. It stems from control over a category increasingly viewed as foundational to public health systems and long-term healthcare economics.

Read more: Tech Giants Just Made Every Business Their Business 

The New Economics of Indispensability

In each case, the trillion-dollar threshold reflects the same market instinct: assign enormous premiums to companies controlling scarce leverage points.

Walmart, another recent 2026 entrant, offers a different but equally revealing version of the pattern. The U.S. retailer’s dominance rests not only on its sheer scale but also on its logistics supremacy. Walmart operates one of the world’s most sophisticated distribution networks, capable of moving goods across vast geographies with extraordinary efficiency. In an inflationary environment shaped by supply chain disruptions, logistical control itself becomes a form of economic power.

PYMNTS covered recently how Amazon, another trillion-dollar-club member, is building out its own supply chain network. After all, once a company becomes deeply embedded in critical workflows, switching costs can rise dramatically.

Modern corporate dominance, as the success of the trillion-dollar-club shows, depends less on products than on systems.

This is one reason Berkshire Hathaway remains such a powerful presence among the world’s most valuable firms despite operating outside the technology spotlight. Warren Buffett’s conglomerate controls strategic assets across insurance, railroads, energy, manufacturing and finance. These are not glamorous sectors, but they are deeply embedded within the functioning of the broader economy.

See also: What 2026 Will Make Obvious

How AI Is Accelerating the Trend

Artificial intelligence is intensifying these concentration dynamics rather than dispersing them.

Training frontier models requires massive computational infrastructure, enormous datasets, specialized talent and staggering capital expenditures. Those requirements favor firms already sitting atop existing infrastructure advantages, and the result today is a growing concentration of power among hyperscalers, semiconductor firms and platform companies capable of funding AI at industrial scale.

That reality explains why trillion-dollar valuations now cluster around infrastructure layers rather than end-user applications. Investors are betting less on who creates the next viral product and more on who controls the underlying rails powering the Connected Economy.

As Bloomberg News reported Wednesday (March 4), companies such as Polymarket and Kalshi, which offer financial contracts on the outcome of everything from sporting events to elections, are now letting users trade on things like when Iran’s leader would be ousted.

On Polymarket, bettors made a record $425 million in wagers on the geopolitics category during the week ending March 1, compared to $164 million the week before, the report added, citing user-compiled data on Dune Analytics.

As the report noted, the companies have been criticized for these types of bets. Prediction markets are governed by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which has rules to prevent insider trading and contracts related to war.

Although Polymarket is launching a U.S. venue under CFTC oversight, the platform where the Iran wagers are listed is based offshore, Bloomberg said.

For its part, Kalshi has said it avoids any markets directly referring to military action. Its new bets related to Iran deal with questions of whether the country will become a “democracy” this year or host a presidential election. These have generally seen less activity than the Polymarket bets, the Bloomberg report said.

Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour, Bloomberg added, has argued that the contract dealing with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei served a legitimate purpose, saying that leadership changes in Iran hold implications for global oil prices, national security and the larger world order.

“These markets have important geopolitical and global economic impacts,” a Kalshi spokesperson told Bloomberg.

War-related wagers have gotten the attention of lawmakers, PYMNTS reported earlier this week. Among them is Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who over the weekend posited that insiders may have made money from prediction markets based on the timing of the initial strike on Iran.

“I’m introducing legislation ASAP to ban this,” Murphy said in a post on X.

As covered here last week, the reality around predictions market is a chaotic one, with “lots of sports volume, plus jurisdictional trench warfare.”

States are issuing cease-and-desist orders against multiple platforms (including Robinhood’s derivatives arm and Crypto.com), while the CFTC has indicated it may go to court to defend the federal government’s right to regulate the predictions space.

At the same time, the CFTC is reportedly working on new regulations governing event contracts. This is a sign, PYMNTS wrote, that “the grown-ups have arrived because the kids won’t stop inventing new ways to wager on reality.”

The initiative brings together major players including Booz Allen, BT Group, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Mitre, Nokia, OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation, ODC, SK Telecom, SoftBank and T-Mobile in a shared effort to create wireless infrastructure capable of meeting the demands of artificial intelligence at scale.

