For years, there’s been talk about how to cater to Gen Z as consumers—faster checkouts, digital wallets, and seamless payment experiences. But now, another shift is underway. Gen Zers are no longer just the shoppers your business sells to. Today, they’re beginning to shape payment systems from the C-suite.
As founders, operators, and emerging executives, Gen Z decision-makers bring consumer-grade expectations into the boardroom. They expect payments to be fast, flexible, and largely invisible. Yet clunky onboarding, manual workflows, and rigid legacy systems are still creating friction.
So as this generation steps into leadership roles, a new question is emerging: are your payment systems designed for the executives and business leaders of tomorrow?
Gen Z’s presence in leadership roles is measurable and accelerating. In 2024, about 18% of business founders were members of Generation Z, up from roughly 14.5% the year before according to LinkedIn data. That means nearly 1 in 5 businesses was started by someone from this generation.
The trend isn’t limited to small startups either. In fast-moving sectors like artificial intelligence and tech, the average age of founders behind unicorn companies—those valued at more than $1 billion—dropped from 40 years old in 2020 to just 29 years old in 2024.
These shifts signal that Gen Z perspectives are influencing strategic decisions and tech choices at earlier and earlier stages of company growth, including how businesses manage, move, and optimize money.
Unlike previous generations of executives, Gen Z leaders didn’t “grow into” legacy finance systems. Many started earning, selling, or building businesses before they ever worked inside or alongside a formal finance department. These digital natives grew up with mobile banking and digital investing at their fingertips, so their reference point isn’t paper cheques, month-end batching, or complex approval chains. It’s instant transactions, intuitive software, and tools that work out of the box.
As a result, Gen Z leaders approach payments less as a specialized function and more as underlying infrastructure. They don’t want to spend time learning how money moves inside a system, because they expect the system to handle that complexity for them. If a payment platform requires extensive setup, training, or ongoing manual work, it quickly feels out of step with how they operate.
For example, Gen Z is three times more likely than other generations to use alternative payment methods such as contactless payments, payment apps, Buy Now, Pay Later programs, and digital wallets. Speed and ease are expectations.
In fact, 39% of Gen Z consider something as minor as entering a PIN number to be a pain point. Now translate that mindset into a business context. Waiting weeks for a cheque to arrive, days for a wire transfer to clear, or navigating multi-step approval workflows doesn’t just feel inefficient—it feels fundamentally misaligned with how they expect work to get done.
And to be clear, this mindset isn’t about cutting corners or ignoring controls. It’s about expecting payments to support the pace of modern business. When payments are slow, fragmented, or difficult to manage, they’re a hindrance to growth, scale, and execution.
For Gen Z leaders, frustration with traditional payment systems comes from how much effort it takes to get money moving. Processes that were once considered standard now feel unnecessarily slow, rigid, or disconnected from how modern businesses operate.
Common pain points include:
Gen Z executives launching their own businesses are already bypassing these inefficiencies altogether. And as they move into established C-suites, they’ll be the ones driving change. Sooner or later—whether within your own organization or across your partner and customer ecosystem—payments will either become a strategic enabler or a blocker to progress.
For Gen Z executives, business payment systems are expected to operate with the same speed, flexibility, and intuitiveness as the tools teams use every day.
At a high level, that baseline includes:
For Gen Z leaders, payments work best when they fade into the background. The less time spent managing how money moves, the more time teams can spend executing, scaling, and making decisions with confidence.
As Gen Z executives step into decision-making roles, businesses need payment infrastructure that reflects how modern organizations—fast, digital-first, and flexible by design. We help businesses modernize payments by offering a range of solutions that reduce friction and support speed, visibility, and control.
Through our platform, businesses can move beyond slow, manual processes by enabling digital payment options such as Interac e-Transfer®, virtual wallets, prepaid and virtual cards, and electronic funds transfer (EFT) —all designed to simplify how money moves between businesses, partners, and contractors. These solutions help eliminate delays associated with cheques and traditional wires, while giving teams more predictable, real-time visibility into payment activity.
Get in touch to learn how DCPayments can help your business modernize payments and keep pace with the next generation of executives and decision-makers.