Merchant payments in 2026: insights from MPE industry experts

On behalf of the Merchant Payments Ecosystem, James Wood, Founder of Eris Intelligence, shares merchant payments insights for 2026.

Danish Nobel laureate Nils Bohr famously noted that ‘predictions are very difficult – especially about the future’. With that opinion firmly in mind, the Merchant Payments Ecosystem (MPE) has canvassed input from 35 payment industry leaders about what to look out for in 2026, from the use of stablecoins through to the future of payments orchestration, agentic commerce, quantum AI in payments, a passwordless future, and other new technologies worthy of note. 

At Eris Intelligence, we’ve also undertaken research into what the industry’s saying about 2026 by analysing the number of times certain trends get name-checked in ‘look-ahead’ opinions published by payments companies every December. Our research found that the use of stablecoins, agentic commerce, and Embedded Finance were the top innovations cited as likely to make an impact this coming year. MPE’s research concurs with this analysis, while adding insight into additional trends and their impact on day-to-day business scenarios.

How money moves – the cornerstone of modernisation

More than 85% of the executives surveyed were keen to comment on money movement and the trends we’re likely to see in systems modernisation over the next twelve months. By itself, that statistic speaks to the significance of this area for the payments business – not to mention the exciting things payments executives believe are going to happen in areas such as stablecoin use, tokenization, payments orchestration, and instant payments. It’s important to note that most executives see close connections between these four areas, with tokenization in particular as the technology that will connect developments in the other three areas of activity. 

Stablecoins: faster, cheaper cross-border transactions

Stablecoins is one of the areas MPE’s panel see as having the greatest promise in the year ahead. Research from TRM Labs shows that stablecoins now comprise 30% of all on-chain transaction volume for cryptocurrencies, accounting for some USD 4 trillion of transactions in 2025, meaning their use grew by 83% compared to 2024. 

One key advantage of stablecoins is the ability to transact with much-reduced foreign exchange (FX) fees, since fewer conversions between currencies are required. Likewise, treasury costs are reduced as the number of intermediaries in a transaction is cut to a minimum. As a digital asset, stablecoins also allow for greater automation, fewer delays, and dramatically faster processing. According to Sarel Tal, VP of Partnerships and Sales at Rapyd: ‘Stablecoins represent a true inflexion point for merchant payments. Infrastructure is finally catching up. That said, stablecoins aren’t a silver bullet. Success relies on liquidity, regulatory clarity, and consumer acceptance. To make stablecoins practical for mass adoption, companies need robust compliance, reserve transparency, and seamless fiat ramps’.

Sarel Tal’s comment is timely, and it chimes with the opinions of many interviewed for this article: while stablecoins have a significant role to play in 2026 and beyond, it’s likely that we’ll see the next stage of their evolution in parallel to traditional payments rails, and that they’re going to be adopted for corporate business-to-business (B2B) payments more often than consumer payments and remittances. A further note of caution when it comes to the consumer use of stablecoins, particularly for remittances, is that they have yet to receive regulatory permission in a wide range of markets, especially in emerging markets where cross-border transactions have traditionally been most problematic.

All that said, perhaps the most compelling aspect of stablecoins is their programmable nature – that is, the ability to add information to a transaction, such as invoice information, credit notes, and more. This feature can only make them more attractive to a B2B payments market keen both to cut costs and improve information flows between transacting parties.

Tokenization – core to payments’ next phase?

A second key trend for 2026 identified by MPE’s panel is the use of network tokens in payments. Network tokens work by replacing sensitive information, such as card numbers, with secure, valueless digital equivalents. This cuts fraud risk, especially for online transactions, while improving transaction authorisation rates by between 2% and 5%, according to data from Visa and Mastercard. Small wonder, then, that Juniper Research projects their use will double between 2025 and 2029, with around 574 billion transactions (between 10-15% of the global total) using tokens by the end of this decade – though Deloitte’s 2025 payments report sees 25% of cross-border transactions using tokens by 2030.