Nvidia described this coalition’s work as foundational to a new era of connectivity where networks are not merely conduits for data but intelligent systems that embed AI across the radio access network (RAN), network edge and core.

These AI-native platforms are intended to support emerging use cases that go beyond traditional communication, such as autonomous vehicles, industrial robotics, smart cities and vast arrays of connected sensors, all of which require real-time intelligence, resilient performance and high trustworthiness.

Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive of Nvidia, said AI is redefining computing and driving one of the largest infrastructure buildouts in history, with telecommunications next in line for transformation.

The partners underscored the importance of open and software-defined platforms to empower a broad ecosystem of operators, vendors, developers and researchers. These open platforms aim to accelerate innovation, simplify interoperability, and build resilience into supply chains critical for future network deployments.

Allison Kirkby, CEO of BT Group, framed connectivity as the backbone of economic growth, arguing that open and trustworthy AI-native platforms will help the industry scale beyond 5G while unlocking powerful new capabilities at scale.

Likewise, Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges said an intelligent and trusted 6G infrastructure will be essential for delivering superior customer experiences and unlocking new value streams for enterprises and consumers alike.

The coalition also drew comments from U.S. government officials. Arielle Roth, assistant secretary of commerce for communications and information, highlighted the role of U.S. leadership in shaping secure, next-generation networks, stressing that this global collaboration aligns with broader national competitiveness and security objectives.

Asian and European operators echoed the need for AI-native design, with SK Telecom and SoftBank executives noting that open, software-defined 6G will serve as the platform for future innovation and ecosystem growth. T-Mobile’s leadership described 6G as the backbone of the AI era, enabling autonomous systems and new digital business models at scale.

The 6G effort arrives as Nvidia posts record financial results, reflecting the explosive demand for AI computing infrastructure that also underpins its networking ambitions.

As the Financial Times (FT) reported Saturday (Feb. 14), that figure is nearly a quarter of the total sportsbook revenue for betting giant DraftKings and spotlights the increasing threat that prediction markets like Kalshi present to the $14 billion U.S. sports gambling market.

The report came one day after DraftKings shares fell after the company said it expected 2026 revenues would be $6.5 billion to $6.9 billion, short of analysts’ $7.2 billion projections. Flutter, which owns rival FanDuel, saw its stock fall as well, with both companies losing more than half their market value in the past year.

FT said its analysis of Kalshi data found that trade volume and fees ballooned last fall with the start of football season in the U.S. As of this month, the platform’s annualized revenues for sports trading accounted for roughly 90% of its fees.

Monthly activity users on Kalshi’s app have jumped from 600,000 at the start of last year to 5.1 million as of Feb. 9, the report added, citing data from Sensor Tower.

Still, sportsbook companies have dismissed the idea that they face a threat, FT added. DraftKings CEO Jason Robins said that, in markets where sports betting was legal, those moving to prediction markets were mostly “low-margin or even negative-margin customers.”

For most retail bettors, Robins said sportsbooks provided a more fully fledged product with “better promotions,” while prediction markets were a “great substitute” for people living in states that outlaw sports gambling.

In exploring DraftKongs latest earnings last week, PYMNTS wrote that the company “is betting, quite literally, that it can lead that transition by redefining not just how people bet on sports, but how they engage with uncertainty itself.”

To that end, the company is touting Predictions, which lets users trade event-based contracts, and which DraftKings sees as potentially representing a $10 billion annual gross revenue opportunity over time.

“But even as DraftKings approaches profitability, elements of its revenue base remain inherently variable,” the report added. “Sports outcomes can materially affect quarterly results, with the company estimating that a one-standard-deviation swing could move revenue by roughly $150 million in either direction.”

PYMNTS reported in December on the influx of U.S.-accessible prediction market platforms now that these companies are regulated at the federal level by the CFTC, rather than at the state level by gambling commissions. However, regulators in more than a dozen states are challenging the legality of prediction markets, with varying degrees of  success.

Because of that scale, even modest shifts in wages or employment continuity have measurable macroeconomic consequences. PYMNTS, in collaboration with Ingo Payments and WorkWhile, estimates that a 1% change in Labor Economy wages translates into a $17 billion swing in GDP.

