What will actually change in payments next year. Our editorial team looks beyond launches to the shifts already taking shape
Predictions in payments tend to age badly. The industry is good at imagining futures and less good at anticipating which of them will actually arrive.
Looking ahead to 2026, the mood feels less exuberant and more practical. Automation is advancing, though not always in the ways vendors describe. Digital assets continue to search for their place within the financial system. Fraud remains persistent and adaptive. Meanwhile, familiar questions about responsibility, control and trust are resurfacing in new forms, rather than being resolved.
The most important changes in payments over the next year are likely to be those that alter behaviour rather than headlines, and that is where these predictions begin.
Editor’s predictions: when software starts to spend
The most interesting development in payments over the next year is unlikely to arrive as a product launch. It will arrive quietly, as software begins to make spending decisions on behalf of users, and the industry realises that this is delegation.
Agentic payments have so far been discussed in technical terms. AI agents which can search, compare, execute and settle transactions without human intervention. But this framing misses the point. Payments systems have always assumed an explicit human moment of intent. A click, a tap, a confirmation. Agentic models loosen that assumption and allow intent to be expressed once and executed many times, under rules rather than repeated consent.
In 2026, this will surface first in narrow, practical contexts. Corporate spend management, subscription optimisation, travel booking, procurement, treasury and bill payments are all obvious candidates. These are environments where parameters can be defined, and outcomes measured and errors tolerated to a degree.
The implications for payments providers are significant, though not always flattering. Traditional payment flows are designed around friction as reassurance. Authentication steps, confirmations and notifications exist to remind users that money is moving. Agentic systems treat those same steps as inefficiencies. The tension between reassurance and autonomy will shape product design over the next few years.
Liability will be the harder problem. When a human makes a poor decision, responsibility is clear. When an agent acts within its mandate but produces an undesirable outcome, responsibility becomes contested. Is the fault with the user who set the rules, the firm that built the agent, the platform that executed the payment, or the merchant that accepted it. Regulators will eventually have views, but in the short term, contracts and commercial power will do much of the work.
There is also a quieter prediction embedded here. Agentic payments will favour incumbents more than many expect. Delegation requires trust, data access and balance-sheet confidence. Large platforms, banks and established payment providers are better placed to offer those assurances than early-stage challengers. Innovation will still happen, but it may cluster around integration and orchestration rather than disruption.
The risk is not that agentic payments fail to materialise. It is that they arrive unevenly, in ways that strain systems built for explicit consent and episodic spending. By the end of next year, the industry is likely to spend less time debating whether software should be allowed to pay, and more time dealing with the consequences of the fact that it already is.
Callum Williams: Acting on the stablecoin surge
There will be an overarching push from traditional finance players to uncover new ways for fiat and digital currencies to coexist simultaneously.
If digital currency payments begin to break through the mainstream consciousness of customers, businesses will feel the pressure to accommodate customers to send, receive and hold not just one fiat and digital currency of their choosing, but multiple currencies in an interoperable and user-friendly way.
Businesses will more than likely adopt digital currency B2B payments more proactively, which will in turn cause for greater demand for more payment rails to either be adopted or created to facilitate not just crypto and stablecoin payments, but for crypto-to-fiat, and vice versa, conversions.
Banks will zag to tokenised deposits
In 2025 alone we saw banks such as JP Morgan, Citi, HSBC and more launch their own tokenised deposit services for cross-border trade settlement, and this won’t stop in 2026.
In fact, the more the benefits of handling tokenised deposits – such as yielding interest on tokenised deposit transactions, which is not applicable for stablecoins – become known to traditional finance firms, the more they will favour them over stablecoins.
Tokenised deposits offer nearly the same instant settlement as stablecoins, as well as transparency and liquidity. Banks are also able to own their tokenised deposit services and therefore have more autonomy, which can not be said for stablecoins.
OpenAI will become a payment service provider
If the last several months of 2025 have indicated anything, it is that Sam Altman’s OpenAI will be venturing deeper into payments in 2026.
OpenAI rolled out its Agentic Commerce Protocol service for the first time this year, which saw the likes of PayPal onboard to deliver e-commerce payments via AI agents at the point-of-sale. But what if OpenAI did all of this itself?
OpenAI Payments may not be as forgone an idea as it would have initially been when ChatGPT was founded in November 2022. The app already has hundreds of millions of downloads, so what if it can convert those users into customers by processing its own payments directly from within ChatGPT, being able to instantly verify the payee with its built-in AI agents?
This could become the next global powerhouse payment provider, rivaling the likes of Apple Pay if it can form its own digital wallet down the road.
Kieran O’Connor: Fraud, fraud and more fraud
The first trend to watch in 2026 is the continued shift of fraud activity into cross‑border corridors. As domestic controls tighten and reimbursement frameworks mature, fraudsters will increasingly exploit weaker KYC regimes, instant‑settlement rails and jurisdictions with slower regulatory responses.
International APP fraud is already rising sharply, but the next 12 months will see it become the fastest‑growing fraud category globally and markets will be forced to collaborate or suffer.
Expect more intelligence‑sharing agreements, more joint investigations and the early foundations of a more unified global payments‑security framework. The industry has talked about collective responsibility for years and 2026 is when it becomes unavoidable.
The second prediction sits in consumer banking, as I can see Monzo overtake Revolut in Ireland in customer numbers, provided it can stabilise its leadership issues that is.
Its brand strength, customer satisfaction scores and product simplicity give it a real advantage in markets where Revolut’s super‑app model is starting to feel crowded. Next year will also see the banks expand further into Europe, with Spain the mostly likely the next market.
Finally, despite political noise, card payments will continue to dominate UK consumer behaviour. The government’s attempt to push alternative payments will generate headlines but little behavioural change.
The reality is consumers, not regulators, decide what payment methods are used and habit remains the most powerful force in payments. Contactless cards are fast, familiar and embedded in daily life. Even with instant payments expanding, cards will remain the UK’s default choice throughout 2026.
