Top Payments & Financial Services Trends Tech Will Drive in 2026

By 2026, payments will be built on real-time rails that demand overhauled legacy cores, with only the most modernized institutions fully ready.
AI-driven “agentic commerce” will automate purchasing, shifting how risk, liability, and authentication are managed across the payments stack.
Digital identity, biometrics, and advanced fraud and compliance tools will become central infrastructure as instant payments amplify exposure.
Open banking, embedded finance, BNPL, and cross-border A2A rails will reshape revenue models, favoring players with composable, data-rich platforms.

The PaymentsJournal article “The Trends That Will Modernize Payments Technology in 2026” (authored by Tom Nawrocki, Dec. 29, 2025) draws on a recent Javelin Strategy & Research report to project key shifts in payments technology infrastructure—especially with regards to real-time payments, legacy system overhaul, AI’s influence, and shifting fraud and identity risk models [1][5]. Below we unpack these findings, overlay them with corroborating sources, posit strategic implications, and flag open questions.

Key Trends & Corroboration

Legacy core modernization & infrastructure overhaul: The article highlights the struggle of many banks whose core systems are batch-oriented and ill-suited to the demands of instant payments and real-time fraud detection [1]. This is echoed in Global Payments’ 2026 Trends Report, which emphasizes the move beyond transaction terminals toward POS systems that are everywhere and deeply integrated, and businesses requiring infrastructure that handles real-time clearing and settlement [10].
Agentic commerce & AI: Agentic commerce—AI agents making purchases autonomously—emerges as a central theme. PaymentsJournal notes companies like OpenAI and Stripe establishing protocols for agentic payments, raising questions on risk allocation [1]. Mastercard’s prediction similarly identifies securing agentic commerce via authentication, intent capture, and fraud mitigation as a key trend for 2026.
Real-time payments & rails expansion: There’s broad agreement across sources that real-time payments will move from edge case to norm. Softjourn observes that real-time rail adoption is accelerating globally (e.g. SEPA Instant, FedNow, RTP), enabling A2A payments and pay-by-bank services [1]. Trustpair also calls out that real-time payments bring real-time risk, pushing institutions toward live monitoring and pre-transaction validation [5].
Identity, biometrics, fraud & compliance: There is strong corroboration that digital identity and fraud prevention are central. Mastercard forecasts stronger digital identity credentials, digital wallets for identity, and tokenization. Netcetera and Trustpair discuss convergence of identity verification with payments (“log in and pay”), advanced biometric authentication, behavioral metrics, and more stringent KYC/KYB frameworks [4][5].
Embedded finance, BNPL, open banking, and cross-border flows: These business model shifts are cited by multiple sources: Softjourn on BNPL growth and wallet adoption [1]; Worldline on embedded finance, UPI expansion, merchant infrastructure, and cross-border corridors [2]; Zota and Netcetera on open banking use cases and variable recurring payments [4].

Strategic Implications

Financial institutions (especially midsize and smaller ones) must prioritize core modernization: APIs, composable platforms and middleware are not stopgaps but essential infrastructure to enable real-time and AI-driven capabilities.
Vendors and incumbents can differentiate via identity and fraud infrastructure: strong KYC/KYB, biometric authentication, and sophisticated risk allocation models around agentic commerce will be a source of competitive advantage.
Regulatory risk will rise: stablecoins, open banking obligations, privacy laws, biometric data laws, and identity verification regimes will drive both costs and compliance overhead. Those who invest ahead will gain both first-mover trust and avoid costly retrofits.
Revenue models are shifting: with embedded finance, pay-by-bank/A2A bases, and AI-agent enabled purchasing, firms that can deliver frictionless, flexible, and tailored payment experiences will win—not just in consumer markets but in B2B/commercial payments.

Open Questions & Risks

How will liability and responsibility be apportioned when AI agents initiate payments? Who is responsible in cases of fraud—agent provider, bank, merchant?
Which regulatory structures (e.g., liability rules, identity verification mandates) will vary by jurisdiction and how will firms operating globally adapt?
What are the operational costs and risk challenges tied to real-time settlement and instant rails, especially for smaller institutions?
How consumers will respond to biometric and identity wallet models—balancing convenience with privacy, data security, and possible bias or exclusion?
How will the economics of BNPL, embedded finance, and open banking affect existing fee structures, interchange revenue, and margins of incumbents?

Supporting Notes

Banks still using legacy core systems are patching capabilities via middleware; by contrast, larger banks with resources are proactively rebuilding infrastructure to support real-time payments and instant fraud detection. This observation is drawn from PaymentsJournal’s coverage of Javelin Strategy research [1].
Mastercard identifies “securing agentic commerce,” “connecting crypto to mainstream commerce,” and “digital identity” among the six global payment trends shaping 2026, highlighting authentication, intent capture, and stablecoin use across commerce.
Softjourn reports that in 2025, U.S. real-time payments rails grew sharply: FedNow lifted transaction limits from $1 million to $10 million; open banking and pay‐by‐bank services are accelerating Treasury and SME use of A2A payments [1].
Trustpair notes that real-time payments’ expansion increases risk, increasing the importance of pre-transaction validation, live monitoring, predictive anomaly detection [5].
In India, UPI saw 19 billion monthly transactions in late 2025, daily values nearing ₹90,000 crore; SoftPOS deployments and tokenization are accelerating contactless and card usage [2].
Javelin’s 2025 Emerging Biometric Authentication at the Point of Sale Scorecard names Verifone, J.P. Morgan Payments, and Wink as Best-in-Class providers across identity-payments platform, end-to-end solutions, and authentication as a service, respectively [4][1].
Global Payments 2026 Report finds trends including “AI is your shopping agent,” “Payment is everywhere,” “Embedded finance gets more accessible,” and “When you need your money now” as six key themes, pointing to agentic commerce, POS evolution, embedded finance, and instant payments [10].