EMBARGO: Silverflow data held until 08:00 CEST, 16 July 2026. Internal review copy — do not publish before the embargo lifts.

Key takeaways 

  • In a survey of 250 senior payments leaders at Money20/20 Europe, 92% called data visibility important to their decisions, yet 33% named getting hold of real-time data their single biggest obstacle, just ahead of joining data up across systems (32%).
  • Performance and authorisation rates (35%) beat cost optimisation (19%) and fraud and risk (26%) as the area leaders most want to improve.
  • The firms most starved of real-time data are the ones most fixated on winning back declined payments: 59% of those who named data access as their biggest problem also named performance as their top opportunity, against 35% across the whole sample. Silverflow, the survey author, sells the processing it says closes that gap, so weigh the finding with that interest in view.

 

Nine in ten senior payments leaders say seeing their data in real time now shapes how they run the business. Only two in three can act on it, and a third say getting hold of that data at all is the hardest problem they face. 

That gap between what payments executives believe and what their systems can actually deliver sits at the centre of a new survey of 250 senior payments and fintech leaders, polled at Money20/20 Europe by the cloud-native processor Silverflow. It’s the first run of what the company plans to publish every year as its “State of Payments Data” benchmark. The full findings are under embargo until 08:00 CEST on 16 July.

Conviction has outrun capability

The headline number is the kind payments rarely produces. Asked how important data visibility is to their decision-making, 92% of respondents said “important” or “extremely important”, and 64% picked “extremely important”. For a market as fragmented as card payments, near-unanimity on anything is unusual.

Then the survey asks what’s stopping them, and the agreement turns into a complaint. Accessing real-time data came out as the single biggest barrier to using data well, named by 33% of leaders. Integrating data across systems followed close behind on 32%. Between them, two-thirds of the sample pointed at the same thing: the plumbing, not the appetite.

The appetite is settled; the infrastructure isn’t. Payments infrastructure still runs on systems built to reconcile in batches overnight, and a batch file from yesterday can’t tell a fraud team or an acquirer what’s happening to a transaction now.

Performance, not cost, is the prize now

The more surprising result is where leaders said the money is. Asked to name the leading opportunity to improve their payments stack, 35% chose performance and authorisation rates. Cost optimisation, for years the reflex answer in payments, came in at 19%. Fraud and risk management placed second on 26%.

Authorisation rate is simply the share of legitimate payments that get approved rather than wrongly declined, and small movements in it carry real revenue. Riskified estimates that issuers decline roughly one in every ten ecommerce dollars at authorisation, and that about 70% of those declined orders come from good customers who could have paid.

That improvement runs straight into the data problem. You can’t lift an authorisation rate you can’t see move, which depends on knowing the outcome as it happens, not in a report the next morning.

The starved are the hungriest

Among leaders who named real-time data access as their biggest challenge, 59% also picked performance and authorisation rates as their top opportunity, well above the 35% across the full sample. The people most frustrated by missing data are the same people most hungry for the performance gains better data would deliver.

“Payments leaders have effectively told us, unprompted, where the next gains are going to come from,” said Robert Kraal, co-founder of Silverflow and a former chief operating officer at Adyen. “If you want to move the needle on performance, you have to start with the data feeding it, in real time, not in a batch file from yesterday.”

Why the data isn’t there yet

Real-time rails have gone mainstream, which raises the expectation for everything around them. ACI Worldwide counted 266.2 billion real-time payments in 2023, up 42% on the year, forecasting 575 billion by 2028. And the messages carrying payments are getting richer: Swift’s move to ISO 20022, with the legacy MT format retired from November 2025, means more structured data with each transaction. The raw material for sharper analytics is arriving; most processing infrastructure hasn’t caught up.

Read the source, then read the signal

Silverflow is not a neutral party, and the survey should be read with that on the table. The company is a cloud-native processor that raised a €37 million Series B in March 2026 to sell exactly the real-time processing the findings say the market lacks. That interest frames the numbers without sinking them: batch-era infrastructure genuinely can’t deliver real-time visibility, and independent data on declined payments shows the performance money is real. The test is time. Silverflow says it will repeat the survey each year, which turns a snapshot into a benchmark, and for now it says payments has agreed on the destination well before it built the road.