The Changing Route to the Top in Payments

A decade of transformation in payments

Between 2015 and 2025, the payments sector evolved along several critical dimensions. The business model expanded beyond transaction processing into embedded finance, software-enabled payments and value-added services. Payments is increasingly integrated into broader workflows, often invisible to the end user.

In this environment, fintech-native platforms have achieved similar scale as long-time incumbents, which have been adapting to more technology-driven models. The boundaries between payments, software and financial services have become increasingly fluid.

At the same time, technology has become a primary source of differentiation. API-based architectures, cloud infrastructure and real-time capabilities have shifted competition toward product quality, integration and developer experience. These changes have redefined not only how payments companies compete, but also what is required to lead them.

How the CEO route has changed

Our analysis of CEO backgrounds between 2015 and 2025 highlights several clear shifts:

The rise of the founder CEO

The share of founder CEOs has increased significantly over the past decade, doubling from approximately 20% in 2015 to over 40% in 2025. This trend reflects the growing prominence of fintech-native platforms that have scaled into global businesses while retaining founder leadership.

This trend also signals a shift in boards’ comfort with founders’ ability to lead complex, regulated organizations over extended periods, rather than transitioning leadership to traditional operators as companies mature. This change has been driven in part by the strong performance of founder-led companies, as well as a growing recognition that the capabilities required to build differentiated platforms — particularly product vision and speed of execution — remain critical even at scale. As a result, founders are increasingly viewed not as transitional leaders, but viable long-term CEOs of complex, global organizations.

The decline of sales and marketing pathways

The proportion of CEOs with sales and marketing backgrounds has declined sharply: from nearly half of all CEOs in 2015 to a small minority in 2025. Historically, success in payments was driven by distribution: enterprise sales, bank partnerships and relationship management. Today, distribution is increasingly embedded within the product itself — through APIs, integrations and software platforms. As a result, the traditional sales-led route to the CEO role has become less prevalent.

The re-emergence of the finance route up

Finance backgrounds (particularly executives who have been CFOs before), have become more common among recent CEO appointments. This suggests a renewed emphasis on operational rigor, capital allocation and disciplined growth, particularly in the wake of the broader fintech market reset. Importantly, these leaders are not simply stewards of cost and risk. They are increasingly expected to operate as strategic capital allocators within complex, multi-product platforms.

Payment CEOs – Trends in routes up

The evolution of the founder CEO

Founders of large-scale payments companies are more than simply entrepreneurs. They are leading large, complex, closely regulated organizations. This reflects a broader shift in which founders are expected not only to innovate, but also to scale and institutionalize their businesses. This has coincided with increasing acceptance of founder CEOs by boards and investors. Indeed, the qualities traditionally associated with founders — product intuition, speed and comfort with ambiguity — are increasingly valued across all CEO profiles. In this sense, founder DNA is no longer confined to founders.

Most founders in the top 30 payments companies are early-stage founders, meaning they launched their companies early in their careers, rather than following long tenures as operators or executives. This suggests that the “builder” mindset increasingly valued at the CEO level is not typically acquired later in one’s career but is often a foundational trait — expressed early and refined over time as companies scale. Almost half of the founder CEOs in the 2025 cohort are also serial entrepreneurs — i.e., they launched other companies before founding the successful payments company they continue to lead.

A missing pathway: why product leaders are (largely) not becoming CEOs

While product and technology capabilities are increasingly central to success in payments, our analysis did not identify a corresponding rise in CEOs emerging directly from chief product officer or chief technology officer roles. CPO-to-CEO promotes do exist in payments (Mastercard is an obvious recent example) but they are quite unusual.

Several factors may explain this dynamic. Product roles in many organizations remain narrower in scope, with limited ownership of commercial outcomes. At the same time, the rise of founder-led companies has provided an alternative pathway for product- and engineering-oriented leadership to reach the top. Finally, boards continue to prioritize candidates with proven experience running complex, regulated businesses. Taken together, these dynamics suggest that while product thinking is increasingly essential to the CEO role, the pathway through formal product leadership positions is less obvious.

The role of finance in the new model

The growing prevalence of CEOs with finance backgrounds reflects an evolution in how financial expertise is applied within complex, platform-based businesses. Payments companies today operate across multiple revenue streams, invest heavily in technology infrastructure, and often pursue growth through M&A and ecosystem expansion, all under heightened scrutiny from investors. This dynamic has been reinforced by the post-2021 fintech market reset, which shifted investor expectations toward profitability, capital efficiency and more disciplined growth after a prolonged period of expansion. In this context, financially savvy leaders are valued less for cost control and reporting discipline alone, and more for their ability to allocate capital strategically, balance growth with profitability, and bring operational rigor to scaling platforms. As a result, the modern payments CEO increasingly embodies a hybrid profile — combining builder instincts and product orientation with the judgment and financial discipline required to manage complexity at scale.