But there’s a constraint: mobility. PYMNTS Intelligence and its collaborators describe today’s hourly workforce as “safe but stuck.” Labor Economy workers report high confidence in keeping their current jobs but far lower confidence in finding new ones, a lock-in dynamic that limits their ability to improve outcomes.

When workers feel secure but immobile, they prioritize stability over optimization. Housing and transportation take precedence, while healthcare compliance, subscriptions and credit health become negotiable. From a financial services perspective, that behavior increases the likelihood of recurring liquidity shortfalls and weakens traditional underwriting signals.

Skills That Travel

Against that backdrop, skills portability can function as a practical form of job security.

PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster has written that the next phase of Labor Economy innovation moves beyond faster pay toward preserving worker progress as people shift between employers. Today, skills, certifications and reliability records are typically trapped inside individual platforms or companies. When workers change roles, that accumulated value often resets. Webster points to portable credentials, standardized certifications and benefits that follow workers as mechanisms to make experience visible and transferable.

“AI becomes an enabler here, documenting skills, validating experience, matching workers to higher-value roles and making progression visible and transferable,” Webster wrote.  The data in the Labor Economy analyses show that individuals establish online presences across employers and use platform-based work as a buffer against income volatility, with gig and shift platforms accounting for 15% to 30% of total income for many workers. Infrastructure that allows their skills and reliability to move as easily as their labor can be a key way to keep the work coming in.

The federal data underscores how widespread credentialing already is. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Requirements Survey finds that in 2025, 22.9% of civilian workers were required to hold a license or certification, 6.5% required an educational certificate and 1.2% required an apprenticeship. In healthcare practitioner roles, that figure rises to 93.4%, while 17.3% of construction and extraction workers require apprenticeships.

These credentials represent verified skill, training and readiness to work. When recognized across employers and platforms, they shorten hiring cycles, reduce mismatches between workers and roles, and increase the probability that a worker can move quickly from one job to the next.  Platforms that combine shift matching, rapid onboarding and wage disbursement reduce those timing gaps while also building persistent work histories. Over time, these systems create verifiable records of attendance, performance and skills that can travel with workers, raising their odds of staying employed even as they move between roles.

That continuity has downstream effects. Since Labor Economy workers account for more than one-third of U.S. employees, so stabilizing their income directly stabilizes consumption. Recent Wage to Wallet data shows that December’s 1.9% monthly wage increase, if sustained, would add $32.5 billion to annual GDP.

From Employment Stability to Credit Signals

For lenders and risk teams, portable credentials and platform-based employment histories introduce a new category of underwriting input.

When workers can document skills, training and reliability across employers, income becomes more predictable and employment gaps shrink. That reduces dependence on overdrafts and short-term credit used solely to bridge timing mismatches.

Stable work histories, credentialed skills and consistent platform engagement provide alternative signals of capacity and persistence. As those signals strengthen, lenders gain clearer visibility into repayment potential, while workers benefit from improved access to mainstream financial products.

In that sense, portable credentials operate as more than résumé enhancements. They function as economic infrastructure that lead to healthier credit outcomes and a more resilient economy.

 

Across farms, clinics, AI labs and labor platforms, a theme emerged: payments is increasingly the interface, not the moat. The moat is the operating system. Here are eight Monday Conversations from 2025 that captured that shift.

Nelly: Europe’s digital health problem is a process problem (Feb. 3)

Nelly CEO Niklas Radner came to healthtech by way of Klarna, and he brought the same instinct: win by redesigning process. Nelly’s thesis is that digitizing healthcare practices starts with workflow that captures data at the right moment, then turns that data into better patient experiences and better financial products. When paperwork becomes the bottleneck, staffing becomes geopolitics. “We see doctors fleeing [from Germany] to Switzerland, and they call themselves bureaucratic refugees,” Radner said.

Bushel: Tariffs hit the Midwest and software shows up (Apr. 21)

Bushel CEO Jake Joraanstad made tariffs feel less like a policy debate and more like a margin call. Commodity prices, input inflation and higher interest rates collide in the cash flow reality of small and family farms. Bushel’s bet is that digitization changes outcomes by giving farmers timing, transparency and control — especially when the market moves before the office opens. “Over half of the grain offers made through our platform are submitted outside of regular business hours,” Joraanstad said.

