“We’re seeing a shift where businesses are now looking for a payment processor that is more inclusive of a product stack, so a one-stop shop for everything,” Justin Downey, vice president of product at Maverick Payments, said. “Payment processors are looking for services that are adjacent to payments. That could be advanced fraud prevention, network tokens, real-time account updater, other tools that can increase the acceptance rate while reducing fraud,” Downey said. He highlighted the quest for a “frictionless checkout experience” — the new gold standard for merchants and consumers alike, as “something that truly makes it easy for customers to submit payments,” he added. The future Downey envisions, and the picture of the present he has painted, is neither purely competitive nor fully collaborative. It’s both. Processors will need to be architects — building unique, defensible intellectual property at their core — as well as curators, integrating complementary services to offer breadth and agility. The platformization trend means processors are stretching beyond payments into tangentially related domains — sometimes encroaching on territory once exclusive to FinTechs or even banks. “Payment processors are expanding into areas that are close to payments, but not exactly payments, like financial services, alternative payment methods, embedded finance,” Downey said. “Processors are in this unique position where, generally, they have a very strong distribution network, and they’re expanding into new product offerings that they can offer to their businesses, all as a one-stop shop. That’s a win-win for everybody,” he added.