By Sandra Blair, Chief Technology Officer, Sola
At Fintech South in Atlanta this week, I joined a panel of payments leaders to talk about what a “seamless” payment experience actually means. The question that kept coming back was a simple one: seamless for whom?
When we talk about friction in payments, the conversation often centers on the customer’s experience at checkout. But a payment touches a much broader ecosystem. Merchants, software partners, developers, support partners, and finance teams all interact with different parts of the process, and each has different needs.
Creating a seamless experience means absorbing more of the complexity behind the scenes without losing the visibility and accountability businesses need.
The impact of unnecessary complexity can be significant. According to research from the Baymard Institute, 17% of U.S. online shoppers surveyed said they had abandoned an order during the previous quarter because the checkout process was too long or complicated.
That illustrates why removing friction matters. But it is equally important to understand which friction should be removed and which serves a necessary purpose.
APIs are part of the product
APIs were once viewed primarily as a way to connect systems and move data. Today, they are part of the product experience itself.
An API should do more than provide generic connectivity. It should deliver information in the context its user needs. A developer integrating payments has different priorities than a CFO reviewing performance or a support team investigating an issue.
The payments ecosystem is too complex for one system to do everything. The opportunity is to make those systems work together more effectively and deliver useful, contextual information to the right person.
Let your portfolio data set the roadmap
Payment companies have more technologies and capabilities competing for space on their roadmaps than they can reasonably adopt at once.
The right priorities will not be the same for every business. Card-present and card-not-present environments face different challenges. Cross-border payments introduce different considerations. Authorization rates and performance trends may also vary across different portions of a portfolio.
Before adopting another capability, businesses should understand the problem they are trying to solve and examine the data within their own portfolios. Technology should be selected because it addresses a demonstrated need, not simply because it is available.
Some friction serves a purpose
A completely frictionless payment ecosystem should not necessarily be the goal.
Certain steps exist to protect consumers, merchants, and the financial system. Authentication, identity verification, and compliance reviews may add time or effort, but they also provide important safeguards.
The challenge is distinguishing necessary friction from avoidable friction. Asking a customer or partner to enter the same information in several systems or log in to multiple platforms to complete one process creates complexity without adding meaningful protection.
The goal should be to preserve the steps that establish trust and reduce risk while removing the duplication and disconnected experiences that make payments unnecessarily difficult. That is the standard we hold ourselves to at Sola. A software partner should be able to onboard a merchant, see transaction data, and manage a dispute without bouncing between logins — the verification happens once, where it matters, and the rest stays out of the way.
Where this goes next
Looking ahead, AI can help make these experiences increasingly contextual. Instead of requiring people to search across systems for information, the information they need can be proactively delivered based on who they are and what they are trying to accomplish.
That is where the future of seamless payments is headed: not toward zero friction, but toward more intentional experiences that make complexity manageable while maintaining security, trust, and accountability.
