Written by: Jack Simison

Translated by: Chopper, Foresight News

Payments and investments generate a total of $30 trillion in annual revenue, exceeding the total market value of cryptocurrencies. The two rely on completely different user behaviors and completely different underlying infrastructures, and even today, correspond to completely different product systems. Here, I want to directly compare these two worlds.

One track earns from money that everyone must pay; payments are essential for survival and a necessity; the other track earns from money that most people will never choose to invest; investing is a luxury behavior.

Payments and investment management are the two largest fields in financial services by revenue size. They have long operated within their own independent systems: different products, different accounts, different regulatory frameworks, and different interaction interfaces. This is both a legacy of historical system architecture and a result of the lack of practical needs to connect payments and investments in the past.

Programmable money is breaking down this barrier. The same balance, stored in the same wallet, public chain, or application, can now participate in two income channels simultaneously. The two worlds are converging in the form of a unified account.

To understand why this is important, one must see the significant differences in the underlying behavioral logic of the two.

Payments: A Universal Behavior

Payment is the only financial behavior that is absolutely necessary for participating in daily economic life. Buying food, paying rent, paying utility bills... without payments, people cannot survive.

By 2025, approximately two-thirds of adults globally will have conducted or received digital payments. In the US, consumers make about 48 payments per month; in India, UPI has over 500 million unique users; in Brazil, Pix has increased the average annual transaction volume to approximately 193 transactions per person; in some regions of Sub-Saharan Africa, mobile payments are no longer just a convenient way to pay, but an important part of the financial system.

Payments are not an optional financial activity for a small active group; they are a daily behavior for the masses. They are immediate, frequent, and psychologically low-impact, with costs that are usually negligible. Consumers do not deliberately calculate transaction fees at the checkout. Compared to cash, digital payments reduce the pain of paying, further increasing the frequency of use. The lower the friction, the greater the transaction volume.

This behavioral foundation brings enormous business coverage. According to McKinsey data, the global payment system processes approximately 34 to 36 trillion transactions each year, with an annual flow of funds amounting to about $18 to $20 trillion. Salary issuance, merchant payments, cross-border remittances, bill payments, subscription services, personal transfers... at every link, intermediaries can take a share of the pie.

Every layer of the payment chain profits from this.

McKinsey's "2025 Global Payments Report" shows that global payment revenue is about $2.5 trillion. However, nearly half of this (about $1.15 trillion) is net interest income: the earnings that banks earn from deposited funds during transaction gaps. This is more like profits from idle funds rather than pure transaction fees. Excluding this portion, the core payment revenue from just fund transfers, exchange fees, processing fees, embedded finance (Shopify, installment payments, Stripe) and frictional fees (ATM, overdraft, on-chain fees) still amounts to about $1.35 trillion.

Investing: A Luxury Behavior

In contrast, investing is a financial behavior that no one is compelled to engage in. A person can go their whole life without buying stocks, opening a brokerage account, or consulting a financial advisor, and still complete their economic life intact. Most people do just that. Active individual traders are statistically only a minority group.

Unlike payments, investing confronts loss aversion directly and carries a heavy cognitive burden. People instinctively avoid trading, which is why most ordinary investors' funds languish in pension accounts, investment portfolios, ETFs, and index funds, bought and then held long-term with little further attention. Among those who participate in investing through pension accounts, 94% do not adjust their plans once they join, trading almost not at all.

The result is that the behavioral foundation of investing is narrow, passive, but has strong stickiness.

The participation rate comparison shows a glimpse: even in the countries with the highest investment penetration, only about half of the population participates in the investment market in some form, while the penetration rate for digital payments reaches as high as 95%.

• United States: About 62% of adults hold some form of investment, mostly in very few operated pension accounts
• United Kingdom: Following closely, about 55%
• China: About 24% of adults have securities accounts
• India: About 13%
• Brazil: 4%
• Sub-Saharan Africa: Only about 1%

Having an account does not imply that one will actively trade.

This has led to a global asset management scale managed by professional intermediaries reaching about $147 trillion, including ETFs, mutual funds, pension and private market funds, accounting for 43% of global household financial wealth (about $305 trillion). The vast majority are passive index funds with extremely low fee rates: stock ETFs average only 14 basis points, and bond ETFs 10 basis points. Nevertheless, the fund industry managing approximately $135 trillion in assets still has annual revenues of about $43.5 billion.

Assets managed by a small number of private equity, venture capital, real estate, and hedge funds (about $13 trillion) charge 1%–2% management fees + 12.5%–20% performance profit-sharing, resulting in annual revenues of about $36.3 billion.

Considering private market advisory fees, hedge fund performance fees, PE/VC profit-sharing, securities lending, trading commissions, etc., the total annual revenue of the investment industry amounts to approximately $85 to $90 billion.

Overall revenue in the payment industry remains higher than that of investing, but the per capita revenue in the investment industry is far higher than that in payments.

The Collapse of Boundaries

This asymmetrical pattern has been stable for decades because the two fields have long been in separate systems with independent infrastructure.

Payment businesses are dispersed among banks, card organizations, and payment processing institutions. Asset management businesses are spread across fund companies, wealth advisors, and pension platforms, while trading businesses are handled by brokerage firms.

Even when the same bank provides both checking accounts and investment services, it operates as independent products, including separate customer registrations, compliance processes, and user experiences. The behavioral barrier between "spending" and "investing" is further reinforced by the system.

However, the real change is that blockchain infrastructure allows modern payment applications to provide genuine investment services, and investment applications to offer real payment services, sharing the same underlying system.

Investment balances can be used directly for payments without needing to be transferred through separate systems. Traditional brokerage processes involve: deposit → buy → sell → transfer to bank → spend. The crypto infrastructure compresses this into a single step.

Wallets, new banks, trading applications, or any programmable balance can allow the same dollar to earn revenue in lending agreements while completing cross-border transfer settlements or to exchange for other assets in the same interface and operation session. Account holders can profit from both investment and payment sides simultaneously.

For the first time in history, the same balance and the same interface can simultaneously earn returns from two different tracks.