Financial Infrastructure and Payments Applications | Apis Partners

The payments stack is being rebuilt. Who owns the new rails?

Global payments revenue is projected to reach $3 trillion by 2029. Real-time transactions will hit 575 billion by 2028.

Yet the most significant shift isn't in the numbers, it's structural. The rails, the routing, the settlement, the issuing: it is all being rebuilt from the ground up.

In this white paper, Bryan Wee, an investment professional in our Singapore office, maps the three-layer architecture of the modern payments stack, examines the six forces driving infrastructure value creation, and makes the case for why the next decade of returns will look fundamentally different from the preceding acquirer era.

Bryan also addresses the most contested question in payments investment today: will stablecoins and programmable money render existing infrastructure obsolete? The evidence, when examined closely, points in the opposite direction.

Explore:

• The full-stack view of where value is created and captured across payments infrastructure

• Why integrated platforms are generating 35 percentage points more annual TSR than standalone acquirers

• The Apis' thesis on programmable money, and why most investors are reading it backwards

• The rotation from the acquirer era to the next wave of infrastructure-led returns

Download PDF

Back to insights