Rezolve Ai: eCommerce’s real problem isn’t payments — it’s confusion (May 5)

Rezolve Ai CEO Daniel Wagner reframed cart abandonment as a human-factors failure. Digital shopping still assumes consumers arrive with perfect product knowledge and the patience to filter endlessly. Physical retail works because a salesperson translates intent into a decision. Wagner’s wager is that AI can bring that translation layer online and compress browsing into buying. “The way in which we navigate eCommerce is not good… it is no longer ideal,” Wagner told Webster.

Unlearn: Digital twins could make clinical trials feel less like roulette (June 16)

Unlearn founder Jon Walsh argued that AI-powered “digital twins” can shrink placebo groups, accelerate timelines and make trials more ethical, especially in diseases with small patient populations. The provocation wasn’t just speed. It was a new promise for medicine: fewer cycles of trial-and-error, both in R&D and eventually in treatment. “Our long-term mission is to advance AI to eliminate trial and error in medicine,” Walsh said.

WorkWhile: Underwriting labor is the next underwriting category (June 30)

WorkWhile COO Simon Khalaf (former Marqeta CEO) described the Labor Economy as a prediction market hiding in plain sight. If you can forecast show rates and job fit, you can build a portable stack of instant pay, benefits and financial services around the worker, not the employer. The subversive idea: future wages become collateral, and labor data becomes a credit file. “We’re better at predicting humans than most companies are at predicting whether you’ll pay your credit card,” Khalaf said.

Autonomize AI: America doesn’t do healthcare (July 7)

Autonomize AI CEO Ganesh Padmanabhan aimed at the administrative drag that burns out clinicians and delays care: prior authorization, intake, policy matching and patient communications. Agentic AI matters, in his view, because it can distill messy clinical documentation and attach evidence and provenance to each step. His sharpest point is also a measurement critique: incentives track treatment, not prevention. “We don’t do healthcare in this country. We do sick care,” Padmanabhan said.

Baseten: The AI gold rush isn’t about models — it’s about rails (Sept. 22)

Baseten CEO Tuhin Srivastava put a payments-style frame around AI: training gets headlines, but inference gets adoption. What wins is infrastructure that makes complexity disappear while increasing trust, uptime and security — the same forces that made card networks durable. His edge case is speed: the fastest builders outsource the non-core parts of AI delivery to specialists. “That advantage is speed… you can only move fast if you delegate away stuff that is not core to you,” Srivastava said.

Nova Credit: The next credit bureau is real-time (Oct. 27)

Nova Credit CEO Misha Esipov challenged the core assumption of credit scoring: that liabilities and repayment history are the “truth.” In a gig economy, the missing truth is cash flow — income, expenses and stability visible in bank data. Esipov argued that cash flow underwriting is shifting from experimentation to infrastructure, but only if the industry can standardize messy transaction data into something risk teams trust. “This is not a game of basis points of improvement. This is a step change — hundreds of basis points in approval rates,” Esipov said.

The connective tissue across these conversations is the migration of value from transactions to systems. A grain offer placed at dawn. A clinical trial redesigned around simulation. A shift filled because an algorithm understands skills. A credit decision built on permissioned cash flow. Each is a workflow decision that becomes a financial decision.

For leaders in banking, payments and FinTech, the 2025 Monday Conversation lesson is clarifying: your next competitor may not be “a payments company.” It may be the company that owns the experience and therefore owns the economics above it.

Whether the system in question is a cloud platform, a payments network or even a blockchain, the five nines, representing 99.999% availability, have become table stakes.

After all, in the early marketing of public blockchains, uptime was treated less as a technical metric than as a philosophical guarantee. Bitcoin, ethereum and their successors were framed as systems that could not be turned off, constrained or meaningfully interrupted. Decentralization itself was the redundancy plan.

For enterprises now considering stablecoin issuance, on-chain treasury management or blockchain-based settlement, that framing has begun to collide with a more prosaic reality. In 2025, downtime on public blockchain infrastructure, like Coinbase’s Base layer-2 blockchain, ceased to be an edge case and instead became an operational variable that finance leaders were increasingly forced to model.

