Are you who you say you are? As researchers, that question has become all too frequent recently when working with panel respondents. This is why, while attending the recent 2025 Payments Canada Summit, I could definitely relate to the central themes of fraud and trust. The parallels here are striking between the two industries, but that’s not where the similarities end. Both industries are also increasingly using AI, but how far do we go? And just because technology allows for product and service innovation, do customers really want it? Are we even asking them? Here are my thoughts about these topics and the summit in general.

The Summit Overall 

The conference was well attended and offered engaging sessions and great networking opportunities. It focused on the future of payments, specifically through the lens of innovation, collaboration, and transformation, with industry-leading speakers from Payments Canada, Interac, Visa, Scotiabank, CIBC, Central 1, and many more. 

Key themes were:

• Artificial intelligence
• Cybersecurity and system resilience
• Consumer-directed finance
• ISO 20022
• Fraud prevention and real-time payments 
  

I found some of the best sessions to be the fraud prevention panels, legislation and policy sessions exploring the modernization of Canada’s payment regulations, and presentations on global payment standardization. The deep dive sessions were also particularly insightful and covered a range of topics from AI and payments to customer experience. 

Fraud and Trust: Parallels Between MR and Payments

Yes, fraud touches the market research and payments industries, but in different ways. In market research, it’s anything from incentive abuse to dishonest or low-quality responses to, most recently, bots completing surveys. In payments, there’s identity theft, fraudulent transactions, account takeovers, payment scams, and the list could go on. However, there are two central components: technology and trust. 

Fraud has eroded trust in both industries, and we’re constantly looking at how to rebuild it. There were a number of sessions at the event on this very topic, and for the payments industry, transparency is a big part of that effort. By that, I mean transparency in transactions in terms of making customers feel secure about where their money is, where it went, who has it now, and so on. 

Technology—AI in particular—is another parallel in that it’s a key component for both industries, as we use it more and more to automate processes. Both payments and market research industries face a number of challenges and opportunities when it comes to technology and how prevalent it is in our processes, products, and services. 

The “If You Build It, They Will Come” Mentality in Payments

Customer experience is a specialty area at Phase 5, and to me in particular as a subject matter expert in that space. Through that lens, I feel there is a real miss (or opportunity for market research) when it comes to customer experience in the payments industry. At the event, there was so much talk of technology making things possible, but little mention of whether the customer wanted those innovations or not. We’ve found customers aren’t necessarily ready for everything that technology is ready to offer. 

For example, this was one of the themes in our recent webinar [link] on Jobs To Be Done (JTBD). We discussed how innovation is a good thing if it solves a job for customers, but otherwise, just because we can, does that mean we should? It's sort of the old school product-driven strategy, which has been proven not to work anymore. 

Today, it's about what the customer wants, how they feel, and their expectations and perceptions. It was interesting to me that in the sessions where customer experience was mentioned, the discussions were not really about the actual experience. It was more about making something easier or quicker, etc., which is great if that matches customer needs, but those questions had seemingly not been asked. True customer insights could go such a long way here, not only in driving product development, but also in creating messaging that supports benefits rather than features. 

Final Thoughts

The 2025 Payments Canada Summit was a great event, and an insightful one for me. As an industry conference, I wasn’t expecting there to be a lot of talk about market research. But looking at it from my research and experience lens, I can see that there are not only more parallels between our two industries than I would have thought but also a tremendous amount of opportunity for market research to help drive more customer-centric decision making in payments. 

To continue the discussion or to see how Phase 5 can put our market research expertise to work for your business, contact us.