Escaping the card-first trap: why LPMs are the C-suite’s next growth lever

Business astatine its simplest is simply a bid of levers you effort to propulsion astatine the close clip to initiate growth. If you had an other lever, and you knew it would work, would you propulsion it?
The reply seems obvious, but determination is simply a lever for maturation that galore businesses are not prioritising. That lever is your payments strategy, a relation which inactive sits successful the backmost bureau astatine excessively galore businesses.

Today, for immoderate slope oregon merchant with planetary ambitions, payments are a frontline maturation lever. The diverseness of outgo options you connection your customers straight influences conversion and tin marque oregon interruption the feasibility of you entering caller markets. But galore C-suites and concern owners person yet to lucifer their outgo strategy to what consumers privation astatine checkout and it’s becoming a important resistance connected revenue.

This resistance is astir disposable successful the persistence of a card-first mindset. Credit and debit cards person underpinned astir user commerce successful markets similar the US and Europe for decades and stay indispensable successful the payments mix. But user behaviour has moved on; successful galore of the world’s fastest increasing ecommerce markets – from India to Southeast Asia and parts of Latin America – section outgo methods (LPMs) person go the default mode to pay.

This is acknowledgment successful ample portion to advances successful exertion which person enabled new, seamless acquisition options similar instant slope transfers, mobile wallets, bearer billing, and account-to-account (A2A) schemes. Now you lone request a mobile telephone to bargain the things you want.

LPMs present relationship for 52% of e-commerce globally and volition scope 59% by 2028, adjacent arsenic wide e-commerce grows 65% successful that period, to a marketplace worth of $10.6tn. Cards, meanwhile, volition shrink to conscionable 29% of transaction measurement by 2028. In regions similar APAC, wherever schemes specified arsenic India’s UPI oregon Thailand’s PromptPay are present the ascendant mode, LPMs already thrust the bulk of transactions, leaving card-centric strategies mismatched and costly.​

Prioritising card-based payments lone means missing the consumers who aren't reachable done paper rails, and the spread is astir acute successful the markets that should beryllium fuelling maturation for merchants. Put that alongside the increasing country of AI-enabled and agentic commerce, and a card-only attack leaves important maturation connected the table.

Payments person agelong been viewed arsenic a relation alternatively than a feature, operational plumbing owned by specializer teams and managed done bequest infrastructure. Traditionally, outgo rails lone get discussed erstwhile thing has broken. Also, the patchwork outgo systems that person been built up implicit decades tin marque it dilatory and costly to adhd caller methods.