As 2025 unfolded, the world seemed set on fast-forward, defined by political shifts and technological leaps.  

To misquote Peter Thiel, we were promised flying cars and what we got was Katy Perry singing in space. Be honest, you didn’t have that on your 2025 bingo card, did you? The US inaugurated a new President who ushered in a wave of executive actions and provided a significant boost to digital assets. Just a few weeks later, we also got a new Pope, Leo XIV, previously known as Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, the first US-born pontiff.  

Not to be upstaged, and in a moment of deja vu, Cloudflare decided its 2024 needed to be overshadowed and fell over again. And then again, just in case you didn’t notice the first time. You could have checked Down Detector to see if your favourite website was working, except...it was also down, thanks to Cloudflare.  

In the financial services sector, quantum computing and AI have begun to move beyond the buzz. At the same time, stablecoins and tokenisation have captured the payment industry’s attention and dominate most of the major conference agendas.  

It was also noticeable that there was a greater focus on infrastructure powering innovation, with the defining stories this year clustering around real‑time value movement, programmable money, and regulation‑led change.  

What did the past year hold for an industry now navigating everything from geopolitical volatility and quantum‑powered systems to tokenised deposits and faster cross-border transactions? Let’s dive into how infrastructure came to the forefront and how stablecoin and AI narratives evolved.

Real‑time and account‑to‑account (A2A) payments are shifting to centre stage as regulators and schemes push instant rails. In Europe, the SEPA Instant mandate came into force in early October, including the Verification of Payee (VoP) requirement, a system designed to help prevent misdirected payments and authorised push payment (APP) fraud.  

Meanwhile, the European Payments Initiative’s (EPI) wallet, Wero, designed to be an independent and unified payment alternative in Europe, continued to add partners, including German neobank N26 and cross-border payment firm Nuvei. It was also announced that the Dutch payment system iDEAL will transition to Wero, beginning in early 2026.  

In the UK, open banking has reached 15 million users, six and a half years after rollout, up from 10 million in 2024. The latest statistics from Open Banking Limited (OBL) also show that services powered by the technology were used 2.04 billion times, representing a 3.5% increase from June. Payments remain the biggest driver of adoption, with July’s data revealing that the total volume reached 29.89 million – an 8.7% growth (from 27.5 million to 29.9 million).  

Crucially, Variable Recurring Payments (VRPs) accounted for over 4% of all open banking transactions, representing an 8.6% increase, to 4.26 million transactions across various sectors, including retail, travel, and tax. VRP received a further boost in mid-December with the FCA’s announcement of the UK Payment Initiative (UKPI), a new company formed by 31 firms to enable variable recurring payments in the UK. UKPI will operate a commercial VRP scheme, allowing consumers to make flexible, recurring payments to businesses such as utility providers. The first live payments under the UKPI scheme are expected in the first quarter of 2026. 

In the US, FedNow adoption is expanding, and RTP volumes are increasing, which is forcing banks and corporates to redesign their cash management and reconciliation around 24/7 settlement instead of batch windows.  

Throughout 2025, the conversation focused on the next generation of financial infrastructure. Traditional payment methods are being challenged by real-time settlement networks, the implementation of digital asset infrastructure in the form of stablecoins, and the increasing tokenisation of deposits and funds.  

Many of those conversations focused on new protocols, interoperability, and the modernisation of legacy systems to support instant money movement, dissecting settlement networks, cross-border payment efficiency, and the competitive landscape between banks, digital asset providers, and tech platforms.  

In the US and Europe, regulatory frameworks for stablecoins are maturing, enabling more banks, payment firms and corporates to experiment with tokenised settlement and on‑chain flows. In 2025, euro- and dollar-denominated stablecoins are being used for cross-border B2B payments, on-exchange liquidity, and programmable payouts, often abstracted behind API layers so that end-users never see the underlying token.  

That included ClearBank announcing our partnership with Circle, and as an early participant in its Arc platform, an open Layer-1 blockchain network designed to meet the needs of developers and companies bringing real-world economic activity onchain.  

Tokenisation of real-world assets appears to be at an inflection point. The infrastructure has matured, and institutions pilot real product migrations. Institutional pilots now include major custodians, regional banks, and asset managers.   

HSBC’s Orion platform offers clients access to tokenised gold and tokenised deposits. UBS Tokenize provides issuance, distribution and custody for tokenised bonds, funds and structured products, targeting institutional investors looking for fractional and programmable exposure.  

The conversation has shifted from whether to tokenise to how fast to integrate tokenised products into client workflows, with 2026 likely to be the year adoption moves from proofs of concept to sustained production.  

Yes, there’s plenty of hype surrounding AI, along with concerns about a bubble. What’s also become clear in financial services, at least, is that the industry has transitioned from rule‑based automation and GenAI chatbots to autonomous systems with goals, tools, and the ability to act in core financial workflows.  

This includes automation in the middle and back office, encompassing everything from payables and receivables to credit scoring and modelling, all the way through to payment recovery. With the growth of instant payments comes related issues around fraud sophistication and velocity. In response, firms are combining AI‑driven behavioural analytics, device intelligence and shared intelligence networks to detect anomalies earlier and orchestrate dynamic controls in real-time.  

Banks and fintechs are utilising AI tools to automate document capture, invoice matching, exception handling and dynamic transaction routing, cutting processing times and costs while making operations more resilient. We’re no strangers to this as ClearBank, and you can read more about how we’re using AI to reduce payment recovery processing by 80%.  

The overriding sentiment was that it’s no longer about humans vs. machines. It’s how humans use machines to deliver better outcomes through augmentation.  

Then there’s the rise of Agentic commerce, where AI agents help find goods or services, and. initiate and complete payments autonomously. This is starting to reshape how authentication and payment dynamics work, affecting merchants, wallets and payment providers. On Black Friday in the US alone, AI helped drive a record $11.8bn in online spending.  

Card schemes and large PSPs are rolling out dedicated agentic payment capabilities, including Mastercard’s Agent Pay program, Visa initiatives around intelligent/agentic commerce, and toolkits from the likes of Shopify and Stripe for autonomous shopping flows. The following 12 months will see further developments and concerns over who ‘owns’ the checkout, as agentic flows potentially choose payment methods and merchants optimised for user‑defined criteria such as price, loyalty points or discounts. 

Firms looking to deliver embedded experiences have faced a compromise – work with a BaaS provider offering innovation and agility, or an incumbent bank with proven governance and control frameworks, processes and oversight, but may lack the real-time APIs they need.  

However, a new breed of banks and fintechs are now giving corporates the tools to create seamless new experiences for their customers, helping deepen engagement and drive growth through embedded payments, embedded bank accounts, and embedded loans.  

Across accounting, ERP, and vertical software, embedded finance is evolving from basic payments to a full suite of embedded financial services, encompassing bank accounts, cards, lending, and treasury services. This is turning these platforms into primary financial interfaces for SMEs and corporates. This is also changing advisory and relationship roles, as accountants, marketplaces and platforms become distribution channels for regulated products.  

So that’s 2025, a year where promises started to turn into reality.  

It was a pivotal one for ClearBank too, as we hit new milestones for deposits, transactions and accounts, and welcomed new embedded banking partners, including Coinbase and LemFi. We also expanded our services to large-scale corporate clients in the UK, modernising transaction banking with real-time, API-based payments and accounts. We then went a step further by launching our embedded banking services and welcomed our first client, PayCaptain.