Payments firms are under growing pressure to keep pace with regulatory change. But the real challenge is no longer just interpreting new rules, assigning ownership or updating policies.
Increasingly, firms have to prove it in the data: reliable reconciliations, positions that hold, records that stand up when someone asks to see them. That is a different test, and it lands squarely on the back office.
About the whitepaper
The Confidence Gap: why payments firms feel ready for regulatory change their systems aren’t built for examines the distance between how ready payments firms feel and how ready their systems, workflows and controls actually are to evidence it.
Drawn from a survey of 75 senior leaders across UK card processors, e-money institutions, issuers, acquirers and neobanks, it reads regulation, safeguarding, AI and modernisation through a single lens: not what firms know, but what their operating model can prove.
The picture that emerges is a sector that is aware, active and
investing — but still closing the distance between intent and execution.
Key findings
- 45% of executives say compliance costs are rising faster than revenue
- 49% say regulatory expectations are changing faster than their systems can adapt
- 32% describe themselves as already fully compliant with the FCA’s updated safeguarding regime — but just 13% reconcile daily as the regime expects
- 63% say they have the in-house expertise to adopt AI responsibly, though confidence in AI and readiness for it are rarely the same thing
- Legacy systems and competing priorities tie as the biggest barriers to faster modernisation
What’s inside
- Why regulation has become an operating-model problem, not a compliance task
- How rising costs and stretched systems expose the limits of manual, back-office processes
- Why safeguarding has become one of the clearest live tests of operational readiness
- What AI can and can’t do in regulated operations — and why it inherits the weaknesses beneath it
- What the next phase of payments compliance will demand from systems, data and controls
Read the report
The Confidence Gap sets out executive perspectives on where payments compliance goes next — and why the firms best placed for it will be those with a back office built for evidence, resilience and repeatability.
Free to read, no sign-up required 👇
