A warming world will — and is already having — a profound impact on the things we all depend on: shelter, food, water, energy, medicine. Most nations have committed to drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to dial back the planet’s thermostat.  But true sustainability is not just about emissions. We will need to transform the way all industries operate — from agriculture to transport and health — to meet the SDGs. The great green transition necessitates innovation. It calls for new, clean technologies and the scaling of proven ones. It requires industry leaders, disruptive innovators, and ambitious startups to create the blueprints for a sustainable world. “Sustainable societies require systems, infrastructures, and propositions that facilitate and stimulate people to take better care of themselves and their surroundings, as private individuals and as professionals,” says Andy Lürling, founding partner at LUMOLabs. Calling all Scaleup founders! Join the Soonicorn Summit on November 28 in Amsterdam. Meet with the leaders of Picnic, Miro, Carbon Equity and more during this exclusive event dedicated to Scaleup Founders! The sprouts of change are already visible. Climate action is accelerating faster now than ever before. But we need to keep going. This is why we’ve made Sustainable Societies one of the six refreshed themes of TNW Conference 2025, taking place on June 19 and 20 in Amsterdam. The theme is for climate warriors. It’s for startups, investors, innovators leading the charge in the climate, energy, health, and agrifood industries. It’s also for anyone — from big execs to young innovators — who want to deepen their understanding of the myriad ways technology can drive the sustainability shift.   “I foresee that the real value of emerging and disruptive technologies such as AI, blockchain, and AR/VR, lies in their convergence,” says Lürling, who’s an advisory board member for the TNW Conference. “Together they hold the key to structurally disrupting widespread degenerative habits and systems.” We understand that sustainability requires a holistic approach, across industries. That’s why we’ve divided the Sustainable Societies theme into four pillars.  Turning the Tide: The innovations tackling the water crisis Farm to Table: An insider’s look at the future of food Hacking the Human: Building a sustainable healthcare system, from engineered proteins to cell-based therapies Waste Not, Watt Not: Turning environmental issues into opportunities If you want to hear all about these ideas, you can grab a ticket for TNW Conference now. Use the code TNWXMEDIA2025 to get 30% off your pass. See you on June 19 and 20 in Amsterdam! source

When you’re starting a business, there’s a lot to think about. Do you really need to open a separate business bank account? At first glance, using your personal account might seem easier. Fewer accounts to manage, fewer fees to pay, fewer perks to keep track of. What’s the harm, right? But as you dig deeper, it becomes clear that having an actual business bank account offers benefits that go beyond just having a place to store your business cash. There are some drawbacks, but they pale in comparison to the advantages. 1 Wrike Employees per Company Size Micro (0-49), Small (50-249), Medium (250-999), Large (1,000-4,999), Enterprise (5,000+) Medium (250-999 Employees), Enterprise (5,000+ Employees), Large (1,000-4,999 Employees) Medium, Enterprise, Large Features Agile Development, Analytics / Reports, API, and more 2 Accelo Employees per Company Size Micro (0-49), Small (50-249), Medium (250-999), Large (1,000-4,999), Enterprise (5,000+) Micro (0-49 Employees), Medium (250-999 Employees), Large (1,000-4,999 Employees), Small (50-249 Employees) Micro, Medium, Large, Small Features Analytics / Reports, API, Billing / Invoicing, and more 3 Zoho Projects Employees per Company Size Micro (0-49), Small (50-249), Medium (250-999), Large (1,000-4,999), Enterprise (5,000+) Enterprise (5,000+ Employees) Enterprise Features Agile Development, Analytics / Reports, API, and more Who needs a business bank account? The short answer: almost anyone who’s running a business. Whether you’re a freelancer, sole proprietor, or the owner of an LLC or corporation, having a business account can make your life easier. If your business is anything more than a casual side gig, you’ll want that separation. For a more detailed guide on how to keep your finances separate, check out this article. Here’s why: LLCs and corporations: These businesses are legally separate entities, meaning their finances should be kept apart from the owner’s personal accounts. Failing to do so could blur the lines between your personal and business liabilities. Freelancers and sole proprietors: Even though you might not have to separate your finances legally, it’s still a smart idea. A business bank account simplifies taxes and bookkeeping, and it looks more professional when you’re sending out invoices or paying suppliers. Other businesses with employees or partners: If you need to manage payroll, write checks, or have more than one person with access to the account, a business bank account is crucial. Types of business