New research suggests UK merchants value fast settlements, security and transparency over flashy innovation, challenging payment providers to focus on business fundamentals.
The payments industry has a habit of falling in love with the next big thing.
Agentic checkout. Embedded finance. New rails. Smarter routing. The latest acronym, usually accompanied by a panel discussion, a whitepaper, and at least one sentence about “transforming the customer experience”.
All of it has a place. But there is a question the industry should ask more often: what does any of this actually change for the merchant?
Because ask the payments industry what merchants want and the answer is likely to be a tour of the innovation roadmap. Ask merchants themselves, and the answer is rather more grounded. They want to get paid quickly. They want infrastructure they can trust. They want to understand what they are being charged.
None of that is particularly flashy. That may be precisely the point.
That is an argument I made recently, drawing on new independent research commissioned by DECTA and conducted by Censuswide among 500 UK SME decision-makers. The findings suggest that the industry may have become rather too interested in selling merchants the future, while overlooking some of the problems they need solved today.
And those problems are not especially mysterious.
The innovation merchants actually need
The research found that the most commonly cited challenge holding merchants back was receiving funds quickly, identified by 19.4% of respondents. Among mid-sized businesses turning over between £1 million and £9.99 million, that rose to 24.6%.
This is not a particularly glamorous problem. There is no shiny product demo for “money arriving when you expect it to”. Yet for a business managing payroll, suppliers, stock, and its next month of growth, it can be more valuable than the latest feature on the payment’s roadmap.
A merchant already carrying a hole in its cash flow that size cannot also afford for the money it has definitely earned to sit in someone else’s account for several days.
That distinction matters. Getting paid and getting paid on time are not the same thing.
A customer may have completed a transaction, but the merchant can still be waiting for those funds to reach its account. That is a settlement issue. It is separate from late payment, where a customer simply has not paid an invoice.
The payments industry cannot force a customer to settle an overdue invoice. It can, however, make sure that money already received reaches the merchant as quickly as the infrastructure and risk model allow – and be transparent about when that will happen.
Trust beats novelty
The research also delivers a useful reality check for an industry that spends a great deal of time talking about technology.
When asked what mattered most when choosing a payment provider, security came first for 51.8% of merchants, while the latest technology came second at 39.2%.
That order is revealing. Faced with a choice between security and the newest capabilities, merchants prioritise security by a considerable margin. That strongly suggests that trust remains more important than novelty.
This does not mean merchants are uninterested in technology. Nor should it. New payment methods and smarter infrastructure can create genuine commercial value. But technology earns its place when it improves the underlying experience.
Trust is also broader than fraud prevention. It means infrastructure that remains reliable when demand spikes. Funds arriving when the provider said they would. Pricing that can be understood without a forensic accountant. Integration that does not become a six-month project with a trail of anxious emails.
Those are unglamorous commitments, and they are the ones merchants are asking for.
The lesson for payment providers is not to choose between innovation and fundamentals. It is to make innovation strengthen the fundamentals.
Complexity is a problem merchants should not have to solve
The modern merchant is increasingly global, whether they planned to be or not.
An online business in Stockport may be selling to Stockholm before it has developed an international payments strategy. Research from the Federation of Small Businesses found that 61% of small exporters are passive exporters, trading internationally because overseas customers came to them rather than because they deliberately set out to sell abroad.
Going global is increasingly something that happens to merchants. And it multiplies the problems they already care about: currencies, payment methods, fraud exposure, counterparties, and opportunities for money to become difficult to track.
The merchant should not need to become a payments expert simply because their customers are spread across borders.
This is where payments providers have a crucial role to play. The best infrastructure should absorb complexity rather than pass it on. It should make sophisticated capabilities available without requiring every merchant to understand the plumbing beneath them.
That does not mean hiding information—quite the opposite. The experience should be simple, while the economics remain transparent.
The aim is not to turn payments into a black box. It is to make them easy to use and understand, and robust enough to handle what is happening behind the scenes.
The future still matters. It just needs to work harder
None of this is an argument against innovation. The payments industry should continue exploring what is next. New technologies, payment methods, and ways of moving money will continue to reshape commerce.
But the future should not become a distraction from the present.
The research paints a picture of ambitious merchants: 82% believe their business will survive the next three years, while 52.8% expect UK business conditions to improve. Yet four in ten do not feel supported by the payment technology companies meant to serve them.
This is a sizeable gap between optimism and experience.
It is also a clear brief for the industry. Give merchants the tools to grow without making them wrestle with the machinery underneath. Make payments reliable, transparent, and easier to navigate – whether that means accepting a payment, processing it, settling it, or expanding into a new market.
That is the role payment providers should play. It means building the infrastructure that helps businesses access the capabilities they need to grow, without adding unnecessary complexity along the way.
Because the best payment innovation is not always the one that makes the biggest noise. Sometimes, it is the one that lets a merchant get on with running their business. And that may be the most useful innovation of all.
