Your payments team is scaling. Is their knowledge keeping pace?

The payments industry is growing faster than most organisations can build the expertise to match it. New business models, evolving regulation, and the arrival of AI-mediated commerce are raising the bar on what payments teams need to know. The gap between what they know and what they need to do is quietly becoming one of the sector's most consequential challenges.

A fintech giant, a skills overhaul, and what happened next

In January 2026, FIS partnered with Visa and Mastercard to launch the first agentic commerce platform for banks, allowing AI agents to source, negotiate and complete purchases on behalf of consumers using pre-approved payment methods. It was a landmark moment. But the story behind it is more instructive than the headline. (paymentsdive.com)

Years before that launch, FIS discovered that nearly half its workforce, 47%, were operating at novice level. Rather than accepting that as normal, the company invested in fixing it systematically: benchmarking skills, building personalised learning paths, and creating structured development programmes across its teams. Over time, the novice rate fell to 13%. (Pluralsight.com)

When the moment came to lead the industry into agentic commerce, FIS was ready. As CEO Stephanie Ferris stated in the official January 2026 press release: "Our role is to ensure banks not only participate in this transformation but lead it." That readiness did not happen by accident. It was built.

Source:fisglobal.com (January 2026)

A structural problem hiding in plain sight

FIS is not an exception. It is an example. Across the industry, payments functions are expanding rapidly through organic growth, geographic expansion and entirely new business models. But payments expertise is scarce, and teams are increasingly built from people transitioning in from adjacent disciplines: product managers, engineers, compliance officers who bring valuable skills but limited grounding in the payments ecosystem specifically.

The symptoms are familiar to anyone leading a scaling payments team:

●       Slower onboarding, as new hires take longer to contribute to complex payment flows

●       Misalignment across product, risk, operations and compliance teams who lack a common language

●       Weaker decisions when defining product roadmaps or assessing market opportunities

●       Challenges that could have been spotted earlier going undetected until they become costly

The numbers reinforce the urgency. McKinsey estimates that 87% of organisations globally already have a skills gap or expect to develop one. The cost of that gap across industries is projected to reach $8.5 trillion by 2030. (Korn Ferry, Future of Work report 2025)

What solving this problem looks like in practice

Mercedes pay knows this challenge from the inside.

Mercedes pay is the global fintech hub for Mercedes-Benz, enabling digital payments across the entire Mercedes-Benz ecosystem: From reservation payments, online vehicle sales, leasing and financing products to in-car payments for fueling, charging and the Mercedes-Benz store. The company faced exactly this situation when it underwent rapid expansion. A newly formed team, many coming from non-payments backgrounds across the wider Mercedes-Benz organisation, needed to operate as a unified payments function almost immediately. The expertise was there. The shared foundation was not.

Without a common understanding of the payment ecosystem, the symptoms were predictable. Cross-functional conversations took longer. Product and market decisions were harder to reach. Onboarding new hires was slow, because there was no structured way to bring people up to speed on the payments landscape, not just the company's platform, but the broader ecosystem it operated within.

This is where PaymentGenes came into play. The programme PaymentGenes designed was not a generic curriculum dropped into a new context. It was built specifically around Mercedes pay's strategic priorities, including a bespoke deep-dive into the payment methods most relevant to their markets. It was delivered in an in-person format that created space for cross-team discussion and alignment, turning the training into a shared experience rather than an individual exercise. And it was integrated directly into Mercedes pay's onboarding journey, ensuring both new hires and existing employees built from the same foundation.

The results were clear. Onboarding time shortened. Teams began moving faster, working from a shared vocabulary and a common understanding of the payments value chain. Decision-making across product, risk, compliance and operations improved. And Mercedes pay gained a stronger foundation from which to define its product and market roadmap.

The story of Mercedes pay is not unusual. What is unusual is the decision to solve it proactively, and the clarity with which PaymentGenes Academy was able to turn a knowledge gap into a strategic advantage.

What effective payments training actually requires

Not all training delivers this. The organisations that close their knowledge gap treat payments education as a strategic investment, not a box to tick. In practice, that means four things:

●       Context-specificity. A programme built around your actual product reality, markets and regulatory environment, not a generic curriculum applied from the outside.

●       Integration. Woven into onboarding and continuous development, not delivered as a one-off event. Knowledge that lives only in a training module does not transfer.

●       Collective learning. In-person formats that bring cross-functional teams together build something individual e-learning cannot: a shared language and mental model that makes collaboration easier long after the training ends.

●       Depth where it matters. For European teams, that increasingly means SEPA,SEPA Instant, the digital euro, Wero, and the infrastructure requirements of agentic commerce. The landscape is moving fast; foundational knowledge needs to keep pace.

‍Built for what comes next

‍PaymentGenes Academy was designed for exactly this moment. The Payment Foundation Course gives teams a structured, interactive grounding in payments fundamentals, combining core concepts, applied case studies and bespoke check-ins tailored to each organisation's context, delivered in formats built for alignment as much as understanding. The organisations that define the next decade of payments will not simply be those with the largest teams or the biggest budgets. They will be the ones where every person in the room understands the ecosystem they are operating in and can act on that understanding quickly. That kind of knowledge does not appear by accident. It has to be built.

Interested in building a stronger payments knowledge foundation for your team? Get in touch with the PaymentGenes Academy team to explore a programme built around your organisation's context and priorities.

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