At the Portfolio Financial IT 2026 conference — the event’s 14th edition — John Ford, partner at Paymentology, warned that a large part of the payments technology stack still relies on systems designed 10–30 years ago. Market expectations have shifted to cloud-native, real-time and globally scalable solutions, with fast and reliable transaction processing seen as essential.
Where the problem lies
Ford pointed out that tapping a card or phone on a terminal looks simple from the user side, but behind the scenes banks, card networks, apps and multiple systems collaborate in milliseconds. Historically, systems were designed for a different era: during the plastic card period processing often happened in batches and providers were optimized for domestic use.
Today customers expect the same card or digital wallet to work everywhere, embedded payments are spreading, and some purchases may soon be paid by robots rather than people. Ford proposed a gradual rebuild: monolithic legacy systems should be decomposed into smaller, replaceable building blocks, and card data should increasingly be replaced by digital identifiers (tokens) that work more securely and flexibly online and on mobile.
Cross-border expansion: technical and regulatory hurdles
In the panel that followed the keynote, joined by Horányi Gergő, Product Director at Wise, participants explored how international growth is not just a technical challenge. Connectivity to payment networks, local regulation and currency or business environments differ by country. In some regions — for example in parts of the Middle East — local card and payment networks exist to lower costs for regional actors, but these solutions introduce additional integration complexity for anyone expanding globally.
At the same time customer expectations are converging: if users get used to some cross-border transfers arriving in seconds, they will expect the same experience for all international payments. Banks frequently deliver modern user-facing services while using fintech solutions in the background, but from inside the architecture matters: poor system design can break flows, for instance when an app asks for a mandatory data field that a foreign customer simply doesn’t have.
Artificial intelligence: tangible benefits, but cost and risk
Speakers agreed that AI already delivers concrete business advantages, notably in fraud detection and speeding up development. AI can make real-time decisions from multiple data sources (transaction patterns, card network signals) and such capabilities can even be monetised as a service. It’s also realistic today for a developer to accomplish tasks that previously required a team, thanks to AI — but organisations must check whether this actually reduces costs compared with hiring more people.
AI brings security challenges: if an AI assistant has developer-level access to systems, lack of proper controls could enable serious damage. New security rules and risk management approaches are therefore needed.
The role of banks and the future industry shape
Panelists did not see traditional banks disappearing. Instead, the market will become more multi-player: banks will leverage capital, scale and trust, often accelerating via internal fintech teams and external partnerships. The coming years are likely to be characterised by cooperation and fierce competition rather than a decisive win by one side.
Practical takeaway for providers
John Ford’s main advice was that competitive financial technology firms will be those that are fast, easily scalable, reliably operated, and able to adapt flexibly to local market specifics. Real-time processing, cloud scalability and careful AI risk controls are increasingly baseline requirements rather than optional extras.
Moderator of the panel: Hörömpöli-Tóth Levente (Portfolio). Photos credited to Berecz Valter (Portfolio).
