Steven Holzer is senior vice president and head of strategy and transformation at WEX, which helps businesses manage payments, employee benefits, and business expenses. He serves on the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s Payments Advisory Council, which offers the Bank insights on issues affecting the U.S. payments system. We spoke with Holzer about the technology shifts that are redefining payments and what they mean for businesses.

What is WEX and what do you do as head of strategy and transformation?

WEX is a global fintech and payment processing company that helps businesses handle things like fleet payments, corporate payments, and employee benefits. The payment itself is just one part. We also make sure that the right data, pricing, controls, and workflows are in place so customers can run their operations smoothly and avoid issues like fraud. In my role, I focus on strategy and transformation. On the strategy side, my team and I are looking ahead and thinking about things like where our markets are going. We want to know what our competitors are doing and how emerging technologies can help us better serve our customers.

On the transformation side, my team works with partners across the company to ensure we successfully execute our most important priorities. That could be building new products, deploying new tools or technology like AI into our workflows, or transforming operational processes. It’s all part of an effort to create more value for our customers.

You’ve worked at places like NASA, Capital One, and Citi. What lessons in leadership and innovation have stuck with you?

Each place taught me something different that I still use today. NASA is all about tackling “impossible” problems. That mindset – that every problem can be solved – has shaped how I approach challenges.

Citi showed me what it takes to operate at massive scale. You’re navigating in a truly global context and managing all the complexities of regulations, technologies, currencies, time zones, etc. And there’s no room for error.

At Capital One, I learned the power of long-term, strategic thinking. Their founder, Rich Fairbank, consistently bets on where the market is going, not just next year but next decade. And that’s what we’re trying to do with customers at WEX. Our priority is the customer, really understanding their needs both today and tomorrow, and designing everything around solving their most pressing problems.

Have you always been interested in the payments landscape?

Honestly, I wasn’t interested at first. I started in consulting and avoided financial services because I thought it was boring and that payments had essentially gone unchanged for decades. But around 2009–2010, I saw early signs that technology was about to transform the whole industry. The shift took longer than I expected, but now we’re finally seeing the impact of that evolution.

Why do you think the shift was slower?

Payments can’t fail. You need accuracy, reliability, and compliance every single time, which makes fast innovation difficult. Tech loves to “move fast and break things,” but you really can’t break anything in payments. Add in heavy regulation and huge complexity, and progress naturally slows down. But in the last decade, the pieces have started to come together, and we’re seeing real breakthroughs, including exciting emerging opportunities like agentic commerce, where payments will take place without direct human intervention.

What are the biggest opportunities you see ahead?

The big opportunity is making payments feel invisible by fully integrating them into business workflows. This has started to become commonplace in many consumer use cases, like with the Uber or Starbucks apps, where the payment disappears into the experience. This same evolution has even greater potential in business payments.

Embedding payments in business workflows reduces friction and helps businesses run more efficiently. And it can also help drive more revenues, create better customer experiences, reduce risk, and optimize cashflows. This is a major focus for WEX. We want payments to be a source of value and differentiation for our customers, as opposed to a cost or a hurdle to overcome.

How is the payments industry changing, and what shifts have made the biggest impact?

One of the biggest changes is the rise of AI and the intelligence it brings to payments. It’s not just about moving money, it’s about connecting data, insights, and payment execution to optimize outcomes.

AI is unlocking huge opportunities to optimize businesses in real-time, and we’re now only scratching the surface. As we look toward the future of things like agentic commerce, the key is building safety directly into the workflow. Using tools like virtual cards, for example, provides automated systems with clear guardrails. The challenge – and the opportunity – is making sure we’re ready for the future while keeping everything safe, reliable, and seamless.

What drew you to the Boston Fed’s Payment Advisory Council?

Payments are incredibly complex and deeply interconnected. So, no single company can solve these challenges alone. To move the industry forward, you need shared understanding across all players: where the pain points are, what’s changing, and what needs to improve. That’s what excites me about the council. It brings together payments leaders to identify the biggest opportunities and challenges and to help the Fed think through how to unlock progress for the entire payments ecosystem.