EVOLVE connects NED’s, board-level talent, senior advisors and fractional executives with growth-stage commerce companies. Our events are one expression of that work.

We host expert sessions, in-person meetups, and small, closed dinners across key global markets. These gatherings are designed to support ongoing conversations, not one-off appearances. Now, onto this week’s newsletter.

This week’s EVOLVE expert session featured Marius Costin, a global payments executive whose career spans fintech, payments, and telecommunications across Central and Eastern Europe.

His perspective matters because it emerges from operational proximity to markets where payments are not an invisible layer of commerce, but a visible mechanism shaping behaviour, trust, liquidity, and risk distribution.

In large parts of Western Europe and North America, payments have largely faded into infrastructural obscurity. They are assumed to work. Failures are treated as anomalies. Strategic discussions tend to orbit customer experience, growth channels, and platform economics.Payments rarely occupy centre stage. Yet the session revealed something structurally important: Payments disappear only where systems have already stabilised. Elsewhere, they remain an active force.

Marius highlighted an asymmetry that most consumers navigate daily without consciously examining.

“We pay for the train in advance. We pay the cab after the ride. And yet we hesitate in ecommerce.”

The observation appears intuitive. Its implications are structural.

Transaction timing encodes trust, certainty, and perceived risk exposure.

When purchasing a train ticket, payment precedes service consumption. The passenger commits value before receiving the benefit. Yet hesitation is minimal. The system is perceived as reliable. Institutional structures are visible. Service delivery is assumed.

In the case of a taxi, payment follows consumption. The passenger receives the service first and settles afterward. The risk horizon is shorter. Delivery uncertainty is eliminated through immediacy.

Ecommerce introduces a different configuration.

Payment frequently precedes fulfilment. Delivery is deferred. Counterparty visibility is indirect. Risk perception expands across fraud, non-delivery, returns, dispute resolution, and timing uncertainty.

Hesitation emerges where uncertainty expands.

What appears behavioural is infrastructural.

Payments do not merely move value.
They expose trust under timing asymmetry.

The discussion opened with a question that often remains implicit in commerce strategy:

Have payments become one of the primary arenas where commercial power is negotiated rather than a neutral utility supporting transactions?

Marius’s response reframed the premise.

This observation contains a deeper structural insight.

Payments are perceived as utilities only when reliability is sufficiently high that decision-makers no longer allocate cognitive attention to them. In other words, utility is not inherent to payments. It is a by-product of systemic stability.

In mature environments, payment systems have achieved:

• High authorisation predictability
• Standardised consumer behaviour
• Deep banking penetration
• Stable settlement cycles
• Low trust friction

Under these conditions, payments resemble electricity. They power the system quietly.

But this resemblance is fragile.

Constraint reveals structure.

When payment flows destabilise, commerce does not merely slow. Risk reallocates. Liquidity timing shifts. Consumer confidence erodes. Merchant economics distort.

Payments transition from utility to leverage.

The analogy naturally led to a deeper examination of trust.

“Online payment is an upfront payment. If customers pay upfront, your brand is trusted.”

The statement captures an essential behavioural signal, yet its interpretation requires analytical precision.

Payment choice reflects how consumers calibrate risk relative to delivery certainty.

Upfront digital payment requires confidence that:

• Goods will be delivered
• Counterparty risk is acceptable
• Recourse mechanisms are credible
• Value exchange is predictable

In markets where delivery reliability, institutional trust, or consumer protection frameworks are uneven, hesitation becomes rational behaviour rather than psychological resistance.

Trust is not binary.
It is calibrated through economic exposure.

Payments function as instruments through which that calibration becomes visible.

The structural visibility of payments differs markedly across regions.

In Western Europe and North America, payment flows are sufficiently stabilised that their behavioural and economic influence often goes underexamined. Payments appear passive precisely because systemic friction has already been neutralised.

Central and Eastern Europe presents a contrasting reality.

Fragmentation persists across currency systems, banking penetration, credit infrastructure, and behavioural norms. Payment ecosystems remain diverse. Cards, instalments, transfers, cash-linked mechanisms coexist longer than convergence narratives predict.

“People outside the EU think it is one country. It isn’t.”

Currency heterogeneity alone reshapes settlement exposure, FX dynamics, pricing logic, treasury behaviour, and consumer perception.

Payments remain visible where constraint persists.

The session challenged a persistent misconception: that payment diversity signals technological immaturity.

Payment behaviour reflects underlying economic structure.

Instalment systems encode liquidity management patterns. Cash persistence encodes trust horizons and risk exposure preferences. Bank transfer usage encodes institutional familiarity.

“If you ignore instalment cards, you may be missing 40 percent of your market.”

Payment diversity often represents rational economic adaptation rather than behavioural lag.

Global standardisation narratives underestimate local economic logic.

Payments govern flows of value, approval logic, settlement timing, fraud exposure, FX mechanics, and liquidity visibility.

“The entity that shapes payment experience is shaping commercial power.”

Power, in this sense, reflects influence over economic conditions rather than dominance.

Approval logic shapes conversion viability.
Settlement cycles shape cash flow velocity.
Risk controls shape loss distribution.

Payments behave as control points within commerce systems.

Utility narratives obscure leverage mechanics.

Payment systems operate under continuous tension between security and behavioural continuity.

“Strong security that creates friction kills the process.”

Security mechanisms influence conversion economics directly. Friction functions as an invisible tax on transactions.

Technologies such as passkeys represent infrastructural attempts to stabilise identity assurance without imposing behavioural discontinuity.

Security decisions become economic decisions.

Currency fragmentation amplifies FX complexity. Conversion transparency, settlement predictability, and margin stability depend on mechanisms frequently inherited from legacy architectures.

“Dynamic currency conversion was built on very old technology.”

FX infrastructure shapes trust and economics long before it becomes strategically visible.

Infrastructure inertia produces commercial consequences.Why this matters now

Markets are less forgiving than they were a decade ago. Margin for error is thinner. Execution gaps surface faster.

In this environment, strategy quality matters less than execution conditions.

The lesson from this session is not that organisations need better ideas. It is that they need to take execution seriously as a system.

That requires humility, restraint, and a willingness to surface uncomfortable constraints early.

Those are not popular leadership traits. They are effective ones.

Technological narratives increasingly centre on agentic commerce. Payment infrastructure remains regulator-constrained.

“Payments engage exchange of value. They will be more regulated.”

Automation narratives accelerate faster than institutional systems.

Narratives move quickly.
Infrastructure moves cautiously.

Trust, risk, liquidity, behaviour.

Payments sit quietly at the centre of all of them.

Yet they remain underexamined in most strategic conversations.

EVOLVE continues to attract operators who are curious about the mechanics beneath performance.

If that sounds familiar, you already understand why this room exists.

Curated. Personable. Global.
That is EVOLVE

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