Payments’ Next Scaling Problem Is Complexity, Not Transaction Volume

Payments companies have spent years bragging about how much volume their technology can handle. That could be the wrong measure.

The harder problem is what happens when every new dollar of payment volume arrives carrying another processor relationship, sponsor bank, software integration, distribution partner, underwriting requirement, risk rule and support obligation. Modern payment rails can absorb enormous transaction growth. The businesses operating on top of them cannot necessarily absorb the corresponding complexity.

“I don’t measure scalability only by transaction capacity any longer. Now the question is, how much more complexity can we handle with the infrastructure that we have?” Guy DiMaggio, senior vice president of Operations & Strategy at Maverick Payments, told PYMNTS for the PYMNTS 2026 B2B Event.

For DiMaggio, that means infrastructure has moved from cost center toward competitive capability.

“The days are long past” when merchants would tolerate weak support in exchange for attractive pricing, he added. “In order to really remain competitive in the marketplace, you’ve got to offer the full package.”

Faster Payment Rails Are Exposing Slower Business Operations

The competitive challenge in payments today increasingly extends upstream and downstream from the transaction itself. That creates an unusual consequence of payments innovation, where faster technology can make outdated operational infrastructure more visible.

“A faster rail doesn’t automatically create a faster payment business,” DiMaggio said. “If onboarding, underwriting and risk still are using fragmented workflows, then you have a bottleneck for the business.”

A payment might move in seconds while a merchant application travels among disconnected underwriting, compliance and risk systems. A provider might offer sophisticated routing while its support organization struggles to reconstruct what happened across multiple platforms. Adding another processor or banking relationship may expand distribution while simultaneously creating another operational layer to manage.

“If the operational burden grows at the same rate as the portfolio growth,” DiMaggio said, “then I’m looking at an infrastructure that’s just not creating enough leverage or elasticity.”

He described the alternative as “operational elasticity,” or the ability to absorb additional volume and complexity without requiring operations to expand proportionately.

Every Process Handoff Has a Price

The economics become clearer when payments infrastructure is viewed through the number of handoffs required to serve a merchant.

“If you have a fragmented infrastructure, it creates handoffs,” DiMaggio said. “Those handoffs can very much lead to a loss of context, duplicated work, slower decision-making.”

Fragmented systems create more of them. An application moves from onboarding to underwriting, then risk, monitoring, reporting and support, potentially leaving pieces of its history scattered across different platforms and teams. If adding merchants requires adding employees to reconcile systems, investigate exceptions and manually transfer information, volume can increase without producing comparable operating leverage.

Growth effectively drags its own overhead behind it. The strategic question as a result becomes not simply what technology a provider owns, but where ownership creates meaningful differentiation and operating leverage.

“Where does ownership create differentiation versus where it simply creates operational burden?” DiMaggio said.

The Payments Moat Is Moving Behind the Product

That helps explain why infrastructure could also become a retention strategy. Price can be matched. Features can be copied, and new rails eventually become broadly accessible. The operational system connecting those capabilities is considerably harder to replicate because its value emerges from how underwriting, risk, compliance, service and technology work together.

And merchants experience that infrastructure even if they never see it.

“It’s one thing to win business, it’s another thing to retain it and grow it,” DiMaggio said.

A provider can acquire a merchant with aggressive pricing or sophisticated features. But if onboarding takes too long, risk decisions lack context or service quality deteriorates as the portfolio grows, those front-end advantages become less meaningful.

That means the competitive moat in payments may be shifting away from the transaction itself.

As DiMaggio put it, “the most complex of the payments happen before and after the actual transaction.”

Payments companies have largely solved how to make that transaction scale. Now they have to make everything around it scale, too.

Watch the full PYMNTS interview with Maverick Payments Senior Vice President Guy DiMaggio to hear more about:

• Why payments’ next scaling problem isn’t volume — it’s complexity.DiMaggio says providers should measure scale by how many merchants, processors, banks and partners their infrastructure can absorb without adding proportional operational burden.
• Why faster payment rails can expose slower payment businesses.DiMaggio says real-time payments and orchestration cannot eliminate bottlenecks when onboarding, underwriting and risk still depend on fragmented workflows.
• Why the payments moat may be moving behind the transaction.DiMaggio says pricing and features can win merchants, but integrated infrastructure across risk, compliance and support increasingly determines whether providers can retain them and grow profitably.