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What new industry research reveals about trust, risk, and the future of finance.
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Security is now the biggest barrier to innovation – so fintech needs to optimise for safety instead of speed.
Payments providers have always been obsessed with velocity. Faster rails, faster onboarding, faster scale. But new research suggests the industry’s real bottleneck isn’t regulation or legacy infrastructure anymore – it’s cybersecurity.
According to a global survey by ACI Worldwide, cybersecurity and fraud risks now outweigh regulatory complexity as the biggest barrier to payments innovation. We think that’s a significant shift. In an industry built on momentum, security is increasingly the factor that determines how confidently teams move at all.
This is even more urgent because of the confidence gap beneath it. Payments is still perceived as one of the fastest-moving industries in the world, yet fewer than half of organisations say innovation is a clear C-suite priority. More than half admit they aren’t fully using the technology already at their disposal. As real-time payments expand and fraud pressure rises alongside them, hesitation has a cost.
No one likes to slow innovation down. But this is about recognising that modern fintech is infrastructure-deep: instant payments, APIs, orchestration across networks, and always-on customer expectations. When something breaks, it breaks instantly – and publicly.
Security now sets the speed limit on innovation.
Hatem Ali Hachicha (Expert in Finance Innovation, SVP at a leading bank in the Middle East and Africa):
“Finance is built on trust: trust from customers, regulators, and market participants. If cybersecurity is left to the end, and not core in your design, why should anyone trust you from the beginning?”
(Connect with Hatem on LinkedIn)
How is cyber risk influencing innovation decisions in your organisation? Open this newsletter on LinkedIn and tell us in the comments. We’ll bring the debate to Money20/20 Middle East.
Catch you next week,
The Money20/20 Middle East Team
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