Interestingly, while backgrounds in finance have become increasingly common, direct CFO-to-CEO promotes are still comparatively rare. Finance skills, in other words, are increasingly helpful in CEO roles, but not sufficient by themselves. Normally there is a different “last-mile” role (typically president, COO or divisional CEO) where broader general management skills can be developed.

Looking ahead: the impact of AI on CEO profiles

The rapid emergence of artificial intelligence is likely to further accelerate the evolution of leadership requirements in payments.

AI is already reshaping core elements of the industry, including:

• Fraud detection and risk management
• Payment routing and optimization
• Customer experience and support
• Software development and operational efficiency

Over time, AI will likely also influence how payments are embedded into workflows, how decisions are automated and how value is created across platforms. This is already starting to happen with the rise of agentic commerce, even if adoption remains nascent.

As AI becomes more central to competitive differentiation, CEOs will increasingly be expected to understand AI as a strategic capability rather than simply a technical tool. This includes making informed decisions about where to build, buy or partner, and how to integrate AI meaningfully into core products and workflows. At the same time, leaders will need to exercise sound judgment in managing the associated risks, including issues related to model governance, bias and regulation. While this does not imply that future CEOs must be technical experts, it does require a level of fluency in how AI creates value within their business model, and the ability to deploy it thoughtfully and responsibly at scale.

Importantly, AI does not fundamentally change the direction of travel. The shift toward platform-based, product-centric leadership is likely to continue, with AI serving as an additional layer of differentiation within those platforms. Leaders who combine product intuition, technological fluency and financial discipline will be best positioned to navigate this next phase.

Implications for talent and succession

As the payments sector continues to evolve from transaction processing to technology-enabled, product-centric platforms, boards will need to rethink what future-ready leadership looks like. The CEO profile that succeeds in this environment is no longer defined primarily by scale, distribution strength or operational discipline alone. Instead, the most effective leaders are increasingly those who combine product vision, technological fluency and speed of execution with the financial judgment and organizational maturity required to lead large, complex and closely regulated businesses. For boards, this raises the stakes on succession planning and leadership development: they must be looking not just for proven operators, but for leaders who can build, adapt and allocate capital effectively in a more volatile and innovation-driven environment.

Planning for the future requires boards to calibrate leadership criteria to where the sector is headed, not where it has been. Boards should prioritize the development of CEO candidates with hybrid capabilities: builder instincts — such as product intuition and decisiveness — combined with strategic rigor and financial discipline. The evolution in CEO profiles reflects a shift that is already well underway in boardrooms across the industry. What’s less obvious is the best pathways for future leaders to be developed.

For example, product and technology capabilities are becoming more central to the CEO role, yet the pathways to build those capabilities remain uneven. In particular, product leaders often lack the end-to-end business ownership required for CEO readiness. Finance leaders, meanwhile, bring operational rigor and the ability to allocate capital strategically but need to have the technical fluency to guide — or at least oversee — product vision if they are to be successful as CEOs.

Leading organizations are addressing these development needs deliberately — expanding the scope of product and finance roles to include P&L responsibility and creating rotational opportunities that expose high-potential leaders to commercial, operational and strategic decision-making. The president or chief operating officer role is one path for providing these experiences. Often a “finishing” role for CEOs, COOs benefit from overseeing the operational complexity of the business as well as additional enterprise and stakeholder exposure. Another route, divisional CEO roles, provide broad experience overseeing a P&L and driving revenue growth of their organization, including product innovation and development. Overall, 93% of CEOs in the payment sector were promoted from these two positions between 2015 and 2025.

Compared to other sectors in financial services, payments companies have been more willing to look externally for CEO talent. Just 53% of payments CEOs named in the past 25 years were true insiders. The rest were candidates hired as CEO from outside the company (18%), selected from the company’s board of directors (19%), or hired for another position and promoted to CEO within a year (15%).

Where are boards looking externally for talent, and how broadly defined should the relevant talent pool be? While adjacent sectors may offer leaders with strong platform-building experience, payments remains a complex and highly specialized ecosystem, and deep industry knowledge can be a meaningful differentiator at the senior level. As a result, organizations are likely to benefit from a balanced talent management approach — developing internal talent with the requisite breadth, while being selective and intentional when looking beyond the sector.

• • •

The route to the top in payments is no longer defined by the ability to scale distribution or manage large organizations alone. Increasingly, it is shaped by the ability to build, integrate and scale technology-enabled platforms within complex ecosystems. While there is no single pathway to the CEO role, the direction of travel is clear. Leaders who combine builder instincts, product and technology fluency, and financial discipline are becoming the new standard. Organizations that recognize and adapt to this shift will be better positioned to identify and develop the next generation of payments leaders.