The Green Sheet Online Edition
January 1, 2026 • 26:01:01
Payments in 2026: From promise to pressure test
For much of the past decade, payments innovation has been defined by acceleration powered by increasingly sophisticated technology. Faster checkout. Faster settlement. Faster onboarding. Faster decisions. By the time 2025 drew to a close, the industry had grown accustomed to constant motion and to the assumption that progress itself was the goal. In 2026, that assumption begins to break down.
The coming year appears to be shaping up less as a victory lap for innovation and more as a pressure test of trust, governance, resilience and operational reality. Artificial intelligence is moving from novelty to infrastructure. Digital wallets and instant payments are expanding globally. Stablecoins are edging out of crypto experiments and into settlement discussions.
Meanwhile, fraud is scaling faster than ever, powered by the same AI tools that promise efficiency gains. Regulators are watching more closely. Consumers are becoming more cautious. And merchants, squeezed by costs and complexity, are demanding systems that work, not just technologies that impress.
Across the payments ecosystem, a clear theme is emerging: 2026 will not be about what can be built. It will be about what can be trusted, explained, secured and sustained.
AI grows up ... and gets audited
Few technologies have captured industry imagination as forcefully as AI. In payments, it has already delivered real value in fraud detection, transaction monitoring and customer support automation. But after an initial wave of enthusiasm, expectations are shifting.
"Over the last 18 months, the 'AI will solve everything' mindset has started to level out," said Robin Anderson, head of product management at Tribe Payments. "The promise remains, but expectations are evolving fast."
What's becoming clearer is that not all AI use cases are equal, and not all are acceptable in regulated financial environments. Payments decisions carry consequences. When a transaction is declined, flagged or routed differently, providers must be able to explain why.
"Black-box reasoning may be acceptable for product recommendations," Anderson said. "It's not acceptable for regulated financial processes."
This need for explainability is reshaping how AI is deployed. Rather than racing to embed generative models everywhere, many payments enterprises are narrowing their focus to areas where AI can deliver measurable value without undermining accountability. Fraud detection, risk scoring and compliance triage top the list. Autonomous decision-making, by contrast, remains tightly constrained.
At the same time, the industry is grappling with a widening gap between AI haves and have-nots. Large acquirers and retailers are shaping models based on their own data and workflows, while smaller players risk being excluded from training sets and optimization cycles. That disparity, Anderson noted, could become a regulatory concern in its own right as performance gaps widen.
From authentication to continuous risk
Nowhere is the strain more visible than in identity and fraud prevention. Fraud has evolved rapidly from isolated attacks to industrial-scale operations, and generative AI has pushed it into what some experts describe as the "easily mass" era.
"Even junior fraudsters can now generate deepfakes and synthetic identities at unlimited volume," said Yair Tal, CEO of AU10TIX. "The result is unprecedented scale, speed and accessibility."
In that environment, traditional authentication breaks down. A check performed at onboarding or login quickly becomes obsolete as attack patterns shift. The industry, Tal stated, is being forced to rethink trust itself. "Risk becomes the new trust layer," he said. "Organizations must move from one-time checks to continuous, adaptive identity intelligence that updates as fast as the fraud targeting them."
Complicating matters further is the rise of AI agents as legitimate economic actors. Bots are no longer simply threats to be blocked. Increasingly, they are acting on behalf of consumers: shopping, booking travel, submitting applications and executing transactions.
"The challenge is no longer eliminating agents," Tal said. "It's authenticating them and determining who is the human behind the agent."
That shift introduces a new verification problem: enterprises must validate both agent behavior and human authorization, without undermining privacy. Verifiable credentials may help resolve that tension, but only when paired with continuous risk intelligence capable of spotting anomalies and misuse in real time.
Agentic commerce and the trust gap
"Agentic AI taking on commerce sounds promising right now," said Ruston Miles, founder of Bluefin. "But it's still too early for secure transactions." Teaching AI how to act is no longer enough. In 2026, Miles said, the industry will be focused on teaching agentic AI how to act safely.
That emphasis on safety and familiarity extends to the checkout experience itself. Research from Burbank suggests that trust is increasingly a commercial metric, not just a design concern.