However, Ashley Paulus, VP of Sales at Checkout.com, argues that tokens could be even more important to the next wave in payments, noting that ‘by giving each authorised agent in agentic commerce a secure, identifiable token, parties to a transaction can track which agent initiated a transaction, making disputes traceable and accountability enforceable – and allowing authentication to remain streamlined’.

This is a perspective shared by Attila Doğan, Chief Product Officer at PPRO, who sees tokens as ‘accelerating innovation in local payment methods such as account-to-account transfers, wallets, and BNPL services, raising authorisation rates, reducing false declines and enabling “self-healing” transactions that update mandate or wallet data automatically’.

Instant payments set to surge

The 2024 launch of FedNow in the US and the success of national instant payment schemes in Europe (such as the UK’s Faster Payments, the Dutch iDEAL scheme, and the massive success of Sweden’s Swish), plus the EU’s introduction of SEPA-Inst payments for cross-border purposes late last year are all combining to make 2026 the year instant payments become the norm. 

Juniper Research see instant payments – by value – rising from USD 22 trillion last year to USD 58 trillion by 2028: in other words, three times the size of the US economy. By this time, they say the number of instant payments users will hit 600 million worldwide, one and a half times the entire European population.

With numbers like these, it’s little wonder MPE’s executive panel agree that 2026 will be the breakout year for instant payments. Andrew Riabchuk, Founder and CTO at Akurateco, notes: ‘New instant payment methods will reshape money movement as richer APIs, instant settlement, and lower costs shift more transactions off card rails. This fundamentally changes how merchants design and optimise their payment flows’. Looking further afield, Robert-Jan Lieben, VP Commercial for EMEA at EBANX, says: ‘A2A systems such as Brazil’s Pix and India’s UPI are fundamentally changing consumer expectations by providing instant, 24/7 access, becoming a primary engine for financial inclusion’.

Bringing these two perspectives together, it’s clear that instant payments aren’t just good for SMEs and consumers, given their low costs and rapid movement of funds. They’re also attractive to policymakers looking to broaden access to financial services through digital and mobile channels – and to merchants looking to make their payments more efficient. 

Flowing it all together: payments orchestration

Whether it’s cards, instant payments, crypto, or any other payment method, merchants need help to ensure that they get maximum value from transactions. In practice, that means routing payments via the most cost-efficient, secure, and rapid channels – as well as acquiring data that can help them find out more about how and why consumers are shopping with them. 

Enter payments orchestration, perhaps one of the biggest buzzwords of 2025 and, according to MPE’s panel of experts, a financial technology that’s set for further expansion in the year to come. Payments orchestration acts as a centralised control layer for managing the entire payment process, connecting and coordinating multiple payment service providers (PSPs), gateways, processors, acquirers, banks, fraud tools, and other payment-related services through one unified platform. This means that merchants can work with an external provider – either through software installed in their systems or accessed via an API – and avoid having to build and maintain dozens of individual integrations.

While payments orchestration has seen runaway adoption in 2025, with the market growing by 20%, industry leaders interviewed by MPE for this article say we’ve yet to see everything orchestration is capable of. As Shona Sabah, Senior Manager and Strategic Growth Lead at KAE explains: ‘In 2026, payment orchestration will stop being “just” an operational tool and will start determining who actually owns the merchant and consumer relationship. Platforms that control orchestration will control the customer touchpoints, set the economics, and decide the flows, while banks and networks risk being pushed into the background as commoditised infrastructure. The narrative around orchestration will shift too, from failed-transaction reduction and connection consolidation to strategic outcomes such as margin, loyalty, influence in verticals, and cross-border intelligence as a competitive advantage’.

In other words, rather than just using orchestration to connect layers, improve authorisation rates, and gather data – useful tools in their own right –, merchants will increasingly use orchestration for a wider range of tasks, including the management of stablecoins and tokens. According to Chris Jones, Managing Director of PSE Consulting: ‘Payment orchestration will advance from routing to real-time prediction, optimisation, and self-correction powered by AI and transparent data flows, [while] stablecoins will mature into cross-border B2B liquidity tools rather than retail novelties, and digital wallets will evolve into multi-rail hubs connecting cards, Open Banking, and tokenized money’.

