Reflecting on Payments Unleashed 2025: A message from our CEO

We were privileged to welcome David Malpass, former President of the World Bank, as our opening keynote speaker. His session reinforced what our clients experience daily: payments infrastructure is no longer back-office plumbing. It’s the foundation of economic growth, financial inclusion, and global competitiveness. 

Malpass’s insights on stablecoins, regulatory frameworks, and the evolution of cross-border infrastructure elevated our industry dialogue. He articulated what many of us believe but too rarely say:

His presence underscored why we designed Payments Unleashed to convene leaders and policymakers, not just practitioners. 

The sessions that followed reflected the breadth and depth of challenges facing our industry. In our CEO panel on “Shaping the Next 50 Years of Payments Globally,” we examined the critical decisions leaders must make today to position their organizations for 2030, 2040, and beyond. These weren’t theoretical discussions. They were grounded in the real experiences of executives who are balancing innovation velocity with operational stability, regulatory complexity with customer expectations, and legacy infrastructure with emerging technologies. 

Throughout the breakout sessions, our clients explored how embedded payments are becoming smarter and more seamlessly integrated into digital experiences. We examined how payment ecosystems are evolving from rails to platforms, rebuilt for an API-driven, real-time world. The “Executive Roundtable on C-Suite Priorities” surfaced what keeps senior leaders up at night: how to turn compliance into a competitive advantage, modernize core infrastructure without disruption, and build payment strategies that scale across decades.

For billers, the exclusive preview of Speedpay ONE, our next-generation bill payment platform designed for resiliency, flexibility, and efficiency, demonstrated how we’re translating decades of client partnership into the solutions that will define the next era. For merchants, sessions on AI-driven fraud prevention and the new rules of customer engagement tackled the intersection of technology, trust, and commerce. Across every track, the underlying question remained: how do we balance the need to innovate with the responsibility to deliver mission-critical reliability?

Among the week’s most memorable moments was our celebration at the Nasdaq closing bell, marking 30 years as a publicly traded company. Standing in Times Square with clients who have been with us since our earliest years was profoundly meaningful. These aren’t transactional relationships. They’re partnerships that have endured through Y2K, the financial crisis, the global shift to real-time payments, and now the emergence of AI and digital assets. 

That evening, we gathered at Thomas Keller’s Per Se to celebrate not just ACI’s milestone, but the clients and partners whose trust has made our growth possible. These are the institutions that chose ACI when payments modernization was a risk, not a requirement. They’re the innovators who partnered with us to build capabilities that didn’t yet exist in the market. They’re the reason we’ve remained committed to delivering enterprise-grade reliability while continuously pushing the boundaries of what payments infrastructure can enable. And they’re the foundation on which the next 50 years will be built. 

As we close the chapter on Payments Unleashed 2025, I’m energized by what lies ahead. The conversations throughout the week reinforced something fundamental: the payments industry is entering a new era where infrastructure must be both intelligent and adaptive, where trust must be embedded at every layer, and where partnerships must be built on shared outcomes rather than software licenses. 

The landscape will continue to evolve. New rails will emerge, regulations will shift, customer expectations will intensify, and technologies like stablecoins and tokenized assets will mature from possibility to reality. But the foundation remains constant: our clients need a partner they can trust to deliver mission-critical infrastructure today while investing relentlessly in the innovation that will define tomorrow. 

To the banks, billers, and merchants who joined us in New York, and especially to those who have trusted ACI across multiple decades of transformation, thank you. Your partnership drives our innovation. Your challenges sharpen our focus. Your success defines our purpose. And your trust reminds us daily why we do this work. 

Here’s to the next 50 years of building the future of payments together.