bank accounts to consider When it comes to business banking, you’re not limited to just a checking account. There are several types of accounts that might suit your needs depending on the nature of your business. Here’s a quick rundown: Business checking account This is your everyday account. It’s where money comes in from clients and goes out for expenses, like bills or paying vendors. A business checking account gives you the flexibility to handle all your basic transactions while keeping your personal and business finances separate. Many accounts offer integration with QuickBooks and other tools to streamline bookkeeping. Business savings account If you’re smart about setting aside funds for emergencies, taxes, or future investments, a business savings account will help you grow that cash. It’s also an easy way to build a buffer in case of unexpected expenses. Merchant services account If your business accepts credit card payments, you’ll need a merchant services account. It’s a special type of account that allows you to process card payments, which then get transferred into your business checking account. For more on managing payroll and related services, check out this guide on what a payroll account is. How does a business checking account work? A business checking account functions a lot like your personal one. You can deposit money, write checks, make electronic transfers, and withdraw cash. The difference is that it’s tailored for business needs. For example, business accounts often have higher transaction limits and offer features like: Multiple signers: If you have employees or partners, they can have access to the account, with permissions set by you. Integration with accounting software: Many business accounts sync directly with accounting tools like QuickBooks or Xero, saving you a ton of time on bookkeeping. Merchant services: Some business checking accounts come with payment processing solutions, making it easier to accept payments from customers. The biggest perk, though, is the clear separation between your personal and business finances. That’s going to save you a lot of headaches when tax season rolls around. More Banking Coverage Business checking account vs. personal checking account If you’re still wondering whether you really need a business account, let’s compare it to a personal checking account. Personal checking account Meant for personal day-to-day expenses like rent, groceries, and Netflix subscriptions. Typically has lower fees and fewer features. No real need for detailed tracking or reporting. Business checking account Designed for managing business income and expenses. Offers features like multiple signers, higher transaction limits, and integrations with business tools. Necessary for protecting your legal structure if you run an LLC or corporation. Helps you build business credit. Bottom line: A business checking account is built to handle the complexities of running a business, whereas a personal checking account is not. Benefits of a business bank account Having a business bank account isn’t just a formality; it offers real benefits that can make a huge difference in how you manage your business. Simplifies taxesAll your business income and expenses are in one place, making it easy to track everything. Come tax time, you (or your accountant) won’t need to sift through a mess of personal transactions to find business-related expenses. Establishes professionalismClients, vendors, and partners will take you more seriously when you pay them from a business account rather than your personal one. It shows that you’re running a legitimate operation, not just a hobby. Helps build business creditHaving a business bank account is one of the first steps toward building business credit. This can come in handy if you ever need to apply for a loan or line of credit. Legal protectionIf you’re running an LLC or corporation, keeping your business and personal finances separate is crucial for

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More AI agents hold much promise, with some saying they will revolutionize the workplace itself.  But they can be a bit concept-y, and enterprises don’t always know where to begin.  One-year-old startup CrewAI has quickly become one of the most popular AI agent frameworks — it’s used by the likes of AI pioneer Andrew Ng, among many other leading companies — as it simplifies the building and deployment of multi-agent systems.  Today, the company is launching its first — and highly-anticipated — product to market, CrewAI Enterprise. The platform, which has been in beta for some months, enables users to build, deploy and iterate multi-agent “crews.” The company is also announcing an $18 million funding round.  CrewAI founder and CEO João Moura called the opportunity for AI agents “immense.”  “The AI agent is basically right now an LLM that doesn’t need to be part of conversations,” he told VentureBeat. “Instead of a conversation, you give it a task, and it has the agency to autonomously decide what to do and when to do it.” ‘The simpler the better,’ open-source critical According to Markets and Markets, the AI agent industry will grow dramatically in the next five years, from $5 billion this year to nearly $50 billion by 2030. Capgemini reports that 10% of large enterprises are already using AI agents, more than half plan to use them in the next year and 82% will adopt them within the next three years.  “Agents are the big thing everyone’s talking about right now,”said Moura. “The genie is not going back into the bottle. People want this to happen.” CrewAI, which was just founded in 2023, has already established itself as one of the most popular agent frameworks, competing with the likes of Langraph and Autogen. Moura noted that enterprises are more and more quickly moving from AI agent conception to use cases.  “What we’re noticing is that companies are graduating way faster than we expected,” he said.  The company’s new platform is built on top of its popular open-source framework and enables organizations to build crews of AI agents using any large language model (LLM) or cloud platform. Users can plan and build multi-agent systems; securely deploy those agents into a production environment with custom levels of access and control; and iterate and track ROI with testing and training tools.  When getting started with AI agents, “the simpler the better,” said Moura. That’s what sets CrewAI apart, he said; they also have “doubled down” on educating people.  “It’s a brand new category and market,” he said. “People are trying to understand how they should go about this, they want to be educated.” He noted of other competing projects, “it’s almost like they’re trying to make it complex on purpose.” CrewAI also has significant open-source traction. The company has a “very opinionated” view on how agents work. Open-source is an instrumental part of how the world builds software, Moura noted and is an “amazing distribution channel.” “The world runs on open-source, every software out there uses open-source libraries,” he said. “We don’t want to be in a world where all models are closed source, you don’t know what’s going on, you’re locked in with all these vendors.” Use cases from internal processes to marketing Moura pointed to a “big array of use cases” for agentic AI overall and called CrewAI’s offering “such a cross vertical product.” The most common use cases are around internal automations, marketing and coding, he noted. Agents can perform research, summarization and reporting, and can also help with legal analysis.  For instance, one Fortune 500 customer with consumer-facing products was looking to update legacy projects and apps (including Java and SAP). They were able to build agents that can update and test code themselves before passing them off for final review by a human engineer. They are saving hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result (by their own estimate), said Moura.  “Marketing’s another interesting one,” he noted. Agents can develop leads by interacting with  large, instant sources of information. Or, in the case of real estate companies, agents can monitor markets, produce leads and advise agents on buy-or-rent scenarios.  Moura pointed to a big beverage company that used CrewAI to build agents that handle internal requests from a portal accessible by thousands of employees. A series of very specific rules need to be reviewed before internal requests can be approved, Moura explained; agents understand and review those rules, reply to requests (whether they were approved or not or if more info is needed). Robotic process automation (RPA) systems then take over to port stored information into the company’s database.  Getting even more complex, Moura said CrewAI’s platform has been used by a big media company that fine-tuned models to act like movie directors: They can cut frames and add subtitles and music, then automatically push out to social media.  “People are always pushing the cutting edge,” said Moura. Millions of agents, significant traction among Fortune 500 CrewAI’s open-source platform executes 10 million-plus agents a month, and the company claims it is already being used by nearly half of the Fortune 500. It signed its first 150 beta enterprise customers in less than six months.  “I gotta say it has been insane. I think we’re one of the fastest-growing projects out there,” said Moura. “It’s very intense and very humbling.” Crew AI’s inception round was led by boldstart ventures, and its series A was led by Insight Partners. Additional funding comes from Blitzscaling Ventures, Craft Ventures, Earl Grey Capital and several top angels including Ng and Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of HubSpot.  Ng noted in a statement: “CrewAI makes it easy and fast to develop both simple and complex multi-agent AI workflows. Its powerful orchestration features for enterprises — including memory and self-healing — help businesses go well beyond traditional automation.” source