Ecommerce agents: starting to shape the future

If payments orchestration was one of the greatest trends of 2025, and set for greater things in 2026, then by far the most talked-about development in payments last year was ‘agentic commerce’; that is, the use of AI agents in ecommerce to actively handle significant parts of the shopping, decision-making, and purchasing process on behalf of the user instead of the consumer having to browse, compare, decide, and checkout themselves. As Robert Kraal, Co-Founder of Silverflow, notes: ‘Agentic commerce is shifting payment decision-making from humans to AI agents, creating a USD 5 trillion opportunity by 2030. It’s not replacing the existing payments layer; it adds intelligence and orchestration atop current rails, optimising payment flows, approvals, and risk management’.

According to David Parker, CEO at Polymath Consulting, the best way to look at agentic commerce is as an additional layer on top of existing arrangements: ‘Agentic commerce won’t replace payment rails – it layers intelligence on top. The shift is from “initiating a payment” to agents negotiating, routing, timing, and optimising payments autonomously. Early adoption will come from B2B and treasury, where trust is earned through measurable savings (e.g., real-time FX, smart settlement sequencing). Consumers will follow once these agents prove reliability in the background. The players building this aren’t the protocols – it’s orchestration platforms, smart routing layers, and issuer processors adding adaptive decisioning’.

A 2025 report by Celent and Tieto Banktech says that agentic commerce could account for up to 17% of all transactions by 2035. For this projection to become reality, however, consumers will have to trust ecommerce agents, as will regulators. Florence Kate Addison, Enterprise Account Manager at SumUp, says that while agentic commerce has huge potential, trust will be a key issue: ‘Trust could emerge gradually through transparent logic and verifiable decision trails, and not blind automation – which is important’.

Max Ryzhov, Chief Product Officer at Ecommpay, says that the introduction of agents will be a slow burn, and that merchants should make sure their systems and processes are prepared: ‘It may take some time before consumers feel comfortable relying on their ecommerce agents. However, from an industry standpoint, as with any significant tech evolution, agentic commerce will develop in phases. Merchants don’t need to rip up their systems, but they do need to ensure their infrastructure is resilient, flexible, and API-ready’.

Other experts align with Ms Addison in emphasising the importance of trust to the success of agentic commerce over the next ten years. Alexandros Limniatis, Head of Operations and Products at Maksu, confirms: ‘Trust takes time. People need to know these systems are safe, transparent, and truly on their side. This isn’t about replacing people; it’s about giving us back time. Letting technology handle the boring parts so we can focus on what really matters – connection, creativity, and growth’.

The need for consumers to build trust in ecommerce agents should be seen in parallel with the need for regulators to develop their positions regarding the use of agents. As yet, no formal legislation has been proposed in Europe, though it’s likely that the EU’s third Payments Services Directive (PSD3) will begin to address this issue under its remit to strengthen consumer protections. It’s perhaps for this reason that independent consultant Masha Cilliers notes: ‘In 2026, it’s too early for agentic commerce to be used by the mass market, but we should start to see some initial use by early adopters’.

AI and quantum computing: a fraud-killing combination

Agentic commerce is, of course, a function of artificial intelligence (AI), an area of economic activity which has been subject to the typical cycle of hype, more hype, and then scepticism before the true economic benefit becomes apparent. If AI is coming to the end of its hype cycle, then MPE’s panel of experts believe we should prepare to see a wider range of applications for AI in payments, including the power of quantum computing.

Quantum computing employs the principles of quantum mechanics (such as the superposition of numbers and quantum interference) to perform certain types of calculations dramatically faster than previously. It is particularly adept at identifying patterns from large data arrays far more quickly than we have seen to date. 

IBM’s proprietary roadmap for the development of quantum computing projects the first use cases for what’s known as ‘quantum + AI’ by late 2026/early 2027, with fully-tested, workable enterprise-wide solutions by 2029. To date, AI in payments has been all about fraud detection, using large data arrays to identify anomalies in transaction data and spot new fraud vectors. 

