In this episode of The Payments Leader Show, I was joined by Sulabh Agarwal, Global Head of Payments at Accenture, for an insightful conversation about the future of the payments industry and the forces shaping it between now and 2028.
Sulabh shares his personal journey into payments, from credit cards and analytics at Capital One to more than two decades at Accenture, where payments has remained a constant thread. What drives his passion, he explains, is that payments sit at the very heart of society: mostly invisible when they work well, but instantly front‑page news when they fail.
The conversation explores the most significant opportunities in payments today, including frictionless cross‑border payments, value‑added services, and most powerfully the untapped potential of payments data. Sulabh explains how transactional data is currently fragmented across the ecosystem and how AI and agentic technologies could unlock enormous value for customers, enterprises and economies alike.
A major focus was tokenisation, covering money, deposits and real‑world assets. Through practical examples, from buying a car to purchasing event tickets, Sulabh illustrates how tokenised money and assets, combined with programmability and smart contracts, could radically reduce friction, risk and cost, while enabling new models like fractional ownership and smarter lending. Alongside opportunity comes risk. Sulabh highlights growing threats around cyber security, resilience, fraud, AI‑driven attack vectors and the implications of quantum computing. In a real‑time, agent‑driven world, legacy systems and batch processing will no longer be fit for purpose.
Crucially, the discussion turned to the human dimension of change. Sulabh outlines the importance of leadership, culture and trust, introducing a clear framework built on the three C's:
Clarity of vision
Consistency of follow‑through
Capability building.
Technology alone is not enough, winning hearts and minds is essential to achieving employee trust which enables speed, resilience and sustainable performance. Looking ahead to 2028, Sulabh predicts major advances in AI‑driven payments, new payment instruments, heightened investment in security and resilience, and accelerating momentum in tokenisation.
His closing message: this is an extraordinarily exciting industry, success requires focus, conviction and disciplined execution.