Roughly half of consumers report abandoning online purchases due to security fears—even when they want the product. As agents interact with sensitive payment data across platforms, the risk surface expands dramatically and trust, not speed, becomes the critical factor.
"This isn't a UX issue," said Justin Pike, founder and CEO of Burbank. "It's a revenue issue."
In response, merchants are beginning to rethink how trust is conveyed at checkout. Rather than optimizing purely for speed, many are exploring payment flows that feel familiar and controllable.
Pike expects card-present-style online payments, mirroring tap-and-PIN experiences, to become standard for high-risk or high-value transactions by the end of 2026. "When customers recognize the process, confidence rises," he said. "And so does completion."
Modernizing the payments plumbing
Beneath the surface of consumer-facing experiences, a quieter transformation is underway. For years, the plumbing of payments—settlement, reconciliation, cross-border flows—lagged behind front-end innovation. That imbalance is starting to correct.
Instant payments, once confined to local rails, are edging toward global reach. Stablecoins are shedding some of their crypto stigma and being reconsidered as settlement tools. Tokenization is moving from pilots into operational use.
"Stablecoins are emerging from the crypto ecosystem and becoming part of mainstream payments," said Teresa Cameron, group CEO of Clear Junction. "The appeal is clear: near-instant, 24/7 settlement at lower cost."
Regulatory clarity is playing a critical role. Frameworks such as MiCA in the EU and proposed legislation in the United States are giving institutions the confidence to experiment beyond proof of concept. At the same time, tokenization is helping streamline post-trade processes by reducing manual intervention and intermediaries.
Yet Cameron cautioned that technology alone is not the solution. Liquidity management, compliance and operational resilience remain complex problems. Digital rails will coexist with legacy systems for the foreseeable future, complementing rather than replacing them.
BNPL, surcharging and the demand for choice
At the merchant level, pressure is mounting to reconcile innovation with economics. Rising card costs, tighter margins and regulatory scrutiny are reshaping how payments are priced and presented.
"In 2026, surcharging normalization will move from being an exception to an expectation in certain industries," said Randy Modos, president and co-founder of PayJunction.
But surcharging, Modos emphasized, must be handled carefully. Transparency, consent and automation will be essential as states refine disclosure requirements. Systems that embed compliance directly into terminals and payment flows will have an advantage as rules evolve.
BNPL is undergoing a similar transition. The next phase of growth, Modos said, will come not from exclusivity but from integration. When BNPL options live inside business management systems, rather than as bolt-ons, adoption becomes more natural, and reconciliation becomes manageable.
"Freedom of choice will be huge in 2026," he said. "Businesses and clients alike want visibility and control over how payments work."
That demand for control extends beyond pricing to operations. Real-time reconciliation, long a pain point, is finally becoming achievable as payment platforms sync more tightly with back-office systems. The result is fewer billing errors, faster refunds and clearer audit trails. These are all benefits customers may never see directly but will feel nonetheless.
Security becomes the competitive edge
As payments grow more interconnected, security is shifting from a back-end safeguard to a differentiator. "For years, the race in payments was about speed," said Brent Johnson, CISO at Bluefin. "In 2026, it will be about trust and transparency."
Tokenization and embedded payments are accelerating a move toward what some describe as "data-less" payments: models in which merchants never handle raw card data at all. Compliance responsibilities migrate upstream, and static credentials give way to dynamic, short-lived tokens.
This evolution is not just about reducing breach risk. It's about enabling secure interoperability across platforms and channels. As AI-driven commerce expands, payments data must be protected not just at rest or in transit, but throughout complex, multi-party workflows.
From hype to hard choices
If the past few years were defined by promise, 2026 will be defined by trade-offs. AI will continue to advance, but only where it can be governed. Stablecoins will find footholds, but selectively. Agentic commerce will grow, but under constraint. Merchants will demand flexibility, but not at the cost of trust. Regulators will press for accountability, even as innovation accelerates.
The winners will be those who treat payments not as a feature, but as infrastructure, something that must be explainable, resilient and fair. The losers will be those who mistake motion for progress. In 2026, the payments industry won't slow down. But it will grow more deliberate. And in that shift, the real shape of the future will come into focus.
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