Francesco Burelli, Partner at Arkwright Consulting, says that quantum-enabled solutions are already underway, though he notes their implementation will not be without complications: ‘A variety of companies, ranging from schemes (e.g., Visa), to wallets and major GenAI engines (Perplexity is wiring checkout through PayPal/Venmo inside the chat interface), to big tech (e.g., Google and Microsoft) are rolling in shopping agents to retail tech providers (e.g., Shopify’s Sidekick targeting merchant ops). Building solutions does not imply succeeding. I would expect merchants and marketplaces to ringfence their content and resist disintermediation, leaving the outcome of this incoming conflict far from clear’.

Ran Cohen, CEO and Co-Founder of BridgerPay, offers a more precise projection for how quantum computing might affect payments, enhancing existing fraud protections and making checkout smoother and more efficient: ‘Quantum won’t change checkout but it will harden and accelerate what’s under the hood: quantum-safe crypto, rapid optimisation of routing paths, and stronger fraud detection, powering autonomous, tamper-resistant payments’.

Summing things up, Ivan Vukelikj of G+D Netcetera paints a more optimistic picture, in which AI and quantum computing combine to deliver optimal anti-fraud solutions – albeit ones that need to consider and include user opinion and responses: ‘Fusing the reliability of established standards with the autonomy of next-generation agentic systems will result in a payment layer that continuously learns, anticipates, and protects with precision, transforming friction into flow without any compromises. AI should complement compliance and security rather than taking over, which is an approach that leads to smoother, more intuitive user experiences’.

Building trust in a passwordless future

At this stage, alert readers will be conscious of the fact that AI isn’t the reserved privilege of the ‘good guys’ in payments. In fact, the use of AI by fraudsters is rocketing. According to a 2025 report from Feedzai, more than 50% of all payments fraud now involves some form of AI, with 92% of banks surveyed globally reporting some experience of AI-generated payments fraud. 

Specific examples include Automated Push Payment (APP) fraud, in which customers are duped into setting up recurring payments to fake merchants or financial institutions online. Most recently, voice cloning has been used as part of a wider effort by fraudsters to trick biometric verification factors. According to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, consumers across 42 countries lost some USD 411 billion to fraud in 2024. These are perhaps the reasons why Dirk Mayer, Head of Anti-Fraud Consulting at RISK IDENT GmbH, says that AI can ‘enable the circumvention of biometrics through sophisticated social engineering and synthetic identity creation. It's increasingly easy to create fraudulent identities, take over accounts, or clone company profiles. This complexity creates new attack vectors where organised crime leads in AI adoption, investing heavily in exploitation tools. As we build more sophisticated authentication, we're actually moving further from true security. The industry must acknowledge this reality while building resilient, adaptive defences’.

In essence, what we’re seeing is an AI arms race, with fraudsters on the one hand and legitimate actors plus law enforcement on the other. A recent graphic from Banking Hub neatly encapsulates the problem, showing how payments modernisation has created both opportunities and challenges alike.

With fraud attempts – and fraud losses – rising fast, could there be a ‘silver bullet’ solution to protect consumers online? Opinions from MPE’s experts vary. Nick Maynard, VP of Fintech Market Research at Juniper Research, says that ‘the indications from the market are that digital identity wallets are becoming increasingly popular, driven in no small amount by the EUDI rollout. Wallets give the user control – control over what they store and what they share. We expect eIDAS 2 to have a similar spread outside of the EU as GDPR did’. At the same time, Maynard notes that ‘AI is a double-edged sword – it gives the fraud fighters better tools, but also empowers fraudsters to accelerate both the complexity and scale of fraud attempts. As such, AI is increasingly blurring the lines between real and synthetic identities. Fraud fighters are rushing to play catch-up and are not well positioned to fight the deluge of synthetic identities and deepfakes’.