It wasn’t just blockchain, either. This past Saturday (Dec. 20), a widespread PG&E outage cut power to nearly one-third of San Francisco, throwing self-driving and autonomous vehicles into a state of confusion. Autonomous vehicles struggled, not because self-driving technology is inherently flawed, but because it was operating within a broader system that failed.

Similarly, AWS and Cloudflare disruptions in 2025 took large portions of the internet offline, from eCommerce platforms to media sites to crypto services. No serious observer concluded that the internet itself was unreliable or obsolete. Instead, those outages reinforced a familiar lesson: resilience depends on architectural choices, redundancy and dependency management.

Read also: PYMNTS Execs Say Resilience Isn’t a Buzzword. It’s Their Business Model

Uptime Emerges as a Design Principle for Digital Payments and Commerce

As businesses look ahead to 2026, the systems that power finance, mobility, commerce and communications are no longer being judged primarily on innovation and capability but on their ability to stay on.

“We had 100% uptime this year. What you want is a Black Friday and not a blackout Friday,” Entersekt Chief Strategy Officer Dewald Nolte said. “Our operations team is absolutely the unsung heroes.”

For firms embracing the five nines of 99.999% uptime, that allows them to be down around just five or so minutes during the course of the year. For payments businesses pushing billions of dollars in transactions, that can represent millions of dollars of lost volume.

“Platform resiliency and business continuity planning, in my opinion, has been our number one unsung hero,” Rinku Sharma, chief technology officer at Boost Payment Solutions, told PYMNTS.

For enterprises, uptime and resiliency trade-offs are unavoidable. Financial institutions have long operated under stringent uptime requirements, not because outages never occur, but because the consequences of failure are systemic.

“We draw the line where innovation would compromise the stability, security or affordability of the customer experience,” Jared Rutkowski, head of payables and receivables at FIS, told PYMNTS.

“Customers want innovation, but they need reliability more,” he added.

See more: The Under-the-Radar Changes Transforming How Money Moves

Mitigating the Impact of Outages Becomes an Operational Reality

What has changed is not the existence of outages, but the expectations surrounding them. In a connected economy, uptime is no longer a feature—it is a prerequisite. The systems most exposed to failure are not necessarily the newest, but the ones whose designers assumed availability rather than engineered for it.

As technologies move from experimental to essential, the tolerance for disruption collapses. Downtime that once could be explained away as the cost of innovation now carries reputational, regulatory and financial consequences. The promise of constant availability has become inseparable from trust itself.

As PYMNTS covered this month, what should have been a Cyber Monday victory lap for Shopify turned into a midday nightmare as merchants worldwide lost access to their admin dashboards and point‑of‑sale systems on one of the busiest online shopping days of the year.

And at the start of 2025, a days-long outage at Capital One locked thousands of customers from their accounts.

These incidents are not unique. Taken together, they present a vivid illustration of a recurring pattern in modern technology failures. Highly sophisticated components are embedded within complex, interdependent systems. When one layer fails, whether it’s power, connectivity or compute, the failure propagates upward.

Finance teams and enterprise IT functions must now ask questions that would have seemed heretical a few years ago: What happens if a network is unavailable for six hours? For a day? What are our fallback procedures? Who bears responsibility?

These questions do not undermine innovation. They professionalize it. Technologies that cannot answer them will struggle to move beyond pilot programs and proofs of concept. Those that can will earn the trust required to operate at scale.

That is the central takeaway from “How People Pay: Consumer Preference for Connected Technology,” the February 2025 PYMNTS Intelligence eBook. The report tracks how U.S. consumers adopt connected devices and how those choices influence payment behavior across channels, devices and income levels.

The data shows that while device ownership growth has slowed, usage patterns tied to payments continue to evolve, creating a widening gap between consumers who treat connectivity as essential infrastructure and those who see it as functional but sufficient.

The report finds that 76% of consumers now own four or more connected devices, up from earlier years as everyday products increasingly include embedded connectivity. Yet ownership clusters into three stable personas. Roughly 4 in 10 consumers remain in the “Basic Tech” category, relying on smartphones and laptops. About half fall into the “Mainstream Tech” group with broader but still selective device ownership. Only about 1 in 10 qualifies as “Connected Tech,” a segment that integrates connectivity deeply into daily life and commerce.

