A recent McKinsey interview with Bhavin Turakhia, CEO of Zeta, highlighted a critical trend in financial services: legacy systems can no longer keep pace with modern payment needs. Zeta is part of a "new breed of payment processors" reinventing the infrastructure behind card issuing, making it faster, smarter, and more adaptable.

It’s an important transformation. But issuing isn’t the only side of the payments ecosystem that needs reinvention. The way businesses accept payments is equally overdue for a rethink.

At ModoPayments, we believe the next wave of modernization must happen at the payment acceptance layer — the crucial moment when revenue either flows successfully… or fails.

Why Acceptance Flows Can No Longer Rely on Legacy Systems

The payment acceptance systems most businesses use today were built for a different era. They assume:

• Payments succeed most of the time, without intervention.
• Payment methods remain static and predictable.
• Fees are a fixed cost of doing business.

Today’s reality is much more complex:

• Recurring billing models mean a single payment failure can risk customer churn.
• Payment methods and rails are proliferating, from cards to wallets to bank-to-bank options.
• Payment failures and high transaction fees quietly erode margins, unless actively managed.

Just as Zeta and others are reimagining issuing, businesses must rethink how they handle incoming payments to optimize success, control costs, and protect revenue.

A New Approach to Payment Acceptance

Modo is leading this shift.  

We give businesses control over how payments flow, intelligently routing transactions, maximizing success rates, and minimizing processing costs without being locked into a single gateway, hub, or processor.

Our modern acceptance platform enables:

• Smarter payment routing to the best-performing providers.
• Dynamic first attempt and retry logic to rescue transactions that might otherwise fail.
• Machine learning-driven optimizations based on historical payment patterns.
• Prevention of revenue leakage by turning passive payment acceptance into an active revenue protection strategy.

In short: payment acceptance should work for you, not against you.

The Future of Payments Belongs to the Builders

Zeta’s story shows how rapidly the issuing side of the ecosystem is evolving.  

At Modo, we’re proud to be part of the parallel movement in acceptance, building infrastructure that empowers businesses to take charge of their payments journey, reduce payment-related churn, and create more reliable revenue streams.

The payments stack of the future won’t just be faster. It will be smarter, more resilient, and engineered for business growth.  

And at Modo, we're excited to be helping build it.