The payments industry doesn’t stand still. Consumers and businesses have rearchitected how they move money, and the pace of change is accelerating.

Here are five trends defining where payments are headed.

The agent in the checkout

AI has had a material role in payments fraud detection for some time. This year, 98% of fraud and compliance leaders report integrating AI into daily workflows, with 95% confident in AI’s ability to detect and prevent payment fraud. The next development — agentic commerce — is more fundamental.

AI systems are beginning to initiate and complete purchases autonomously, with minimal human involvement in the transaction. JP Morgan estimates AI agents will handle 15–25% of all US e-commerce purchases by 2030. In April 2025, Visa announced partnerships with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft, among others, to enable AI agents to process payments on its network. Mastercard has identified agentic commerce as its defining trend for 2026, noting that the “often unsexy work of building the infrastructure, setting the standards and forging the partnerships” to support AI-initiated transactions is now the critical priority for major networks.

The challenge is trust. When an AI agent completes a purchase, questions of consent, authentication, and recourse become acute. As Peter Harmston, Head of Payments Consulting at put it in The Payments Association’s 2025 trends report: “The use of agentic AI in commerce is set to make payments more seamless and almost invisible, but this progress will also raise new questions about how to balance convenience with the need for oversight and control.”

The wallet as default infrastructure

Digital wallets have moved from novelty to default. This year, the number of digital wallet users globally is expected to reach 5.2 billion — more than 60% of the world’s population, with adoption exceeding 75% in several Asia-Pacific countries. In global e-commerce, wallets already command a 54% share of transactions, well ahead of credit cards at 16%.

The shift is structural, not cyclical. Payment service providers like Adyen, Stripe, and Worldpay now treat wallet integration as baseline; the real competition is in which wallets consumers trust most in which markets. Digital wallets continue to gain share, rising from 56% of e-commerce transactions in 2023 to an estimated 60% in 2024 — and the trajectory shows no sign of flattening. In Europe, the EU is mandating digital identity wallets as a standard authentication mechanism, which will embed the habit further still.

Paying without the card networks

The emergence of A2A payments may be the most significant structural shift in payments this decade. Instead of routing a transaction through a card network and its associated fees, A2A moves money directly between bank accounts — faster, cheaper, and with richer data.

Global A2A payment volumes are projected to rise from 60 billion transactions in 2024 to 186 billion by 2029 — a 209% increase. The economics are hard to ignore: the US Federal Reserve’s FedNow network charges around $0.04 per transaction, compared to roughly 3.5% of the transaction value for a typical card payment. For merchants processing at scale, that difference compounds quickly.

Real-time payment schemes now number more than 80 across jurisdictions, supported by the ISO 20022 messaging standard, which has given the rails richer data structures and enabled more sophisticated use cases in treasury management, payroll, and B2B settlement. Capgemini’s World Payments Report forecasts instant payments will account for 22% of all non-cash transaction volumes by 2028, and that A2A schemes could offset 15–25% of future card transaction volume growth. For card networks, that is a number worth watching.

Credit finds its limits

BNPL has earned its place in the credit landscape. The question now is what kind of credit product it actually is. The global BNPL market reached $560.1 billion in 2025, having grown at a compound annual rate of 21.7% between 2021 and 2024 — but that growth story is giving way to a more sober conversation about risk.

Around 34–41% of BNPL users report having made at least one late payment in the past year, with Gen Z users showing a rate of 51%. Regulators in the UK, EU and US have moved to bring BNPL under formal consumer credit frameworks, requiring affordability checks and clearer disclosure. The days of growing through frictionless checkout integrations largely unchallenged are over. Providers now face the same fundamental question as any credit business: how much risk, and for whom.

BNPL can still increase average order values for merchants by 20–40%, and it remains a genuinely useful product for consumers managing cash flow. But the industry’s next chapter will be written by whoever builds responsible lending infrastructure credibly — not by whoever acquires users fastest.z

The payment that disappears

Embedded finance – the integration of financial services directly into non-financial products and platforms – has shifted from experiment to infrastructure. SaaS vendors now derive over 50% of their revenue from embedded payment features, supporting a $185 billion embedded finance ecosystem that remains underutilised.

The result: payments are increasingly invisible by design. A contractor paid through a project management platform, a delivery driver settling through a logistics app, a subscription renewed through a streaming service — in each case, the payment recedes into the background of the experience. Global Payments’ 2026 Commerce and Payment Trends Report identifies embedded finance as having moved “beyond bolt-on features to become core business infrastructure.”

What comes next?

Each of these trends points in the same direction: payments are getting faster, cheaper, and less visible. A2A is eroding the economic case for card rails. Embedded finance is absorbing payments into products that were never designed around them. BNPL is learning, under regulatory pressure, what responsible credit actually looks like at scale. And AI is beginning to take the human out of the transaction entirely — raising questions the industry is still working out how to answer.

Elliot Lyons works in Cognito’s Amsterdam office