Blockchain Blurs the Lines Between Payments and Investments

Written by: Jack Simison

Compiled by Chopper, Foresight News

Payments and investments generate a combined $3 trillion in revenue annually, exceeding the total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies. They rely on entirely different user behaviors and fundamentally distinct underlying infrastructures, and until today, they have corresponded to completely separate product ecosystems. Here, I’d like to directly compare these two worlds.

One market earns money from payments everyone must make—payments that are essential for survival, a necessity. Another market earns money from investments that most people will never choose—investments are a luxury.

Payments and investment management are the two largest revenue-generating areas in financial services. They have long operated within separate systems: different products, separate accounts, distinct regulatory frameworks, and distinct user interfaces. This separation is both a legacy of historical system architectures and a result of the past absence of practical demand to integrate payments with investment.

Programmable money is breaking down this barrier. The same balance, held in the same wallet, public chain, and application, can now simultaneously participate in two income streams. Two worlds are converging through unified accounts.

To understand why this is important, you must recognize the significant differences in the underlying behavioral logic between the two.

Payment is the only financial activity essential to participating in daily economic life. Buying food, paying rent, covering utility bills—without payment, people cannot survive.

In 2025, approximately two-thirds of adults worldwide made or received a digital payment. In the United States, consumers complete about 48 payments per month; in India, UPI has over 500 million unique users; in Brazil, Pix has increased the average number of transactions per person per year to about 193; in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, mobile payments are no longer merely a convenient payment method but a vital component of the financial system.

Payments are not an optional financial activity for a small group of early adopters, but a daily behavior for the masses. They are instant, frequent, psychologically low-effort, and typically involve negligible costs. Consumers do not consciously calculate transaction fees at the checkout. Compared to cash, digital payments reduce the pain of paying, further increasing usage frequency. The less friction, the higher the transaction volume.

This behavioral foundation offers tremendous business reach. According to McKinsey data, global payment systems process approximately 3.4 to 3.6 trillion transactions annually, with an annual fund turnover of about $18 to $20 trillion. From salary disbursements and merchant payments to cross-border remittances, bill payments, subscription services, and peer-to-peer transfers—every环节 allows intermediaries to take a cut.

Each layer of the payment chain profits from it.

McKinsey’s “2025 Global Payments Report” shows that global payment revenues amount to approximately $2.5 trillion. However, nearly half of this—about $1.15 trillion—consists of net interest income: the earnings banks generate from float, the funds held in payment accounts between transactions. This is more akin to idle fund income than pure payment fees. Excluding this component, core payment revenues from fund transfers, exchange fees, processing fees, embedded finance (Shopify, installment payments, Stripe), and frictional charges (ATM, overdraft, on-chain fees) still total approximately $1.35 trillion.

In contrast, investing is a financial activity that no one is required to engage in. A person can live an entire life without buying stocks, opening a brokerage account, or consulting a financial advisor, and still complete a full economic life. This is exactly how most people live. Active individual traders are statistically a minority.

Unlike payments, investing directly contradicts loss aversion and imposes a heavy cognitive burden. People instinctively avoid trading, so most retail investors’ funds remain idle in retirement accounts, wealth management portfolios, ETFs, and index funds—bought and then held indefinitely with no further attention. Among those who invest through retirement accounts, 94% never adjust their plans once enrolled and trade almost nothing.

The result is that investment behavior is narrow-based, passive, but highly sticky.

The participation rate comparison is telling: even in the country with the highest investment penetration, only about half the population participates in investment markets in some form, while digital payment penetration reaches 95%.

• United States: Approximately 62% of adults hold some form of investment, most of which are in low-activity retirement accounts.
• United Kingdom: Followed by approximately 55%
• China: Approximately 24% of adults own securities accounts.
• India: approximately 13%
• Brazil: 4%
• Sub-Saharan Africa: Only about 1%

Even with an account, it doesn't mean you'll take active action.

This brings the total assets under professional intermediary management to approximately $147 trillion, including ETFs, mutual funds, pensions, and private market funds, accounting for 43% of global household financial wealth (approximately $305 trillion). The vast majority of these are passive index funds with extremely low fees: equity ETFs average just 14 basis points, while bond ETFs average 10 basis points. Even so, the global fund industry, which manages around $135 trillion in assets, generates annual revenues of approximately $435 billion.

Assets managed by private equity, venture capital, real estate, and hedge funds—approximately $13 trillion—charge management fees of 1% to 2% plus performance fees of 12.5% to 20%, generating annual revenues of about $363 billion.

Including fees from private market advisors, hedge fund performance fees, PE/VC carried interest, securities lending, and trading commissions, the investment industry's total annual revenue is approximately $850 billion to $900 billion.

Overall revenue in the payments industry still exceeds that of investing, but per capita income in the investing industry is significantly higher than in payments.

This asymmetric landscape has remained stable for decades because the two domains have long existed in isolated systems with separate infrastructures.

Payment services are distributed across banks, card networks, and payment processors. Asset management services are spread among fund companies, wealth advisors, and pension platforms, while trading services are handled by brokerage firms.

Even when the same bank offers both checking accounts and investment services, they operate as separate products with distinct customer onboarding, compliance processes, and user experiences. The behavioral barrier between "spending" and "investing" is further reinforced by these institutional structures.

The real change lies in the fact that blockchain infrastructure enables modern payment apps to offer genuine investment services, and investment apps to offer genuine payment services—all using the same underlying system.

Investment balances can be used directly for payments without requiring transfers through a separate system. Traditional brokerage processes involve: depositing funds → purchasing → selling → transferring to a bank account → spending. Cryptocurrency infrastructure streamlines this into a single step.

Wallets, neobanks, payment apps, or any programmable balance can allow the same dollar to earn yield in a lending protocol while simultaneously completing cross-border transfer settlement, or be exchanged for other assets within the same interface and session. Account holders can benefit from both investing and payments at once.

For the first time ever, the same balance and interface can earn rewards from two different tracks simultaneously.