Last week, the Movitz team attended EBAday 2026, joining banks, payment providers, fintechs and infrastructure leaders from across Europe.
While compliance, instant payments and Verification of Payee remained central themes, we left with a broader observation:
The industry conversation is evolving.
The payments sector appears to be moving from a compliance-driven mindset towards a modernization-driven mindset. Regulatory requirements still matter, but increasingly they are being viewed as catalysts for broader transformation rather than isolated projects.
Here are three signals we observed.
For the past few years, many payment initiatives have been driven by regulatory pressure.
Verification of Payee, Instant Payments Regulation, PSD3 and PSR have all created urgency for banks to act.
At EBAday 2026, however, many discussions extended beyond regulatory compliance.
The G20 goals for cross-border payments; speed, transparency, cost and accessibility, featured prominently in conversations across the ecosystem. This reflects an important shift.
Banks are increasingly asking not only how to comply with new requirements, but how to use those investments to improve customer experience, reduce operational friction and create more competitive payment services.
Compliance remains mandatory. Modernization is becoming strategic.
Regulatory deadlines still drive budgets and prioritisation. That reality has not changed.
What appears to be changing is how banks think about the investments they are making.
Rather than viewing initiatives such as Verification of Payee as standalone compliance exercises, many institutions are looking at them as foundational capabilities that can support wider transformation programmes.
Questions we heard included:
In other words, the discussion is moving from implementation to leverage.
The banks that extract broader value from today's compliance investments are likely to be better positioned for tomorrow's regulatory and customer expectations.
Perhaps the strongest signal from EBAday was the growing emphasis on collaboration.
Across conversations with banks, fintechs, payment infrastructures and technology providers, there was a clear recognition that no organisation can solve payment modernization alone.
The challenges are simply too interconnected. Fraud prevention depends on data sharing. Cross-border transparency depends on network connectivity and customer experience depends on coordination across multiple participants in the payment chain.
As a result, partnerships are increasingly being viewed not as procurement decisions, but as strategic enablers. We expect this trend to accelerate.
Over the next six to twelve months, we anticipate new alliances, partnerships and ecosystem initiatives emerging across the payments industry as organisations seek faster and more cost-effective paths to modernization.
If there was one overarching message from EBAday 2026, it was this:
The industry is beginning to think beyond compliance.
Regulation will continue to be a powerful catalyst for change.
But the most forward-looking organisations are already asking a different question:
"How do we use today's mandatory investments to create tomorrow's competitive advantage?"
That shift - from compliance to modernization - may prove to be one of the most important developments in payments over the coming years.