Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
In today’s financial ecosystem, the simplicity perceived by the end user during checkout is, in reality, a technical illusion. Beneath that “pay” button lies what Lionel Martín, CTO and Country Manager of Lyra in Spain, defines as a “huge cake with many layers”. For innovation and data leaders at financial institutions, understanding and controlling these layers is not just about efficiency, it is a matter of strategic survival.
Martín, whose career in payment systems dates back to 1997, when “everything was billed via modem connection”, brings a unique perspective that merges the rigor of a CTO with the commercial vision of a Country Manager. His message for banking in 2026 is clear: payment sovereignty is the word of the year.
Lionel Martin,“Sovereignty is controlling the technology, controlling the data, controlling the costs, and also keeping the value of the payment method within the zone of sovereignty”
CTO and Country Manager of Lyra in Spain.
What does payment sovereignty really mean?
For a bank or a large financial institution, sovereignty transcends territorial concepts. It is about controlling technology, data, and costs. As Lionel explains: “Sovereignty is controlling the technology, controlling the data, controlling the costs, and also keeping the value of the payment method within the zone of sovereignty”.
Currently, reliance on American technologies like Visa or Mastercard poses a resilience risk. If a decision were made to cut off this technology to a country or company, Europe would find itself unprotected. But beyond geopolitical risk, there is a data risk: “If you pay with a payment method that is not from your country or continent, all your purchase data escapes the legal framework where you live”.
For Heads of Data, this represents a leak of critical assets that the PSD2 framework attempts to mitigate, but which only a sovereign infrastructure can fully guarantee.
The end of “technical debt”: Building vs. Aggregating
One of the most critical points for digital transformation managers is the choice between speed and control. Many competitors in the Fintech space have chosen to be aggregators of third-party solutions to improve their time to market. However, Lionel warns about the hidden cost of this decision: the creation of technical debt that hampers performance and raises costs in the long run.
Lyra has chosen a more demanding but robust path: building its own technological stack. “My challenge is to hide this complexity to allow for a higher payment success rate”, Martín asserts. By controlling every connection directly with the acquirer, it is possible to identify errors in intermediate layers that others ignore, allowing for an increase in the success rate by 0.2% to 0.4%. For a financial entity processing millions of transactions, this marginal adjustment translates into millions of euros in recovered revenue.
Certification and B2B Resilience
In the B2B environment, technological sovereignty goes hand in hand with security. Owning the technology requires certifying every process (PCI DSS, EMVCo, PSD2). Although Lionel acknowledges that “there is a business of certification”, he stresses that it is the only way to guarantee reliability and security in an environment where improvisation is not an option.
💡Lionel said…
“My challenge is to hide this complexity to allow for a higher payment success rate”
AI: From anti-fraud to autonomous payment consent
Artificial Intelligence is not just another trend; it is a horizontal architectural shift. In the world of payments, its application is evolving from fraud detection to a total redefinition of the shopping experience.
- Real-Time Fraud Detection: Traditionally, offline detection was the norm due to the cost of real-time computing. AI changes this paradigm, allowing for instantaneous and much more precise detection of fraud patterns.
- Future Payment Consent: This is perhaps the most disruptive concept mentioned by Martín. In the future, the user will not simply search and pay; instead, they will provide parameters to an AI and, most importantly, their prior payment consent. “I give you my payment method and my payment consent, but for the future… the AI will search the internet for something that matches your criteria and will pay for it automatically”, Lionel predicts.
This shift requires banks to prepare their infrastructures to manage dynamic consents and transactions initiated by intelligent agents, not just humans.
Operational efficiency: The CFO’s argument
For executives evaluating the ROI of their platforms, Lionel offers direct advice: price cannot be the only criterion. A modern payment infrastructure must be measured by its capacity for operational savings.
Data normalization is the key. When a platform allows payments from cards, PayPal, Bizum, or Open Banking transfers to arrive in the same format and file, the accounting department is transformed. “Our customers save between three and five days a month with our solutions because everything is already automated and standardized”. For a medium or large company, recovering a week of work from its financial team every month is a much more powerful sales argument than a small reduction in transactional fees.
Conclusion: Looking toward 2027
The future of payments in Europe involves solutions like Open Finance and regional interoperability. Lyra, with its presence in India, Europe, and South America, demonstrates that simplicity for the end customer is only achieved through technical complexity that is well-managed by the provider.
As Lionel Martín aptly summarizes: “Price is not everything… if you take into account fluidity, brand image, and reconciliation, a modern solution is much more cost-effective”.
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