This stability suggests saturation rather than stagnation. Consumers are not abandoning technology, but many appear content with the devices they already have. What changes instead is how those devices influence purchasing behavior, payment choice and channel preference.

Key data points from the report illustrate how sharply behavior diverges across these groups:

• 48% of Connected Tech consumers used a digital wallet in the past 30 days, compared with 32% of Basic Tech consumers, making them roughly 50% more likely to rely on wallets for transactions.
• 60% of Connected Tech consumers did not use cash or checks in the past 30 days, a share that reflects a 34% decline in physical money usage compared to three years ago.
• 35% of Connected Tech consumers made their most recent retail purchase online, versus 24% of Basic Tech consumers, underscoring the link between device ownership and digital purchasing.

Beyond payments, the report highlights how demographics and income shape connected behavior. Millennials and bridge millennials lead in advanced device adoption, with 16% of bridge millennials classified as Connected Tech consumers. Baby boomers and seniors remain far more likely to stay in the Basic Tech category. Income plays an equally decisive role. More than 60% of consumers earning under $50,000 annually fall into the Basic Tech segment, reflecting practical choices rather than exclusion from the digital economy.

Importantly, the data shows that lower-income consumers are not disconnected. Smartphones and laptops provide sufficient access to digital commerce and financial services. What income limits is the expansion into secondary and tertiary devices that deepen engagement and shift payment behavior.

Another notable trend appears among Mainstream Tech consumers. This group shows a steady rise in mobile purchasing over the past three years, with 26% using a mobile device in one of their most recent transactions. This suggests that behavioral change does not require full immersion in connected ecosystems. Incremental shifts still matter.

The broader implication for banks, merchants and payment providers is clear. Growth will come less from pushing consumers to acquire more devices and more from designing experiences that align with how people already live and pay. Connectivity is no longer novel. It is normalized. That reality raises the stakes for usability, trust and seamless payment integration. The infrastructure is largely in place. The next phase is about how effectively it is used.

No company leaned into that framing more consistently than Visa. Early in the year, Sam Hamilton, Visa’s head of AI and data, described generative AI not as an add-on feature, but as a force that will show up across the network’s value proposition. “I can’t think of one area that GenAI is not going to transform,” Hamilton said, emphasizing that the usefulness of that transformation depends on trusted inputs and governance.

Visa executives also returned repeatedly to the idea that consumer journeys are now designed “outside-in.” In a PYMNTS interview focused on merchant strategy, Visa Acceptance Solutions’ Matt Swatzell highlighted a basic reality that merchants often under-estimate: the sale might happen in-store, but the decision increasingly happens on a phone. That shift, he suggested, raises the bar for consistency across channels—pricing, inventory visibility, fulfillment options and payments all have to line up.

The implications went beyond front-end UX. In another 2025 discussion, Visa’s Nick Roberts described a card business where retention is won (or lost) long before the customer actually closes an account. “It’s always about starting and continuing the relationship,” Roberts told PYMNTS, arguing that issuers have to spot “silent churn”—the gradual shift of spend away from the card—before it becomes irreversible. The message: loyalty is now an analytics problem as much as a rewards problem.

Visa’s push toward “unified commerce” fit the same pattern. The company’s interviews this year framed unified commerce as less about new gadgets and more about removing operational seams—between in-store and online, between checkout and post-purchase service, and between payment acceptance and fraud defense. Visa’s point was straightforward: smaller merchants will not “out-scale” retail giants, but they can compete by collapsing complexity and responding faster.

Consumer Credentials

Mastercard’s 2025 interviews approached the market from a slightly different angle: shifting choice and control to the consumer, and building new toolkits for the middle market. In a conversation about Mastercard One Credential, Bunita Sawhney, the company’s chief consumer product officer, noted that consumers want help managing money across accounts and payment types. Many, she said, “have a high desire to have tools that help them become strong and confident money managers.”

On the B2B side, Mastercard’s Jane Prokop described a middle-market segment that gets underserved by products built for either very small firms or very large enterprises. “The lack of access to the right kind of capital to grow the business is a huge pain point in the middle market,” she said, arguing that richer data and more modern underwriting approaches are needed to match how these firms actually operate.

