In the era of encryption, the boundaries between payment and investment are disappearing.

Byline: Jack Simison

Compilation: Chopper, Foresight News

Payments and investment together generate $3 trillion in revenue every year—more than the total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies. They rely on completely different user behavior and entirely different underlying infrastructure. Until today, they also correspond to entirely different product ecosystems. Here, I want to make a direct comparison between these two worlds.

One vertical earns money from the payments that everyone has to make—payment is a survival necessity, a must-have. The other vertical earns money from the investments that most people will never choose—investment is a luxury behavior.

Payment and investment management are the two largest revenue areas in financial services. For a long time, they have operated within their own independent systems: different products, different accounts, different regulatory frameworks, and different interaction interfaces. This is partly a legacy of historical system architecture, but it also persists because, in the past, there wasn’t a real-world need to connect payments and investment.

Programmable money is now breaking through this wall. The same balance, stored in the same wallet, on the same public blockchain, or within the same application, can now participate in both revenue channels at the same time. The two worlds are moving toward convergence in the form of a unified account.

To understand why this matters, you have to see the enormous differences in their underlying behavioral logic.

Payments: Universal behavior

Payments are the only mandatory financial behavior for participating in everyday economic life. Buying food, paying rent, paying water and electricity bills… Without payments, people cannot survive.

In 2025, about two-thirds of adults worldwide make or receive digital payments. In the United States, consumers make about 48 payment transactions per month; in India, UPI has more than 500 million independent users; in Brazil, Pix has increased annual transactions per capita to about 193; in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, mobile payments are no longer just a convenient way to pay—they are an important part of the financial system.

Payments are not a selectable financial activity for a small group of highly engaged people; they are the everyday behavior of the masses. They are instant, high-frequency, and psychologically easy, with costs that are usually negligible. Consumers don’t deliberately calculate fees at the checkout counter. Compared with cash, digital payments reduce the “pain” of paying and further increase usage frequency. The less friction, the higher the transaction volume.

This behavioral base creates an enormous business reach. According to McKinsey data, global payment systems process about 3.4~3.6 trillion transactions per year, with an annual funds-flow volume of about $1.8~2.0 trillion. Payroll disbursement, merchant payments, cross-border remittances, bill payments, subscription services, personal transfers… At every stage, intermediaries can take a slice.

Every layer of the payment chain profits from it.

McKinsey’s “2025 Global Payments Report” shows that global payments revenue is about $2.5 trillion. But nearly half of it (about $1.15 trillion) is net interest income—banks and payment accounts earn revenue by parking funds between transactions. This is more like idle-fund returns than pure payment fees. After excluding this portion, payment core revenue still totals about $1.35 trillion from money transfers, exchange fees, processing fees, embedded finance (Shopify, installment payments, Stripe), and frictional charges (ATMs, overdrafts, on-chain fees).

Investment: A luxury behavior

By contrast, investment is a financial behavior that no one is forced to engage in. A person can go their entire life without buying stocks, opening a brokerage account, or talking to a financial advisor, and still complete a full economic life. Most people do exactly that. Active individual traders are, statistically, a minority group.

Unlike payments, investment directly collides with loss aversion and creates a heavy cognitive burden. People instinctively avoid trading, so most investors’ funds are mostly sitting in retirement accounts, wealth management portfolios, ETFs, and index funds. They buy and then hold for the long term without further attention. Among those who invest through retirement accounts, 94% don’t adjust their plans once they join—almost no trading.

The result: investment has a narrow, passive base, but extremely strong stickiness.

You can see it clearly from participation rates. Even in the countries with the highest investment penetration, only about half of the population participates in the investment market in some form, while digital payment penetration is as high as 95%.

United States: About 62% of adults hold some form of investment, mostly in retirement accounts with very little activity

United Kingdom: Close behind, about 55%

China: About 24% of adults have securities accounts

India: About 13%

Brazil: 4%

Sub-Saharan Africa: Only about 1%

Even with an account, it doesn’t mean people will proactively operate it.

This makes the global asset-management scale managed by professional intermediaries reach about $147 trillion, including ETFs, mutual funds, retirement accounts, and private market funds—representing 43% of total household financial wealth (about $305 trillion) worldwide. The vast majority are passive index funds with very low fees: equity ETFs average just 14 basis points, and bond ETFs are 10 basis points. Even so, in the fund industry managing about $135 trillion in assets globally, annual revenue is still about $43.5 billion.

A small portion—assets managed by private equity, venture capital, real estate, and hedge funds (about $13 trillion)—charges a 1%~2% management fee + 12.5%~20% performance fee, for annual revenue of about $36.3 billion.

Combining advisory fees in the private markets, hedge fund performance fees, PE/VC splits, securities lending, trading commissions, and more, the investment industry’s total annual revenue is about $85~90 billion.

Overall, payments still bring in higher total revenue than investment, but per-capita revenue in the investment industry is far higher than in payments.

The collapse of the boundary

This asymmetric landscape has remained stable for decades because the two sectors have long been in a fragmented state of separate systems and separate underlying infrastructure.

Payment businesses are spread across banks, card networks, and payment processors. Asset management is spread across fund companies, wealth advisors, and retirement platforms. And trading is handled by brokerages.

Even if the same bank provides both checking accounts and investment services, it operates with independently packaged products, including separate customer onboarding, compliance processes, and user experiences. The behavioral barrier between “spending” and “investing” is further reinforced by institutional structures.

The real change is that blockchain infrastructure enables modern payment applications to provide real investment services, and investment applications to provide real payment services—using the same underlying system.

Investment balances can be used directly for payments without needing independent system-to-system fund transfers. The traditional brokerage workflow is: deposit funds → buy → sell → transfer to the bank → spend. Crypto infrastructure compresses it into a single step.

A wallet, a new bank, a trading application, or any programmable balance can let the same pot of dollars earn yield in lending protocols while also completing cross-border transfer and settlement, or exchange it into other assets within the same interface and within the same action session. Account holders can profit from both the investment and payment sides at the same time.

For the first time in history, the same balance, the same interface, can generate revenue from two verticals at once.