In the course of the year, there were already indications that the conversion could go deeper than originally planned. In the current quarterly report, SAP speaks of 9000 to 10,000 jobs that will be affected by the restructuring. Most of them would involve volunteer programs and internal retraining measures, it said. According to SAP, the program is to be completed at the beginning of 2025 and cost around €3 billion. But the conversion leaves clear traces. The satisfaction of SAP employees is declining. Employee engagement was at 86 percent in 2020, and never fell below 80 percent in the years before or since, but now SAP management expects only a value of between 70 and 74 percent for 2024. Last year, 76 to 80 percent had been expected in Walldorf. The software company is a long way from the 2022 target of achieving 84 to 86 percent next year. In the meantime, no concrete figures for 2025 are given in the boardroom. There is only talk of wanting to steadily increase the number. Cloud business is going well for SAP Financially, on the other hand, things are going splendidly for SAP. For the third quarter of 2024, the software manufacturer reported revenue of just under €8.5 billion, an increase of ten percent after adjusting for currency effects compared to the same quarter last year. The operating result even improved by 28 percent from just under €1.8 billion to a good €2.2 billion. The bottom line was a profit of over €1.4 billion, compared to €1.3 billion in the previous year. source

In recent years, facial recognition technology has gone through cycles of falling in and out of favor, adding to complex questions about artificial intelligence and privacy. Neither facial recognition nor AI is new, but the ways they are applied opens up business potential as well as liability. An interview for an upcoming InformationWeek series on generative AI shed additional light on the intersection of these technologies and why the public may need proactive deterrents for both. Ben Y. Zhao, professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, led a team that worked on a tool called Fawkes, which is meant to disrupt unknown third parties from creating facial recognition profiles to track individuals by using images found on social media. The conversation with Zhao on Fawkes, and his later work on Nightshade, will appear next week on InformationWeek. The name of the Fawkes tool was derived from Guy Fawkes, whose likeness was adopted in the form of a mask as a symbol by hacktivist group Anonymous and others who seek to maintain anonymity while engaging in various forms of protest. The Fawkes tool was developed around the time Clearview.ai got sued for scraping data from social media to flesh out its facial recognition database and tools, which were sold to law enforcement. Related:FTC Prescribes Ban on Rite Aid’s AI Facial Recognition Use Not long after that lawsuit, Clearview.ai was back in headlines, this time offering its services to Ukraine for the potential use of facial recognition to spot Russian agents. This exemplifies some of the back and forth associated with facial recognition. Meta bowed out of facial recognition for tagging photos on Facebook. The Federal Trade Commission banned Rite Aid from using facial recognition for five years after it was discovered the pharmacy chain’s use of biometric technology unjustly target and tagged minorities as potential shoplifters. And those are just some recent steps in this dance between innovating with AI and facial recognition and addressing the issues they raise. Over the past five years there have been discussions of facial recognitions risks, the liability concerns associated with AI, as well as potential uses of facial recognition that do not violate civil rights while responsibly respecting individuals. This particular dilemma between privacy, security, and opportunity dates back even further. The rush of interest in biometrics that arose after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — just a few years shy of a quarter century ago — never completely went away. The effort to identify potential attackers became paramount, a natural reaction steeped in a desire to restore a sense of safety. Related:Clearview AI Offers Face Recognition AI to Ukraine This led to a boom of business for companies that promised to sift through digital images to catch bad actors. This also opened the door for potential authoritarian abuses. Regardless, businesses continue to look for ways to make facial recognition part of the identification equation. But is that viable in a world where the right to privacy and the right to be forgotten continue to gain momentum and strength? This episode of DOS Won’t Hunt explores the tension at that intersection of AI, security, facial recognition, and lessons that could still be learned from Guy Fawkes and other masks. Listen to the full podcast here. source