Discover’s most vivid 2025 interview moments landed in the AI-and-infrastructure conversation. In a PYMNTS interview with Discover Network’s Judith McGuire and Worldpay’s Ian Hillis, McGuire argued that AI’s biggest payoff comes when it turns transaction data into network-level visibility and faster decisioning. “AI is helping us unlock the power of data,” she said, tying that to fraud reduction and speed.

American Express, for its part, spent 2025 drawing a line between automation and brand identity. In a wide-ranging discussion about AI in servicing, Amex executive Gary Kensey summarized the company’s governing principle this way: “AI should work in service of people, not instead of them.” The point was less philosophical than operational—Amex wants AI to reduce internal friction (summaries, recommendations, workflow routing) while preserving human judgment when customers need reassurance.

And in the premium-card arms race, Amex’s interviews signaled that loyalty is still the north star—especially as annual fees rise and consumers re-evaluate what they carry. Raymond Joabar, Amex group president for global commercial services, told PYMNTS that cardmembers are asking for “more rewards” and “new sets of tools” that help run and grow their businesses.

Concora Credit, which plays in near-prime and non-prime segments, brought a different lens to loyalty: incentives have to be practical and immediately felt. In a PYMNTS interview, Chief Commercial Officer Rolando De Gracia said co-brand success starts with “alignment of incentives,” warning that mismatched objectives between issuer and brand can weaken the partnership before it scales.

Banking Roadmaps

In 2025, bank interviews on PYMNTS were notably unsentimental about “digital transformation.” The conversations were less about roadmaps and more about deadlines set by clients who now assume payments should move when business happens.

At Citi, Stephen Randall, global head of liquidity management services, framed the shift as a structural reset for treasury. “If you move to an always-on structure then effectively it is a continuous round-the-clock process,” he said, describing a world where liquidity is managed continuously rather than once per day.

Bank of America’s interviews stayed close to the mechanics of real-world disruption: tariffs, geopolitics and supply chain shocks. Geoff Brady, head of global trade and supply chain finance, described the bank’s role in simple terms: “We’re here to facilitate global commerce.” He then tied that mandate to financing, risk mitigation and working capital optimization—less a product pitch than an explanation of why trade finance exists at all.

Fifth Third Bank’s interviews offered a reminder that the digital economy still runs on physical processes. Robert Norman, the bank’s head of cash logistics strategy, described cash-handling as labor-intensive and exposed to loss. “They’re putting the cash aside and then counting it at the end of the day,” he said—an image that captures why automation in cash logistics is framed as both a security upgrade and a productivity tool.

HSBC’s Andrew Fullam, CFO for the U.S. and Americas, described supply chain planning under tariff uncertainty with a bluntness that matched the mood of many CFOs this year. “Uncertainty is probably the key word here,” he told PYMNTS, pointing to overlapping tariff regimes and carve-outs that complicate planning and widen the performance gap between resilient firms and exposed ones.

The New Economics of Speed

If banks emphasized continuous operations, processors and FinTechs emphasized continuous responsibility for fraud, compliance, customer outcomes and unit economics.

Maverick Payments’ Kyle Becker captured that tension in a PYMNTS interview about real-time fraud and bank oversight. “It’s an artful balancing act for sure,” he said, noting that sponsor institutions ultimately answer to both regulators and card brands. Maverick’s pitch was that processors are no longer simply vendors; they are increasingly expected to behave like risk-and-compliance extensions of the bank.

Ingo Payments CEO Drew Edwards made a similarly economic argument about speed. Too many companies, he suggested, treat instant payouts as a feature checkbox—inviting commoditization. “They’re going to be facing a race to the bottom,” Edwards said, warning that fee-per-transaction economics collapse without a broader strategy around value, risk and ecosystem design.

Velera’s 2025 interviews reflected credit unions’ search for partners in a tougher market. In a PYMNTS conversation, Velera’s Chris Corse pointed to macro uncertainty and a valuation reset from the “frothy” era—conditions that are pushing more disciplined partnership structures and risk-aware product planning.