2025 Payment Compliance Trends: Insights from Experts

Now that we’ve entered 2025, we wanted to take a moment to look ahead at what the payments industry will be facing when it comes to compliance challenges and opportunities. To help you stay ahead of the curve, we tapped into the collective wisdom of spektr’s compliance experts to identify the top five trends shaping payment compliance this year. Spoiler: you might need a helping hand from a platform like spektr.

1. Real-Time Monitoring: No Longer Optional

Periodic checks no longer suffice to keep regulators happy. In 2025, real-time monitoring will be evolving from a nice-to-have into a must-have for compliance programs. Why? Because fraudsters and other bad actors are moving fast, and regulators expect the same level of speed from compliance teams.

Real-time monitoring isn’t just about catching red flags in the moment, it’s also about building a malleable compliance framework that learns and adapts continuously. With regulators tightening their expectations around AML and CFT, companies still relying on manual reviews or outdated systems will find themselves playing an expensive game of catch-up. Platforms like spektr ensure that you can confidently shift from manual checks to 24/7 monitoring to keep risks in check.

2. Cross-Border Compliance Takes Center Stage

Cross-border payments are soaring, but so are the complexities of navigating international regulations. With jurisdictions like the EU ramping up enforcement of cross-border AML rules and new data privacy laws popping up everywhere, compliance teams will need to double down on their efforts.

This year, harmonizing compliance across borders will dominate strategic agendas. Companies processing payments internationally will need to juggle overlapping, and sometimes contradictory, regulatory requirements – taking into account regional peculiarities and, with it, different frameworks. The solution? Automating compliance workflows that can adapt to diverse regulatory environments. The firms that can confidently handle cross-border transactions will thrive in 2025; those that can’t risk fines, reputational damage, or even worse.

PSD3 and PSR: Setting a New Standard

The European Commission’s proposed Third Payment Services Directive (PSD3), alongside the Payment Services Regulation (PSR), signifies a critical shift in payment compliance. These measures aim to modernize the payment services sector across the EU by introducing uniform regulations, enhancing strong customer authentication requirements, and implementing anti-fraud measures such as IBAN/name verification services.

Once finalized, their full implementation may still only take effect around 2026/27, following a pivotal transition period – but the preparation has to begin already now. For payment service providers, compliance solutions that help you adapt to these regulations will be essential to handling cross-border operations, whilst maintaining security and trust.

3. Soaring AI Adoption

Linked to the above, many companies in the payments industry are investing in AI to help with the simplification of cross-border payments — especially factoring in the volumes of transactional data that has to be sifted through. AI can also be implemented to:

• Automate routine tasks that eat up your time in the day-to-day
• Accurately flag risks, in real-time, that might otherwise have been overlooked
• Get actionable insights into payments trends and compliance risks through data summaries and trend analysis
• Discover the other ways AI can help in your compliance processes

As an ISO 42001-certified company, spektr is leading the way in leveraging AI to enhance compliance processes — specifically designed to handle the complexities of modern payment systems.

4. Reinventing KYC for High-Value, Multi-Layered Customers

Verifying a single individual? No problem. Verifying a multinational corporation with complex ownership structures, cross-border dealings, and PEPs sprinkled throughout? This is where a smarter way to do KYC is needed.

In 2025, compliance teams will need innovative approaches to tackle high-value and multi-layered customer profiles. Regulators are scrutinizing beneficial ownership and ultimate control more closely, and existing KYC tools often struggle to provide the granularity required.

Expect to see a surge in demand for tools that combine automation, advanced analytics, and open data sources to dig deeper into customer profiles without slowing down onboarding. The goal? Ensure thorough verification while keeping the customer experience frictionless – a tricky balance, but one that compliance teams can’t afford to ignore.

This is how we do it at spektr: our ownership trees help to easily visualize and validate intricate ownership structures – UBOs, layered entities, cross-border clients – without the hassle, instantly capturing the details, and adjusting as things change.

5. Legacy Systems Will Have to Be Replaced

If you’ve been hanging onto a 20+-year-old compliance system, this is your sign to shake things up. Legacy systems simply can’t keep up with 2025’s compliance demands. From real-time monitoring to cross-border workflows, compliance tools today need to be fast, adaptable, and scalable. Legacy systems, often cobbled together with patchwork integrations, simply weren’t designed for the speed or complexity of modern payments. Changing them up is about more than just avoiding technical debt (though that’s a big part of it); it’s about setting your compliance program up for long-term success.

Looking Ahead

Based on reflections from our in-house experts, 2025 is set to be a year of positive change for payment compliance. Real-time monitoring, cross-border complexity, advanced customer verification, and the changing up of legacy systems are just the tip of the iceberg. For those ready to embrace change, we’re just a message away!