The recently released EU Competitiveness Report from the European Commission delivered a stark message to the bloc’s tech sector. As Mario Draghi, lead author of the report, warned, Europe faces ‘’an existential challenge’’. “The problem is not that Europe lacks ideas or ambition,” the former Italian premier said. “But innovation is blocked at the next stage: we are failing to translate innovation into commercialisation.” Namely, the bloc needs to focus on providing the right conditions for more European big tech companies to grow — and the incentives for them to actually stay. As we get ready for CES Unveiled in Amsterdam on October 15, this is something on many policymakers’ and founders’ minds. Although the event is focused on showcasing European innovation, its ties to CES in Las Vegas also attract founders interested in possible market opportunities and expansion to the US. Yet, shifting politics and a changing business environment in both the US and the EU have led many to rethink their growth and expansion strategies. We spoke with two industry experts to understand the trends and challenges shaping market conditions on both sides of the Atlantic. Calling all Scaleup founders! Join the Soonicorn Summit on November 28 in Amsterdam. Meet with the leaders of Picnic, Miro, Carbon Equity and more during this exclusive event dedicated to Scaleup Founders! Is now the right time to expand to the US? The US has long been a destination of choice for European entrepreneurs looking to expand their business. As Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, explains, “the US has the advantage of sharing one common language across the market. In Europe, this can be a barrier in terms of not only getting a product out but also distribution, relationships, etc.” Many also consider the ease of expanding across the US market once they already have an established entity. However, Shapiro warns laws and regulations can vary from state to state. “Some states have laws that may be unique depending on the category — there might be different privacy laws, for example, or with AI there may be different solicitation laws. Europe has the advantage, frankly, of having an EU-wide system encompassing privacy and AI.” Indeed, while federal privacy and AI laws in the US have stalled, individual states have issued a patchwork of regulations, from Colorado’s ambitious AI Act to Delaware’s Personal Data Privacy Act. Another consideration Shapiro points out is that, although European founders have often looked to US big tech for exit opportunities in the past, the current climate is changing. Following in the EU’s footsteps, Federal Trade Commission Chair, Lina Khan, has been cracking down on big tech monopolies with antitrust cases including investigations into the likes of Microsoft, OpenAI, and NVIDIA. “That has dried up a bit of the investment money,” Shapiro says. “You can go public, you can grow internally, and have private equity investments, but the acquisition exit is one of the most common routes, so that’s definitely a challenge. It’s had a chilling effect on big companies investing in small companies, they just don’t want to deal with potentially going to court.” However, while President Biden was supportive of antitrust initiatives during his term, there is uncertainty about whether Kamala Harris would support a similar stance if elected. And this uncertainty brings us to the elephant in the room. With fresh presidential elections coming up in November, it’s hard to predict what the business climate will be like in 2025 and beyond. Challenges and opportunities in the EU tech market TNW spoke with Constantijn van Oranje-Nassau, Startup Envoy for Techleap, a private-public organisation tasked with supporting and growing the Dutch tech ecosystem, to get his perspective on how Europe can use this opportunity to encourage retention and growth in its tech sector. “In general, I’m not pessimistic about economic activity and entrepreneurship in Europe,” he says, noting that the most recent State of European Tech Report shows venture returns in Europe are actually stronger than in the US. On the other hand, he believes regulation and a more fragmented market are two conditions that could make the bloc less favourable in founders’ eyes. Over-regulation is one issue Van Oranje highlighted. “If you look at the healthtech sector, companies have to incur considerable costs and a very big time investment to get certified, and these companies simply don’t have that. This means that they often go to the US because the FDA is much more efficient and they have a bigger market. So for the whole healthtech market, Europe has made itself very unattractive.” While Shapiro posited that common regulations for popular technologies like AI can help when expanding to new markets across Europe, Van Oranje points out that, when it comes to the AI Act, there’s a lot of work still to be done on implementation. “Right now there’s a lot of legal uncertainty. If there’s too much left to interpretation for national authorities or supervisors, then you get fragmentation in the way it’s applied.” Another challenge is how future-proof the Act can be in a market that’s moving at lightning speed. He put forward the example of GDPR. Although initially designed to protect privacy and data, it now hinders the application of AI in sectors like open government and healthcare. “I think the risk with an AI Act is that in two, three, four years time, the whole paradigm may have shifted and AI could be applied in completely different domains that we haven’t foreseen,” Van Oranje says. “Guardrails are good. Predictability is good. Standardised rules across Europe is absolutely a good thing. Standardised application of the laws is even better. So if the AI Act could do that, then, we just have to deal with its future-proofness, which is always going to be a challenge in technology.” When it comes to supporting growth, the EU could look to the US for strategies on leveraging tax incentives. “The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has done a remarkable job for the US

