In 2025, online payments are smoother, faster, and more invisible than ever. A single tap. Dozens of saved cards in your phone wallet. A biometric check and it is all done. No forms, no friction, just a perfectly choreographed handoff between systems that most users don’t even think about.
And that’s exactly the problem.
Behind that one-click checkout lives a mess of SDKs, compliance updates, edge cases, failed authorizations, and fraud attempts happening every millisecond. Businesses want frictionless UX, but you can’t afford to ignore the other side of that coin: risks and regulations.
At Lerpal, we work on payment-enabled products that live in the real world. So here’s what we’ve learned (sometimes the hard way) about how to build systems that feel invisible but are anything but simple.
The UX-Security Tradeoff in 2025
Everyone wants fewer clicks. Users expect Apple Pay, Google Pay, saved cards, subscriptions, free trials that auto-renew and they want it now. But every layer of convenience is also a new attack surface.
Here’s where many teams go wrong: they think payments are just a Stripe SDK and a beautiful checkout screen. But payments aren’t just about what works once. They’re about what works every time, on every device, for every user and what still works when something goes wrong.
Security is not the enemy of UX. But assuming that the default SDK setup is secure enough? That’s a gamble. And in 2025, it’s one you can’t afford to take.
The Payment Ecosystem: What’s Changed
A lot, honestly.
- PSPs like Stripe, Adyen, and Braintree are evolving fast. New APIs, faster onboarding, more flexibility. But also more complexity, especially when you need custom workflows, split payments, or multi-currency support;
- Apple Pay and Google Wallet continue to push biometric-first checkouts. Users love them. So do fraudsters;
- Cross-border payments are more common and more regulated. From EU VAT rules to U.S. state taxes to country-specific data storage requirements, complexity scales fast;
- Crypto speculation remains niche, but stablecoins are finding real business use cases – B2B payments, capital markets, lending, cross-border payments and treasury management. Still not mainstream, but worth monitoring;
- Real-time payments and open banking are gaining traction. Faster money means faster fraud. Great UX, but don’t ship it without serious fraud detection logic in place.
New Threats and Old Mistakes
2025 brought new toys for attackers and the same headache from developers.
Carding attacks are back in style, with smarter bots and stolen card lists. If your payment form has no velocity checks or CAPTCHA, you’re a target. Token misuse is a growing issue. Especially when developers don’t rotate or validate tokens properly.
Refund fraud has gotten more creative and expensive. Returns fraud alone cost retailers $102 billion in 2023. We’re seeing sophisticated “wardrobing” (buy-use-return for events), “bracketing” (order multiple sizes, keep one), and social engineering attacks on customer service teams. Basic return policies aren’t enough anymore.
And on mobile? The classics still apply:
- Insecure storage of payment data;
- Bad error handling that exposes logic;
- No fallback for 3DS or biometric failure;
- No monitoring for suspicious retries.
What We Do at Lerpal
We don’t reinvent payment systems from scratch. There’s too much at stake.
Here’s what we do:
- We only use PCI-compliant Payment Service Providers. Security is non-negotiable;
- We monitor failure. Declined cards, retries, timeouts – these are signals worth watching;
- We track false positive rates, detection speed, flag suspicious patterns, and measure fraud prevention ROI against operational overhead;
- We plan for 3DS failures. Biometric not working? Card declined? Users still need a way through;
- We never rely on a single provider. Redundancy matters. A PSP going down shouldn’t take your revenue with it;
- We track SDK updates like product releases. Apple changes rules. Google changes formats. And your app needs to stay compliant.
Our job isn’t just to make payments “work”. It’s to make them resilient.
Advice for Building Payment-Enabled Products
Some simple rules that save months of pain:
- Don’t build everything yourself. Even if you can. Even if your devs are excited. Use proven platforms unless you need to go custom – they handle the heavy lifting of compliance, security, and edge cases that would take months or years to develop internally;
- Map the whole journey, including failure. Most friction happens when things break. Know what users see when cards get declined, connections drop, or security kicks in;
- Test on real devices. And not just new iPhones. Try the edge cases: offline, low battery, jailbroken, 3G. That’s where bugs hide;
- Keep compliance close. Legal is never the blocker but a partner who keeps you in the App Store and out of the news;
- Respect local rules. Data residency, PSD3, tax handling – if your app touches multiple markets, you need to design for them early.
Good payments feel invisible, seamless, smooth.
But getting there? That takes real thinking, real planning, and a healthy dose of paranoia. And that’s not overengineering, that’s just smart product work. Because in 2025, the products that win aren’t the ones with the flashiest checkout. They’re the ones that work everywhere, every time and don’t break when something goes sideways.
