• Denys Kyrychenko, Co-Founder & CEO at Corefy


• 17.02.2026 08:45 am
#DigitalPayments #PaymentResearch

Over the past year, we analysed 672 businesses worldwide to understand how payment stacks evolve as companies scale. The result is our latest research, The state of payment maturity 2025 — a global study built to help teams benchmark how they structure, manage, and optimise payments today.

The headline is simple: most companies can connect providers. Far fewer can truly run payments as a controlled system. And that difference increasingly defines who scales smoothly, and who struggles with hidden friction.

About the research

Our digital payment statistics come from 672 completed quizzes gathered over the past year. We used a structured maturity model to evaluate five core dimensions:

• Payment setup and infrastructure

• Functional depth (routing, lifecycle ops, automation)

• Provider connectivity

• Integration speed

• Organisational ownership

The dataset spans businesses from ≤500 transactions per month to 500k+, and from single-country operators to globally distributed companies. If you’re looking for the latest payment statistics grounded in real-world setups, this dataset offers a practical view of how payments work inside operating businesses.

1. Fragmentation is still the default

Nearly 58.5% of businesses operate in a Fragmented payments stage, while only 11.7% have reached Responsive or Agile maturity. Manual payments are almost gone (1.0%), which is progress. But fragmentation has replaced manual execution as the primary constraint.

Siloed PSP setups, uneven reporting, duplicated logic, and thin abstraction remain common patterns. The ecosystem offers mature tooling, yet internal structure frequently stays improvised. Payments may function day-to-day, but the stack rarely supports fast, low-risk iteration.

2. The shift beyond ‘just acceptance’

One of the clearest shifts from 2024 to 2025 is the decline in businesses relying solely on basic payment acceptance — down from 46.7% to 38.5%. At the same time:

• Advanced features increased to 21.5%

• AI/ML automation grew to 8.3%

This is a shift from checkout-centric thinking to lifecycle-centric thinking. Authorisation starts the process; routing and risk decisions, recovery logic, and post-transaction operations determine whether revenue sticks and operations remain stable.

3. Provider portfolios are expanding at speed

Single-provider reliance fell from 41.3% to 33.5%. Meanwhile, companies operating with 5+ providers increased to 37.1%.

The drivers are practical: geographic expansion, issuer variance, local method access, negotiation power, and risk segmentation. Yet portfolio growth without orchestration often produces ‘more moving parts’ rather than higher approval rates. The strongest maturity signal emerges at 5+ providers, where payment hubs and automation become far more common. Connectivity multiplies options. Orchestration aligns execution.

Final thoughts: where the real gap sits

One message shows up across the new payment data: getting live with a PSP is quick. Staying fast and resilient through change is the real test. Many still run payments as a set of separate integrations — with different rules, different reporting, and repeated logic in every connection. That’s why payments often work day to day, yet feel hard to improve.

If you want to benchmark your own payment setup and see the latest numbers behind these patterns, get your copy of ‘The state of payment maturity 2025’.