If you still associate planners with the spiral bound notebooks of your middle-school days, think again. Planners have gone through a huge digital upgrade, and now there’s no reason to use a traditional planner unless you prefer the tactile feel of pages (and having to make all the changes by hand every time a meeting gets scheduled). The field of digital planners and organizers is so crowded that it can be tough to find the best one for your needs. To help you out, I’ve done the research and testing to select the five best digital planners for a variety of needs — and most of them are free to use, forever. 1 Wrike Employees per Company Size Micro (0-49), Small (50-249), Medium (250-999), Large (1,000-4,999), Enterprise (5,000+) Medium (250-999 Employees), Enterprise (5,000+ Employees), Large (1,000-4,999 Employees) Medium, Enterprise, Large Features Agile Development, Analytics / Reports, API, and more 2 Zoho Projects Employees per Company Size Micro (0-49), Small (50-249), Medium (250-999), Large (1,000-4,999), Enterprise (5,000+) Enterprise (5,000+ Employees) Enterprise Features Agile Development, Analytics / Reports, API, and more 3 Nifty Employees per Company Size Micro (0-49), Small (50-249), Medium (250-999), Large (1,000-4,999), Enterprise (5,000+) Any Company Size Any Company Size Features Agile Development, Analytics / Reports, API, and more Top digital planner comparison There are many factors to consider when choosing a digital planner, though price is often at the top of the list. We’ve summarized the most important elements in the table below: Starting price Forever free plan Web app available Template library Recurring tasks Todoist $4 per month Yes Yes Yes Yes ClickUp $7 per month Yes Yes Yes Yes Notion $10 per month Yes Yes Yes Limited Structured $4.99 per month Yes No No Pro plan only Planbook $16 per year No Yes Yes Yes Todoist: Best overall Image: Todoist If you’re looking for a simple app to use as a digital planner, definitely consider Todoist. As the name suggests, it was originally designed for tracking to-do lists, but it now offers many more features, such as recurring due dates, task labels, priority levels, and planning templates. It comes in app versions that you can download for many different devices, including smartwatch apps for both Apple and Google. There are a few drawbacks, however. For instance, two-way sync is not currently supported for Apple or Outlook calendars (which may be a no-go for those dedicated to Windows or Mac project management software). Why I chose Todoist I’ve used Todoist’s free Beginner plan as my own personal digital planner for many years, and I recommend it for an excellent balance of simplicity, functionality, and cost. The free plan will likely be enough for most people, but you’ll need to pay for the Pro plan if you want access to additional features like calendar view and task reminders. For more information, read the full Todoist review. Pricing Beginner: Free for up to 5 personal projects and 5 guests per product. Pro: $4 per user per month if billed annually, or $5 per user per month if billed monthly. Business: $6 per user per month if billed annually, or $8 per user per month if billed monthly. Features Ability to set due dates and times and schedule recurring tasks. Priority levels for different tasks. Task labels to group them by type. Various planning templates. Todoist’s simple interface makes it easy to separate tasks by type. Image: Todoist Pros and cons Pros Cons Four different browser extensions to choose from. Must pay to get access to the calendar layout and task reminders. Offers smartwatch apps for Apple and Android devices. Two-way sync not available for Apple or Outlook calendar, only Google. Offline mode available. Auto backups limited on free plan. Simple, easy-to-navigate interface. ClickUp: Best for customization Image: ClickUp If other digital planners and organizers don’t offer the level of customization you crave, then ClickUp may be the solution you’ve been searching for. In Clickup, you can create custom task types, personalize your page and project views, and create automated workflows. The free forever plan supports unlimited tasks, so you can use it as your daily planner indefinitely without running into a paywall. It also supports unlimited guests, making it a great option for families or small businesses that want to share a digital planner among multiple people. Why I chose ClickUp I chose ClickUp because of its many customization options and its generous free plan, which should be plenty for most users seeking out a digital planner. I also like its friendly and colorful interface, which is very welcoming to new users. It’s worth noting that the sign-up process is smoother on desktop, so I would recommend visiting the site from your computer. For more information, read the full ClickUp review. Pricing Free: