Author: Robert Kraal, Co-Founder of cloud-native payment processing company Silverflow.

 Ask a room full of payments leaders what matters most to their business and you’ll get near-unanimous agreement within seconds. Ask them why they can’t act on it and the room goes quiet.

That’s roughly what happened when we surveyed 250 senior payments and fintech leaders at Money20/20 Europe this year. We asked how important data visibility was to their decision-making. 92% said it was important or extremely important. That’s about as close to consensus as you ever get from an industry built on competing standards, competing rails and competing acquirers.

Then we asked what was actually stopping them from using that data. The answer wasn’t insight, or skill, or even budget. It was access. A third of respondents said getting real-time data was their single biggest challenge – narrowly ahead of integrating data across systems. In an industry that agrees, almost unanimously, that data visibility matters, the most senior people in the room are still describing a basic plumbing problem.

I don’t think that’s an accident and I don’t think it’s a minor finding. I think it’s the headline.

The gap between knowing and doing

There’s a pattern I’ve seen play out across payments for years and this survey puts a number on it for the first time. Everyone knows data matters. Almost no one feels they have enough of it, fast enough, to actually use it.

That gap exists because most acquiring infrastructure wasn’t built for real-time anything. It was built for batch. End-of-day settlement files, overnight reconciliation, dashboards that update on a delay measured in hours, not milliseconds. That architecture made sense when payments were simpler and slower. It makes much less sense now, when the difference between a successful transaction and a declined one is decided in the few hundred milliseconds it takes an issuer to respond and when the data describing why that decision happened is often sitting in a report you won’t see until tomorrow.

So when 33% of senior payments leaders name real-time access as their biggest challenge, I read that as a fairly precise diagnosis of where the industry’s infrastructure is still stuck.

Where the gap actually bites

Here’s where the survey gets genuinely interesting, rather than just confirmatory. We cross-referenced the answers. Of the people who said real-time data access was their biggest challenge, 59% also said better authorisation rates and payment performance was their biggest opportunity for improvement – well above the 35% who said that across the whole survey.

That’s not two unrelated complaints sitting next to each other. That’s the same problem showing up twice, described from two different angles. The people most starved of real-time visibility are also the people most convinced that performance is the lever worth pulling. And if you’ve spent any time in acquiring infrastructure, that correlation should not surprise you, because it’s basically how authorisation rates work.

Authorisation isn’t a single yes/no event. It’s a decision shaped by dozens of signals – issuer behaviour, network rules, fraud scoring, retry logic, routing choices that change by the transaction, by the issuer, by the hour. Acquirers and merchants who can see those signals as they happen can route smarter, retry intelligently and recover transactions that a static, batch-oriented system would simply log as failed. Acquirers and merchants who can’t see those signals in real time are, by definition, optimising blind. They’re reacting to yesterday’s data to fix today’s decline.

So the 59% figure isn’t really telling you something new about payments leaders’ priorities. It’s telling you that the people closest to the problem have, largely without prompting, connected data access to the performance metric it actually drives. That’s a more useful kind of validation than a survey asking people to rate a solution they’ve been pitched. This is the market diagnosing itself.

Performance, not just cost

There’s a second finding worth pulling out, because it cuts against a narrative the industry tells itself too often. Cost optimisation came in at 19% as a top opportunity for improvement – well behind authorisation rates and performance at 35%, and even behind fraud and risk management at 26%.

For a long time, payments got treated internally as a cost line: a fee to be negotiated down, a vendor to be switched if the rate improved by a few basis points.

This data suggests that framing is increasingly out of step with how senior payments people actually think about their stack. They’re not asking “how do we make this cheaper.” They’re asking “how do we make this work better” – because a failed authorisation doesn’t just cost a fee, it costs the sale, the customer relationship and often the next several attempts at retention. Performance, not price, is where the senior conversation has moved.

What this should change

If you’re running payments for a bank, PSP or large merchant, I’d take three things from this.

First, treat real-time data access as infrastructure, not as a reporting feature. If your team is still waiting on overnight files to understand why authorisation rates dipped yesterday, you’re not behind on dashboards – you’re behind on architecture.

Second, stop measuring your acquiring stack primarily on cost. Authorisation performance is the metric with the clearest line to revenue and it’s the one the data infrastructure conversation should be organised around.

Third, expect this gap to become a genuine competitive differentiator over the next few years, not just an operational headache. The acquirers and platforms that can give merchants real-time visibility into authorisation decisioning will increasingly be chosen over the ones that can only explain what happened after the fact.

We’re planning to run this survey annually at Money20/20, because I think this is a trend worth tracking rather than a one-off finding. But you don’t need a second year of data to act on the first. The industry has just told you, in its own words, where the next gains are sitting. The only question left is who moves on it first.

 To learn more, visit: https://www.silverflow.com/