Customer expectations have shifted. As processing, cross-border payments and service tools have grown faster, people now assume near-instant responses from the businesses they deal with. That pressure is forcing fintech firms to rethink how their workflows keep pace.

Three senior operators — Alex Codina of Revolut Business, Guy Douek of Nuvei, and Yolande Piazza of PayPal — weigh in on how they're adapting through AI, market strategy and a sharper focus on experience.

Access is about being embedded, not just invested

Codina frames Revolut Business's role as helping companies move faster by folding payments, spend management, acquiring and business banking into a single platform, so a startup can scale across borders without being slowed by disconnected systems. The aim, he says, is to support a business at every stage of growth rather than only at launch.

Douek pushes the point further: real access isn't primarily a funding question but a question of how deeply a provider is wired into a given market. Even in a mature ecosystem like the UK, businesses rarely struggle because products don't exist — they struggle when those products don't match how transactions actually behave locally. The difference, he argues, is between serving a market from a distance and genuinely building inside it.

Geography isn't a checkbox — it's the strategy

Both Douek and Piazza stress that platforms designed to scale globally still tend to break locally. Payment preferences swing widely by country — cards in some places, account-to-account or cash-based methods elsewhere — and those preferences directly affect whether a customer finishes a transaction. Layer in differing authorisation behaviour, regulation and fraud patterns, and a one-size-fits-all rollout starts degrading performance: more failed transactions, higher costs, an inconsistent experience.

Piazza describes payments as inherently local, shaped by what people trust and the systems they use daily. Her examples: in Brazil, success means connecting to Pix; in India, UPI; in Europe, enabling smooth cross-border commerce despite dense regulation. PayPal's answer is an interoperable layer meant to link local wallets and payment systems so businesses can enter new markets without rebuilding for each one. The winners, in her view, won't simply expand globally — they'll connect local economies at global scale.

The pillars they operate by

For Codina, the recurring themes are continuous improvement in speed and efficiency, a unified platform that strips out the root causes of friction, and a reputation as a transparent, dependable partner as more businesses run core operations through them.

Douek keeps it blunt: performance is always local, complexity grows rather than shrinks as you scale, and a platform's job is to absorb that complexity. Marginal gains — a slightly higher approval rate, lower latency — translate directly into revenue and retention.

Piazza points to global reach across 200-plus markets, deep trust built over 25 years, and constant evolution. The firms that win cross-border, she argues, are the ones that turn regulatory learning into repeatable launch playbooks rather than simply moving fastest.

Where the real investment should go

Douek's view is that too much spend still flows into what the customer sees rather than what decides whether a payment succeeds. The biggest gains, he says, come from improving authorisation rates, cutting false declines, and smarter routing across issuers and payment methods — largely invisible work that nonetheless shapes the journey's outcome. Smoother payments, in his telling, come from better decisioning and orchestration, not better design.

Performance is always local. Global reach only matters if the transaction succeeds at the point of payment. — On why orchestration beats design

Codina emphasises simplicity, speed and integration: consolidating financial operations onto one platform and investing in genuinely global infrastructure that can handle multiple currencies and fast cross-market payments without added friction.

AI: pragmatic, not experimental

Piazza reports an overwhelmingly positive but practical reception to AI at PayPal — framed around measurable value rather than experimentation for its own sake. On the consumer side it powers more personalised experiences and faster issue resolution; on the merchant side it surfaces high-intent customers and improves conversion; in risk and fraud it analyses transactions in milliseconds. She sees the next frontier in agentic commerce, where AI doesn't just recommend but helps complete trusted transactions.

Douek agrees the reaction has been broadly positive but insists the real payoff in payments is narrow and specific: real-time decisioning that improves fraud detection and reduces false declines as transactions happen. Used well and embedded in the processing infrastructure, AI sharpens decisions without adding friction; bolted on as a separate layer, it just adds complexity.

Advice as focus shifts to experience

Codina's counsel is to become a long-term partner rather than a transactional provider — leaning on clarity, consistency and trust, automating routine work so more time goes to meaningful conversations, and aligning with each customer's ambition so growth follows naturally.

Piazza's advice is sharper still: stop treating experience as a layer you add on and start treating it as the product itself, since in financial services every interaction is the experience. She urges firms to measure confidence and repeat usage rather than acquisition alone, and to design around how customers actually behave — fewer steps, smarter use of data, and AI that anticipates needs before the customer acts.