Unlimited users and tasks. Unlimited: $7 per user per month if billed annually, or $10 per user per month if billed monthly. Business: $12 per user per month if billed annually, or $19 per user per month if billed monthly. Enterprise: Contact sales for custom pricing. ClickUp AI: Add on to any paid plan for $7 per person per month. Features Additional project views such as kanban boards and calendars. Virtual whiteboard for brainstorming. Collaborate in documents for note taking and content creation. Customizable subtasks available. An example of the daily planner template in ClickUp. Image: ClickUp Pros and cons Pros Cons Colorful interface that is easy to navigate. Only 100MB of storage on the free plan. Forever free plan that supports unlimited tasks and users. Advanced project management features present a steep learning curve. Many templates to choose from. Multiple project views available. Notion: Best for pre-built templates Image: Notion If you’re searching for a digital planner that comes packed with pre-built templates, check out Notion. Whether you need a template for coding an app or planning your wedding, Notion has you covered with over 20,000 templates for work, school and life. Notion’s task and project management features aren’t as robust as ClickUp’s, but

It’s been quite a ride for payments in recent years: From 2020 through 2022, the COVID-19 pandemic flooded the market with tumult and innovation in equal measure. In 2023, we battened down the hatches after the groundswell of that innovation. 2024 was about setting our businesses apart from competitors after all that change by leveraging payments technology to wrap value around the payment itself. So what awaits us in 2025? More fits and starts, and significant disruptions to the status quo: Geopolitical tensions and wars will double the flow of payments through alternative rails. After Russia invaded Ukraine, both Visa and Mastercard booted all Russian transactions off their rails — so Russian banks and payment entities shifted domestic payments to the local Mir payments system. Large B2B transactions, such as oil trading, are already using alternative payment systems like China’s CIPS and Russia’s SPFS due to sanctions on major oil-exporting countries. With more geopolitical tensions and nationalism on the horizon, governments divert more payments volumes away from global rails and onto their local ones to reduce global dependencies and oversight. Global payment companies and banks must decide whether to support local payment rails and diversify offerings, potentially risking sanctions, or focus on core markets. Cash use globally will fall 40%, displaced by the successful globalization of UPI and Pix. 2025 will mark an inflection point for markets where cash has been sticky. In 2025, account-to-account and real-time payments will displace cash in Europe and Latin America, especially in countries with younger populations who are open to non-cash payment methods. India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) launch in Peru will set off a domino effect in the region, plus a slew of innovation to follow. While the US is cashless in pockets, its broader inability to displace cash usage of the un- and underbanked will hinder its progress. B2B payments will be a hotbed of M&A activity, fueled by rate cuts and funding. We expect at least a dozen big companies to acquire smaller B2B payments companies in 2025. The upside: Business customers will benefit from more orchestrated and consolidated B2B payments solutions in the market. Competition in B2B payments will intensify: For example, think of how accounts payable invoice automation vendors like Basware, Coupa, and Esker are rapidly expanding into B2B payments and pursuing acquisitions. The upshot: If they move quickly, there are opportunities for bigger companies to find acquisition targets to complement their B2B payments capabilities. One-click checkout will backfire for one in five merchants, increasing their costs by 30%. Counterintuitively, we expect that consumers will experience more, not less, frustration with resurging one-click checkout (1CC) options. Why? 1CC options are varied and compete with many other systems vying to autopopulate data and automate checkout experiences. Consumers will not have their data up to date with all the many players they’ll encounter at checkout and will inadvertently place orders with the wrong information autofilled — or even complete orders before they intend to. The result: As they attempt to rectify these checkout-optimization efforts gone awry, merchants will incur higher costs for customer service and shipping and logistics. Read our full Predictions 2025: Payments report to get more detail about each of these predictions and read additional predictions. Set up a Forrester inquiry or guidance session to discuss these predictions or plan out your 2025 strategy. If you aren’t yet a client, you can download our complimentary Predictions guides, which cover more of our top predictions for 2025. Get additional complimentary resources, including webinars, on the Predictions 2025 hub. source

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