Where the acquiring market is heading in 2026

As payment technology becomes more modular, orchestration, AI, and Embedded Finance are reshaping the acquiring market. Artjoms Dozorcevs, CEO of Finsei, discusses the trends influencing the industry and how providers can adapt to merchants' changing needs.

How would you describe the state of the acquiring market in mid-2026, and what is the most significant change you're seeing right now?

The acquiring market is becoming less about owning infrastructure and more about how effectively you can bring that infrastructure together.

For years, scale was the main advantage. Today, merchants have more choice, technology is more modular, and switching between providers is becoming easier. That changes the competitive equation.

The biggest shift we're seeing is that acquiring is moving closer to the wider financial relationship a business has with its provider. Payment acceptance is no longer an isolated product. Merchants increasingly expect their acquirer to connect payments with accounts, settlement, liquidity, and other financial services.

That's where I think the next phase of competition will happen, not around who processes the most transactions, but around who can make the whole financial experience work better.

Which technologies - AI, Embedded Finance, instant payments, orchestration - do you think will reshape acquiring the most in 2026-2027, and why?

I wouldn't pick one technology in isolation. The bigger change is the combination of them.

Orchestration makes the payment stack more flexible. Instant payments are resetting how fast customers expect money to move. Embedded Finance is quietly relocating where financial services sit in the customer journey. And AI sits across all of it, sharpening the decisions made in each layer.

But technology only matters when it changes the outcome.

For acquiring, I think orchestration and AI will have the most immediate impact. The ability to make better decisions around routing, risk, authorisation, and merchant operations can directly affect payment performance.

The interesting part is what happens when these technologies start working together rather than as separate products.

AI is being applied across underwriting, fraud detection, and merchant onboarding. Where is it actually moving the needle for acquirers today, versus where is it still hype?

AI is already useful where there is a large amount of structured data and a decision that needs to be made repeatedly.

Fraud detection is a good example. Underwriting and transaction monitoring are others. There are also clear opportunities in merchant onboarding, particularly around document processing, risk assessment, and identifying inconsistencies earlier.

Where I think hype starts is when AI is presented as a replacement for expertise.

A model can identify patterns. It doesn't automatically understand the commercial context behind a merchant or a transaction.

The real opportunity is to use AI to make experienced teams faster and more precise, rather than pretending the human layer has become unnecessary.

Acquiring is increasingly becoming embedded and invisible, with platforms and software companies owning the payment experience. What does that mean for traditional, pure-play acquirers?

It means an acquirer can no longer assume that owning the transaction means owning the merchant relationship. Take a booking platform, a marketplace, or a piece of vertical SaaS - the business using it never sees Finsei, or any other acquirer’s name. They see the platform. We’re running underneath it, and if we’re doing our job well, nobody notices we’re there.

That’s not a threat to acquiring. It’s a change in what must be true for us to win. We stop competing on brand and start competing on things platforms feel: how fast we approve a new seller, how we handle a dispute at 2 am, how much risk we absorb that used to sit with the platform. If a platform has to build its own compliance team or chargeback desk because we can’t handle that invisibly, we’ve already lost.

So, the bar moves from ‘can you process a payment’ to ‘can you make an entire platform’s payment operations disappear into the background?’ That’s a harder thing to be good at than most people assume, and it’s exactly where I think the real competition is heading.

Where does Finsei fit into this changing landscape, and what are your strategic bets for the remainder of 2026?

Finsei is built around a fairly simple idea: businesses shouldn't need to assemble their financial infrastructure provider by provider.

Acquiring is an important part of that, but it is not the whole proposition. We are bringing acquiring into the same relationship where businesses can access accounts, payment infrastructure, and other financial services.

Our strategic focus for the rest of 2026 is therefore not simply to grow transaction volumes. It's to deepen that relationship and make the different parts of the platform work better together.

The goal is to give businesses one infrastructure layer they can build around, rather than another standalone product they have to manage.

What capabilities, markets, or partnerships is Finsei investing in this year to stay ahead of where the market is heading?

Investing in the parts of the stack that directly improve the experience and economics of acquiring is important, as well as continuing to expand the wider financial infrastructure available to our clients.

Partnerships are a big part of that strategy. We don't believe we need to build every component ourselves. We'd rather work with specialists who are genuinely strong at what they do and bring those capabilities together into one proposition.

That gives us more flexibility than trying to own the entire stack.

From a market perspective, we're focused on building a proposition that can support businesses operating across multiple markets, where the complexity of payments, accounts, and money movement becomes particularly valuable to solve.

What's the biggest risk, or blind spot, that you think most players in the acquiring space are underestimating right now?

I think the biggest blind spot is confusing more technology with a better product.

The payments industry has no shortage of new infrastructure, new rails, and new layers of orchestration. But adding another layer doesn't automatically create more value for a merchant.

The real question is whether all that technology makes payments perform better, reduces operational friction, or gives a business something it couldn't do before.

There is also a risk of becoming too focused on the transaction itself. A merchant doesn't ultimately care how many systems sit behind a payment. They care whether they get paid, when they get paid, what it costs, and whether the infrastructure keeps working as they grow.

That's the level at which acquiring needs to compete.

What will the market look like in three years, and what role do you think Finsei should play in that future?

I expect the distinction between acquiring, payments, and business banking to become much less relevant from the merchant's perspective.

Businesses won't necessarily think in terms of "my acquirer", "my payment provider" and "my account provider". They'll expect one financial infrastructure relationship that supports how their business actually operates.

I don't think every provider will become that platform, and I don't think they should. The winners will be the ones that can connect the right capabilities without making the underlying complexity the merchant's problem.

For Finsei, that's the opportunity.

No provider needs to own every layer of the financial stack. What we need is to be very good at choosing the right ones, connecting them, and turning them into something businesses can actually use.

If we do that well, Finsei won't just be an acquirer. It will be part of the infrastructure businesses build their financial operations around.

About Artjoms Dozorcevs

 

Artjoms Dozorcevs is the CEO of Finsei, a London-based electronic money institution authorised by the UK's Financial Conduct Authority. He leads the company's strategy and growth in business accounts, cross-border payments and FX services for SMEs and freelancers trading internationally. Under his leadership, Finsei has processed more than EUR 2.6 billion in client funds turnover.

 

About Finsei

Finsei is a London-based digital payments platform that simplifies financial services for SMEs, freelancers and individuals operating across borders. A fully licensed electronic money institution authorised by the UK's Financial Conduct Authority, it offers business accounts, virtual and physical Visa cards, e-wallets and payment acquiring, with Apple Pay integration. Finsei has processed over 500.000 transactions and EUR 2.6 billion in client funds turnover, including EUR 1 billion in 2024 alone.