Payments Predictions 2026: Trust, Control and the Battle for the Customer

Who controls the customer, the transaction and the trust?

Insights from our knowledge partners reveal a market on the cusp of transformation - but also one facing growing tension between speed of innovation and sustainable value.

From Digital Convenience to Digital Confusion

AI-driven and agentic commerce will expand rapidly in 2026, but not smoothly. Autonomous buying agents, experimental stablecoins and AI-mediated transactions promise efficiency, yet they also introduce unprecedented opacity into the payment’s ecosystem.

Merchants are becoming increasingly cautious. While early adoption will focus on low-value, low-risk transactions, there is widespread concern that agentic commerce - largely designed without meaningful merchant or consumer input - risks recreating “card-not-present economics on steroids”. Margin pressure, higher merchant discount rates and limited visibility into whether sales are truly incremental all threaten the foundations of retail profitability.

More critically, if AI agents optimise purely for price or task completion, branding, loyalty, upselling and emotional engagement risk being sidelined. Retail websites could be reduced to functional catalogues, while value migrates upstream to the platforms controlling the algorithms.

A Turning Point: Lowest Price vs Real Value

This shift will expose a key truth in 2026: consumers are not only price-driven.

As agentic commerce attempts to move into higher-value, service-intensive journeys - travel re-bookings, complex fulfilment, personalised experiences – it’s limitations will become clear. Where tangible value, service recovery and human judgement matter, simplistic optimisation will fall short.

Retailers and service providers that can combine AI efficiency with genuine value-added experiences will differentiate themselves. Those that cannot, will be commoditised.

The Retreat to Trusted Ecosystems

At the same time, trust in the open digital advertising model continues to erode. AI-generated content, disinformation, scams and psychological manipulation are exposing fundamental flaws in today’s attention-driven economy.

Rather than abandoning digital channels altogether, consumers, merchants and financial institutions are retreating to controlled, trusted environments - wallets, apps and bank-led ecosystems where identity, payments, loyalty and financial services are better protected.

Expect the rise of millions of “mini digital ecosystems”: secure, permission-based environments where AI works for the user -optimising loyalty, payment choice, embedded finance and fraud prevention - rather than exploiting them. Standardised QR codes are likely to become a unifying access layer from 2026 onwards, simplifying navigation while shifting security responsibility to banks and regulated providers.

Payments Infrastructure Finally Catches Up

Beneath the surface, payments rails are undergoing long-overdue modernisation.

Instant payments are becoming the default across the UK and Europe, steadily replacing legacy clearing models. Interoperability between real-time schemes will reduce cross-border settlement times from days to minutes, reshaping treasury operations, B2B payments and account-to-account (A2A) use cases.

At the same time, CBDCs are moving from concept to execution. The digital euro approaches a critical legislative phase in early 2026, while the UK’s exploration of a digital pound continues to gather momentum. While mass adoption remains several years away, the foundational infrastructure and policy frameworks will soon be in place - with profound implications for settlement, liquidity and monetary policy transmission.

Open Banking, A2A and the Challenge to Cards

Open banking is finally edging towards commercial relevance, but progress remains uneven. UK Commercial VRP launched with high expectations, yet merchant adoption has been slower than hoped.

Nevertheless, the direction of travel is clear. Retailers are actively seeking alternatives to high-cost card acceptance, inspired by global A2A success stories such as Pix and UPI. In Europe, super-wallet initiatives like Wero signal a strategic push to replicate one-click convenience using bank rails rather than card networks.

The missing link is orchestration: wallets and platforms that can tokenise bank credentials, manage consent, and deliver seamless, Apple Pay–like experiences -without card economics.

Retail Reinvents Itself for the AI Era

In response, retailers are rethinking both digital and physical experiences.

Hyper-personalisation will become table stakes. Every journey - including payment method presentation - will be tailored in real time, reducing friction and checkout abandonment while increasing conversion and basket size.

Physical stores will evolve into experience hubs, anchoring “Omnichannel Next Gen” strategies. Models such as Buy Online, Return In-Store (BORIS), Ship to Store (BOSS) and Reserve Online, Pay In-Store (ROPIS) will transform fulfilment from a cost centre into a loyalty engine - blending digital speed with tangible engagement.

Embedded Finance: From Feature to Strategy

Embedded finance is entering its second wave. Beyond frictionless payments, platforms are integrating contextual lending, embedded insurance and B2B working capital directly into workflows.

For merchants and SaaS providers, this is about more than revenue - it is about stickiness. When payments, credit and capital are embedded at the point of need, switching becomes difficult, and long-term relationships are locked in.

Regulation: Present, but Not Yet a Differentiator

Despite DORA being in force across the EU, enforcement remains cautious and uneven. Most institutions are focusing on minimum compliance rather than deep operational transformation. True differentiation based on resilience and third-party risk maturity is unlikely until enforcement tightens - often triggered by high-profile incidents.

2026: The Year Trust Becomes the Competitive Advantage

The common thread across all predictions is clear: technology alone is no longer enough.

In 2026, competitive advantage will come from trust, transparency and alignment of incentives - between consumers, merchants, banks and platforms. AI, payments and digital money will either reinforce today’s extractive models, or finally enable a more efficient, resilient and value-driven ecosystem.

The organisations that succeed will be those that choose the latter.

With Thanks:

We would like to extend our sincere thanks to our knowledge partners for their time, insight and invaluable contribution to this research:

• Steve Mott, Principal, BetterBuyDesign
• David Parker, Polymath Consulting
• Mark Beresford, Edgar, Dunn & Company
• Adrian Evans, Payments Leaders Advisory

Their expertise and perspectives have been instrumental in shaping a balanced, forward-looking view of the payments landscape as we head into 2026.