The Green Sheet Online Edition
December 22, 2025 • 25:12:02
Less conventional ways to reflect on 2025
As the calendar flips from one year to the next, a year-end review often means dashboards, KPI snapshots and a list of what didn't get done. Useful, yes, but incomplete. For payments professionals, whose work sits at the crossroads of technology, trust, regulation and human behavior, there are richer ways to take stock of a year.
Here are a few less conventional ways to reflect on 2025.
Audit the frictions, not just the wins
Begin with friction points instead of metrics. Where did money, data or decisions slow down unexpectedly? Which approvals took too long? Where did partners hesitate or customers disengage? In earlier eras, bottlenecks were studied as carefully as profits. Mapping friction reveals where resilience broke down and where investment may matter more than innovation.
Write the year as a customer story
Pick one imaginary, but realistic merchant or consumer and trace their journey through your ecosystem from January to December. Every rule change, outage, integration, fraud scare or policy shift they encountered becomes part of a narrative. This story-based reflection often surfaces disconnects between internal success and external experience that metrics alone miss.
Look for shadow work
What work kept things functioning but was never documented? Manual reviews, late-night escalations, patchwork fixes, human judgment stepping in where automation failed? In pre-industrial accounting, unpriced labor was often annotated in margins. Naming shadow work today helps organizations decide whether to formalize, automate or protect it.
Revisit predictions
What trends were you certain would crest this year? Embedded finance timelines, real-time payments adoption, AI deployment curves? Instead of asking whether you were right, ask what assumptions aged poorly. Prize humility and learning, not ego.
Assess trust
Trust often matters more than momentum. This includes trust between in-house teams, and with merchants, regulators and partners. Ask where trust deepened as well as where it quietly eroded. Payments infrastructure runs on confidence long before it runs on code.
A year isn't just a sequence of launches and challenges. It's a system under pressure, adapting in real time. Reflecting on where this year bent, where it cracked, and where it quietly held may be the most valuable assessment you carry forward into 2026. 
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