Silverflow Study Shines Light on Payments Landscape

By W.B. King

During the 2026 Money 20/20 Europe conference, a collaboration with FXC Intelligence, 250 senior payments and fintech leaders were surveyed by Silverflow. Among findings: 92% said data visibility is “important” or “extremely important” to their business decision-making, with 64% rating it “extremely important.”

Silverflow, based in Amsterdam, where the conference took place in June, provides a cloud-native solution with a single API to the card networks. "Payments leaders have effectively told us, unprompted, where the next gains are going to come from," noted Robert Kraal, Co-Founder at Silverflow.

“It's a rare moment of near-unanimous agreement in an industry as fragmented as payments, and it underlines how central real-time data has become to strategic decision-making across banks, card networks, PSPs and fintechs alike. The people most frustrated by a lack of real-time data are the same people most hungry for better authorization rates,” he continued. “That's not a coincidence - it's the industry pointing directly at the fix. If you want to move the needle on performance, you have to start with the data feeding it, in real time, not in a batch file from yesterday.”

Building a Longitudinal View

While respondents understand the noted overarching issues occurring in the industry, they said their biggest challenge in using data effectively. Payments leaders ranked accessing real-time data as their number one barrier (33%), just edging out integrating data across systems (32%). “Together, the two responses point to a basic infrastructure problem still holding the industry back, even as appetite for smarter data use accelerates,” the survey noted.

Cross-referencing the survey responses, Kraal offered, provides a better understanding of current market conditions. To this end, of the respondents who cited real-time data access as their single biggest challenge, 59% also identified better authorization rates and payment performance as their top opportunity for improvement. This is compared with 35% across all respondents who cited performance as their leading opportunity overall. “Respondents who identified real-time data access as their biggest challenge were therefore more likely than the wider survey population to prioritize authorization rates and payment performance as the area most in need of improvement,” he stated.

Another takeaway was challenging conventional wisdom on payments priorities. Performance and authorization rates (35%), for example, outranked cost optimization (19%) as the leading opportunity for improvement in respondents' payments and transaction stack. Fraud and risk management was 26%.

Kraal said this research is the “first wave” of a new annual benchmark, the “State of Payments Data” survey. “This is to be repeated each year at Money 20/20, building a longitudinal view of how the industry’s relationship with data evolves over time.”