The Art of Influence for Product Leaders
Senior product leaders are increasingly judged on their ability to influence without direct authority, according to a panel of executives who transitioned from banking to global fintech roles. A key skill is aligning product, engineering, compliance, and business units around a unified vision. Building credibility as a 'thought partner' is seen as vital for driving strategy.
- The RTP® network from The Clearing House saw payment value soar 195% in Q2 2025 to $481 billion, largely driven by a transaction limit increase to $10 million in February. This change spurred a 376% increase in the average payment size, from $842 in January to over $4,000 by June, attracting over 340,000 businesses for use cases like B2B payments and merchant settlement. - While over 1,400 financial institutions are now participating in the FedNow Service as of July 2025, its transaction volume of 1.3 million in Q1 2025 is still dwarfed by the RTP network's over 1 million daily transactions. The majority of FedNow participants are community banks and credit unions, with many still in the early stages of offering the service directly to consumers. - Globally, initiatives to connect domestic instant payment systems are accelerating to facilitate cross-border real-time payments. Swift is playing a key role in enabling this interoperability, connecting to platforms like Europe's TIPS and RT1, and is launching a new scheme in 2026 to standardize the experience for retail and SME cross-border payments. - In the fight against financial fraud, AI-driven attacks now account for 42.5% of all detected fraud attempts. In response, financial institutions are leveraging AI for fraud detection, with advanced systems achieving detection rates of 87-94% and reducing false positives by 40-60% compared to rule-based methods. - Digital identity verification is becoming a cornerstone of fraud prevention, with banks adopting technologies like biometric verification and liveness detection to secure the account creation and authentication stages. This identity-centric approach is critical for real-time fraud detection in the context of open banking and embedded finance. - The global embedded finance market is projected to grow significantly, with forecasts estimating it will reach between $454 billion and $588 billion by 2030/2031. Embedded payments are the dominant segment, and North America currently holds the largest market share. - Institutional adoption of stablecoins for cross-border payments is expected to accelerate with regulatory clarity. Some analysts predict that 5-10% of cross-border payments, equating to $2.1 to $4.2 trillion, could be made using stablecoins by 2030. - Influencing without authority is recognized as a critical skill for product managers, requiring them to build credibility through expertise and align stakeholders by understanding their motivations and goals. This involves being politically savvy and using storytelling to build momentum for a shared product vision.
