2025 in focus: Biometrics, invisible payments, and fraud innovation driving change

AI, this year, is truly everywhere. For payments, it brings a wave of increasingly personalized—and increasingly targeted—shopping experiences. AI’s ability to rapidly analyze large amounts of customer purchasing and browsing data can help merchants target advertisements more effectively, catching customers at the optimal time and place. AI can also play a role in improving customer experience, including customized experiences such as automated re-ordering and suggestions and recommendations based on previous search or browser history.

In fraud prevention, AI enables real-time transaction monitoring and smarter financial decisions. Visa's acquisition of Featurespace is one way we’re helping safeguard the future of payments, developing innovative solutions to scrutinize data and detect more elusive instances of fraud.

Biometric authenticated payments, once considered emerging, have become mainstream. Consumer demand for biometric payments is growing—and merchants are starting to incorporate them at increasing rates.

The concept of creating a digital identity is catching on and is fueling the adoption of passkeys, wherein users can bind their mobile device to biometric marker, such as their fingerprint or face scan. After a one-time setup, users can authenticate payments quickly and easily using their personal marker.

Payments are one of the most critical parts of the shopping experience—but they’re actually becoming increasingly invisible. The ability to accept payments is becoming embedded in everything—social media, video and online games, and other immersive experiences. Consumers don’t want to be interrupted or experience friction when they need to pay during these experiences, so it’s more important than ever for merchants to make these types of payments as smooth and unintrusive as possible.

Payment orchestration is an important part of embedded payments. It involves the smart routing of transactions for authorization for the highest likelihood of approval. This helps ensure that businesses capture as many transactions as possible and that consumers experience the least amount of checkout friction as possible.

At Visa, we’re using the power of AI to help make faster authorization decisions using the insights from millions of customer behavior and transaction data points. By analyzing data in real time, decisions are made in the quickest and least disruptive way, while continuing to identify fraud and stop it in its tracks.

Open banking promises to make financial transactions quicker and more convenient for consumers—and more efficient for businesses. Open banking refers to access by third parties such as financial service providers to consumers’ banking and financial data. Consumers can share their account information with a financial service provider, who can transfer funds directly into or out of their accounts.

As a result, non-card payment types such as real-time payments (RTP) and account-to-account (A2A) payments have made huge strides as far as usage—and are set to continue to do so in 2025. These payment types not only offer benefits for consumers, including convenience and speed, but they can offer businesses greater insight into their cash flow. In the B2B space, real-time payments can replace checks, which are outdated, inefficient, require manual effort, and are prone to error.

Visa’s capabilities through the acquisition of Tink and the U.S. acceleration of open banking with the release of FedNow will continue to boost the popularity of instant payments in coming year. In Europe, we’re also seeing a shift toward open banking with a focus on A2A payments in the new Payment Services Directive (PSD3), released early this year.

Cash use is falling, and payment methods that were formerly considered emerging are stepping in to take its place. Traditionally this space had been filled by card use, both debit and credit. But this isn’t always the case anymore—noncard payments are stepping in to fill the gap.

Card payments are growing, especially formerly emerging methods like digital wallets. According to a report by Juniper Research, digital wallets are expected to account for more than 50% of eCommerce transaction value globally by 2025, up from just over 40% in 2021.¹ And to spur more digital wallet momentum, more mobile platforms are allowing developers to embed their own NFC contactless transactions into their apps.

But noncard payments and schemes like decentralized finance (DeFi) are also catching on in more regions. DeFi involves leveraging blockchain technology to offer financial services without traditional intermediaries. We believe we’ll see more central banks developing and implementing digital currencies to encourage growth, improve financial inclusion, and boost efficiency, especially in cross-border and other more complex transactions.

We highlighted the innovation in AI that is driving payments—but fraudsters have access to AI, too. James Mirfin, SVP and global head of risk and identity solutions at Visa, observes, “AI and other cutting-edge tech offer fraudsters brand-new tools, plus faster methods to employ tried-and-true techniques.”²

Fraud is evolving to target non-card payments and other growing schemes that we’ve discussed, like A2A transactions, cryptocurrency, and open banking. And fraud of all kinds continues to be one of the main drivers of evolution in merchant fraud strategies. It’s estimated that global merchants will lose $362 billion+ to online payment fraud between 2023 and 2028.³

The Visa Acceptance platform works together to leverage the power of AI to keep transactions secure by uncovering patterns in transaction data that humans and other fraud platforms can’t see. For instance, Decision Manager analyzes anomalies, evaluates behaviors and identifies potential bad transactions in real-time to automate secure payment acceptance. These flexible AI solutions help you stay ahead of fraudsters so you can accept more legitimate orders and tailor strategies to your specific business needs, all while maintaining a seamless customer experience.

Want to hear more about how we’re getting ready for whatever 2025 will bring? Chat with our experts to hear how they can help you prepare.