Making Digital Payments Feel Human Is Next Competitive Edge

The FinTech landscape has overindexed on innovation. But in an operational landscape defined by automation, predictive analytics, and invisible payments, the most important innovation in financial technology may ultimately be an attitudinal one.

“My word of the year is ‘service,’” Nicole Haskins, director of customer experience at Paymentus, told PYMNTS during a conversation for the “What’s Next in Payments” series February edition, “Word of the Year.”

“We immediately think of good service that we’ve had, bad service that we’ve had,” Haskins said, noting that the word itself can trigger emotional recall. “I think it’s everyone’s secret sauce, or it should be.”

After all, the FinTech sector has spent the past decade racing to digitize transactions. Now, as those capabilities mature, the competitive frontier may be shifting from whether companies can process payments efficiently to whether they can make customers feel understood while doing so.

“As money and resources get tight, everyone’s budgets are squeezed and tolerance levels of consumers are at their lowest,” Haskins said. “Service can make or break a relationship.”

Winning Across the Emotional Layer of Payments Infrastructure

Industries outside FinTech are increasingly rediscovering the dynamic of service as a strategic differentiator rather than a support function.

Haskins pointed to the return of small, human gestures across retail environments, from baristas writing names on cups to store associates being trained to acknowledge customers within a defined physical radius. These are not nostalgic flourishes; they are calculated responses to a consumer base that increasingly feels processed rather than served.

But while technology has become extraordinarily good at anticipating needs, with navigation apps predicting routes, streaming platforms anticipating tastes, and many more instances beyond that, many billing and payment interactions can remain stubbornly impersonal.

“It almost feels like we’re taking a step backwards when it comes to treating people like humans,” Haskins said.

That mismatch creates a form of cognitive friction: consumers experience hyper-personalization in discretionary contexts and bureaucratic rigidity when managing essential obligations. Billing and payments are uniquely sensitive touchpoints because they are non-optional. Unlike retail purchases, they carry emotional weight and, often, stress.

“Many of the bill types are mission critical to maintain the health of my family, my home, my business,” Haskins said.

This is where FinTech’s traditional metrics such as uptime, throughput and processing cost can prove insufficient. Consumers are not evaluating these interactions as technical workflows but are evaluating them as trust relationships tied to essential services like utilities, insurance, healthcare and taxes.

“People are tired of being treated like strangers by their service providers to whom they send money every month,” Haskins said. “Winning a customer is only the start. Retention and customer loyalty depends on how all problems get handled, how quickly issues get resolved, and how consistently the experience holds up.”

Designing for Both Automation and Humanity

Acquisition may dominate growth strategies, but retention is where service lives, particularly as recurring revenue becomes the norm. Every billing interaction in today’s environment can become a micro-moment of brand validation. In this sense, service is not reactive support; it is behavioral design. The goal is to build confidence loops that make engagement feel reliable enough to fade into the background of daily life.

Still, a central tension in FinTech is how to serve two customers simultaneously: the one who wants instant self-service and the one who needs reassurance from a human interaction. That means digital channels must convey empathy without necessarily inserting a person into every transaction. The challenge is not deciding between automation and human support, but designing systems that allow fluid movement between them.

A “service-first mindset,” Haskins said, provides “flexibility and optionality for … end users,” allowing individuals to engage in ways that match their preferences at any given moment. Those preferences are far from static. “How you prefer to interact … is probably very different than how I interact,” she added, and can even change depending on timing, finances or context.

Ultimately, Haskins resisted treating these as separate design problems, noting that FinTechs are “in the service industry” at the end of the day.

As more industries adopt embedded finance, billing platforms increasingly become the connective tissue between brands and customers. The experience of paying for a service can shape perceptions of the service itself.

That’s why, if the FinTech industry’s first chapter was about digitization and its second was about intelligence and layering in analytics and predictive capabilities, the emerging third chapter may be about restoring relational signals that digital transformation inadvertently stripped away.

The word “service,” Haskins said, does something subtle but powerful: “It makes me sit up just a little straighter.”