A new survey of 250 senior payments and fintech leaders at Money20/20 Europe earlier this year suggested that real-time data access has become the deciding factor in payments performance.

The survey was conducted by the cloud-native payment processing company Silverflow and shows nine in ten respondents, 92%, said data visibility is “important” or “extremely important” to their business decision-making, with 64% rating it “extremely important.”

The finding underlines how central real-time data has become to strategic decision-making across banks, card networks, PSPs and fintechs alike.

“Payments leaders have effectively told us, unprompted, where the next gains are going to come from,” said Robert Kraal, Co-Founder at Silverflow.

“It’s a rare moment of near-unanimous agreement in an industry as fragmented as payments, and it underlines how central real-time data has become to strategic decision-making across banks, card networks, PSPs and fintechs alike. The people most frustrated by a lack of real-time data are the same people most hungry for better authorisation rates.

“That’s not a coincidence – it’s the industry pointing directly at the fix. If you want to move the needle on performance, you have to start with the data feeding it, in real time, not in a batch file from yesterday.”

But conviction hasn’t translated into capability. Asked about the biggest challenge in using data effectively, respondents ranked accessing real-time data as their number one barrier (33%), narrowly ahead of integrating data across systems (32%).

Together, the two responses point to a basic infrastructure problem still holding the industry back, even as appetite for smarter data use accelerates.

Cross-referencing the answers shows a link between the two issues.

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Of respondents who named real-time data access as their single biggest challenge, 59% also identified better authorisation rates and payment performance as their top opportunity for improvement, compared with 35% across all respondents who cited performance as their leading opportunity overall.

Respondents who identified real-time data access as their biggest challenge were therefore more likely than the wider survey population to prioritise authorisation rates and payment performance as the area most in need of improvement.

The findings also challenge a common assumption about where payments priorities sit.

Performance and authorisation rates (35%) outranked cost optimisation (19%) as the leading opportunity for improvement in respondents’ payments and transaction stack, and edged out fraud and risk management, which was a strong second overall (26%).