At MPE 2025, the narrative was clear: the payments industry is converging, but not just across rails and channels. It's converging across experiences, identities, emotions, and expectations. From Visa's macro view on infrastructure to Lloyds’ boots-on-the-ground perspective in hospitality, a multi-dimensional story unfolded: one where relevance, not rails, defines success.

The Big Convergence – Visa’s Systemic View

Mathieu Altwegg, Head of Products and Solutions for Europe at Visa, kicked things off with a vision of convergence at scale. His keynote painted a world where payments are not about replacing existing systems, but about seamlessly integrating them. Cards, A2A, wallets, and BNPL must work together, orchestrated in real-time by intelligence and tokenised infrastructure.

This "network of networks" philosophy is Visa’s answer to fragmentation: an attempt to harmonise the global payments landscape while embracing regional idiosyncrasies. Visa believes this convergence is not a future - it's a present challenge, accelerated by AI, regulation, and changing consumer expectations. Personally, I am not so sure we are there yet.

Redefining Hospitality – Where Every Second Counts

Melinda Roylett, Managing Director Merchant Services at Lloyds Banking, grounded this systemic view in one of the most complex verticals: hospitality. Her message was clear: in an industry defined by immediacy, even milliseconds matter.

“In hospitality,” she told me, “the holy grail is invisible payments. It just has to work—fast, reliably, and across every payment method, every channel, every use case.” I can see why that is the case: more than in a story, with all the goods with you, it is much easier to look for another place in hospitality as a consumer, and from a merchant point of view, volumes matter, and time matters.

Hospitality, more than most sectors, is under pressure. Margins are razor-thin, inflation lingers, post-COVID consumer habits have evolved, and Brexit has compounded staffing issues in the UK, she explained.

Honestly, I don’t think that is only a UK problem; I see the same trend in Belgium, for instance, and likely everywhere else in Europe.

Melinda’s team supports over 6,000 merchants, from large food chains to tiny rural pubs, and they’re all asking for the same thing: integrated, cost-effective, omnichannel payment experiences. And maybe, but that is more my interpretation of the problem: they don’t want to be bothered by payments; it simply needs to work!

What stands out is the sector’s growing complexity, from pub pool tables that still take cash to touchscreen ramen menus with embedded payments. Hospitality now blends e-commerce with physical experiences in real time. As Melinda put it, “It’s not like buying a sofa, you can’t afford a failed payment when there’s a queue of 40 people waiting on their lunch break.”

Another critical point she raised is the fragmentation of the payments integration stack. Hospitality merchants rely on a wide range of ISVs (like Lightspeed, Epos Now, etc.) and demand seamless connectivity between payment service providers and software platforms. Reconciliation, reporting, and loyalty integration must happen behind the scenes, ideally through one interface.

Again, these merchants don’t want to be bothered by payments; they just want things to work so they can focus on the business.

This highlights a broader convergence challenge: how to reconcile fragmented platforms, devices, and payment methods into a seamless operational flow. It’s not about innovation for innovation’s sake, it’s about maintaining operational sanity.

Hyper-Personalisation: Still a Mirage?

Melinda also brought pragmatism to the hyper-personalisation buzzword. Yes, facial recognition, camera-triggered orders, and behaviour-based suggestions are technically feasible, but we’re still far from mainstream adoption.

“The real challenge,” she explained, “is still connecting the customer to the sale. Even in supermarkets, that’s not ubiquitous. Without that link, there’s no foundation for true personalisation.”

She believes loyalty is the stepping stone, an underrated but essential bridge to identifying and rewarding customers. Yet even here, adoption is patchy, and many merchants still struggle to collect and activate data effectively.

Moreover, Melinda raised an ethical flag: “Everyone talks about hyper-personalisation, but what about opt-outs? What about data control? The world is getting more insecure. Who has your data and what are they doing with it?”

Her view resonates with our panel’s broader point: that hyper-personalisation must come with trust, transparency, and optionality.

Convergence Meets Compute: NVIDIA’s Vision

Georgios Kolovos, EMEA Payments and Fintech Leader at NVIDIA, added an additional dimension to the equation: intelligence as the new payment layer. His message was clear: AI will be the engine that powers the next wave of convergence. From fraud detection and transaction optimisation to behavioural analysis and hyper-personalised experiences, payments are no longer just about pipes: they’re about predictions.

NVIDIA’s vision centres on enabling real-time, data-driven decisions across the transaction flow. Think intelligent routing that adapts based on device, network, risk score, or sentiment. In this model, AI doesn’t just reduce cost or fraud, it curates experiences, balances security with fluidity, and contextualises every payment. And with generative AI on the rise, Georgios hinted at a future where the entire customer journey: offer, checkout, loyalty, post-sale and engagement, could be dynamically orchestrated in real-time.

Luckily, we have AI solutions to ensure the basic data stacck gets cleaned up to make sure a different AI agent does take smart decisions on those different data points. Because that was another common point of discussion in the context of AI: sh*t in, sh*t out. You can have the best tools, but if the resources are not fit for purpose these tools lead nowhere.

Visa and Netflix: A Convergence of Experience and Infrastructure

A particularly interesting subplot was the strategic alignment between Visa and Netflix. While one builds the rails and secures transactions, the other defines digital experience and consumer expectations. Together, they explore how payments can serve not just as a financial tool, but as an engagement layer. With Joerg from Netflix highlighting the role of frictionless, invisible billing in customer retention and Visa championing tokenisation, real-time payments, and smart authentication, their collaboration points to a shared goal: maximising lifetime value through seamless, secure, and global commerce.

This alliance exemplifies convergence at its highest form, not just across technologies but across value chains. It underscores a powerful idea: the future of payments will be built at the intersection of trust and user experience.

Where the Convergence Leads

So, what does all this mean?

It means the payments industry is no longer about who owns the rail, it’s about who owns the moment. In hospitality, that moment is fast, emotional, often chaotic and deeply personal. In streaming, it’s about frictionless renewals, and making sure the customer finds peace of mind when he turns on his TV, also when his bank decides to renew their credit card. In travel, it’s about trust and convenience. In every case, it’s about context.

The convergence we’re witnessing is layered:

• Technical: rails and methods blending into orchestration
• Experiential: digital and physical merging into unified journeys
• Strategic: players shifting roles, processors becoming platforms, banks becoming identity hubs
• Emotional: moving from frictionless to invisible, and, eventually, to empathetic

As Melinda summed it up: “Hospitality merchants just want it to work. But they also want control. They want intelligence. And increasingly, they want a partner, not just a processor.”

And maybe that’s the most important takeaway of all: in a converging world, relationships matter more than rails.

(Join us at The Banking Scene Conference Brussels on May 22 where we will be digging deep into top-of-mind topics for financial services professionals, across 3 dedicated content tracks covering Payments, Banking and Fraud & Compliance. Secure your seat today!)