Others are less optimistic. Mairtin O’Riada, Co-Founder and COO at Ravelin Technology, predicts that ‘the EU's EUDI Wallet will be a massive new attack vendor for criminals, who will be able to take over identities better than ever if they successfully gain access. There need to be failsafes because, even if rare, such occurrences would massively change the victim's life – we need the equivalent of a dispute/chargeback for the EUDI Wallet’.

Seen in these terms, a passwordless future – in which consumers make use of biometrics and embedded verification technologies – seems as distant as ever. For Shyam Kodey, Senior Business Advisor at Capgemini, technologies such as Click-to-Pay and passkeys, which rely extensively on tokenization for success, are vital – but not without their own problems: ‘Passkeys and Click-to-Pay aim to rebuild trust by eliminating passwords and reducing fraud, but they’re largely catching up to wallet-native experiences. Digital wallets have long offered seamless authentication, tokenization, and one-click checkout. Passkeys bring biometric security and phishing resistance, while Click-to-Pay standardises card-on-file transactions across merchants. Together, they close the gap with wallets and lay the groundwork for a passwordless, frictionless future’.

At the most positive end of the spectrum, Ross Kolodyazhnyi, CEO and Founder of Genpaid, argues that ‘by the end of 2026, most “payments with passwords” will be a UI illusion. Under the hood, the majority of consumer transactions will be authorised via device biometrics, passkeys, and wallet-bound tokens; passwords survive only for regulation and weird edge cases. Wallets become the new trust fabric: instead of repeating KYC, merchants tap attested attributes in the wallet (age, business status, risk score) via user-consented proofs. Passkeys and Click-to-Pay aren’t rebuilding trust – they’re dragging legacy card flows up to the bar wallets set a decade ago’.

Summing up, it seems we can say with certainty that the battle between fraudsters and legitimate industry will carry on into 2026, with AI on the front lines for both sides. Whether this leads to the gradual erosion of consumer trust – or increasing confidence – is something time will tell us. Signs are there on both sides: across Europe and North America, banks are seeking to build trust by promising to continue or re-establish physical branch networks, while the decline of in-person shopping appears to have slowed to a point where new retail locations are opening as others close. On the other side of the argument, the growth of ecommerce globally, and especially in emerging markets, continues apace. 

What’s certain is that trust is at the heart of the battle for consumers’ hearts, minds, and wallets. Kent Henderson, VP of Product Development at Mangopay, sees a future in which behavioural and device-based biometrics combine to create identities which are much harder to crack. As he puts it, ‘we may not reach a true “passwordless payments era” in the next five years, but adoption will rise. It might be 10% year-on-year, maybe a bit more, as more businesses choose authentication methods that rely less on static credentials and more on signals that are harder to fake’.

A year of growth and serious challenge

In many ways, the mixed opinions from MPE’s experts on the future of identity sum up how 2026 might look. On the one hand, growth – especially in digital payments through the mobile channel – is happening. Rails such as stablecoins look especially promising, in particular for cross-border transactions which have long been plagued with slow settlement times and high costs and fees. And the combination of AI and quantum computing to deliver faster, safer, and smoother user experiences is especially exciting. At the same time, there’s no denying that the shadows of declining consumer trust and – directly linked to this – rocketing online fraud attempts are threatening to spoil an otherwise optimistic outlook. Harnessing the power of AI to build secure, trusted identity online is going to be a key battleground, while the introduction of even more sophisticated payments orchestration technologies could cut costs and improve choice for merchants and consumers alike. 

About the author

 

James Wood is Founder and Managing Partner at Eris Intelligence, a specialist market research, design, and content creation agency based in the UK.

 

About Merchant Payments Ecosystem (MPE)

Discover more at MPE 2026, Europe’s largest merchant payments conference, taking place in Berlin on 17-19 March. Connect with 1,600+ industry leaders and 500+ merchants while exploring the latest innovations in the payments ecosystem. Stay focused on every angle of merchant payments – from acquiring, Open Banking, and Embedded Finance, to digital wallets and AI-driven payments. Learn more at https://www.merchantpaymentsecosystem.com/.