As digital commerce accelerates across geographies, channels, and modalities, the payments landscape is being transformed. Payments are no longer a mere cost of doing business but a strategic asset. Looking ahead to 2026, we anticipate seven major trends that will drive this shift. Payment professionals who understand and prepare for them today will be better positioned to increase conversion, reduce risk, and support global growth.
AI‑Powered Payment Intelligence Will Be a Competitive Advantage
In 2026, AI‑driven payment intelligence and embedded observability will move from “nice to have” to table stakes for businesses of all sizes.
Payment observability refers to the end-to-end visibility and monitoring of your payment flows, from authorization, declines, and retries all the way through to settlement and reconciliation. AI and ML will unify fragmented data from multiple payment service providers (PSPs) into a single view, exposing key performance indicators and allowing payment teams to surface bottlenecks and make data-driven decisions.
Payment teams will leverage AI and ML to monitor transaction flows, detect anomalies in real time, and optimize routing logic across multiple providers. What used to take hours and hours can now be discovered in seconds.
Finance and operations will add payment data and analytics to broader organizational metrics like conversion rate, churn, and customer lifetime value (LTV) to drive forecasting and even go‑to‑market decisions.
Payment professionals won't have to fear missing out on critical insights, as they will be able to dive deeper into patterns and metrics like the conversion rate of a specific payment method in a given region for a certain BIN.
Regulatory pressure is mounting: frameworks like PSD3 in Europe, and increased scrutiny on fraud and cross‑border payment flows mean observability tools are no longer optional. Payments observability is already growing at 18.7% CAGR.
The rise of payment orchestration platforms (like IXOPAY) reflects this trend: by unifying data across multiple PSPs and acquirers, they allow merchants to apply AI models centrally rather than in each provider's silo.
The payments stack will increasingly serve as a decision engine, as well as a transaction engine.
Payment Orchestrators Will Evolve Into Trust Orchestrators
By 2026, payment orchestration platforms will shift from routing transactions to orchestrating trust, becoming the neutral layer that makes agent-driven commerce work. Trust orchestration evolves beyond traditional payment orchestration to handle agent identities across multiple providers. With no centralized agent identity system expected, orchestrators must validate agents from various sources — issuers, banks, and merchants. The trust chain expands from traditional risk and fraud checks to include agent validation, consumer trust, and transaction trust. All this information needs cryptographic storage to defend against chargebacks when disputes arise about agent actions or purchase intent.
Why this shift is inevitable:
AI agents change the bottleneck. The hard part of payment processing won’t be directing transactions—it will be verifying who (or what) is acting, their intent, and attributing liability.
Routing logic becomes commoditized. AI will make today’s optimization rules easy to replicate.
Agent protocols are fragmenting. Google’s A2P, Stripe and Open AI’s ACP, Mastercard’s Agenty Pay, and others each govern different parts of the agentic payment flow, and merchants will need several protocols to support agentic transactions.
Someone must unify the trust signals. Merchants will prioritize the “most trustworthy route,” requiring platforms that can harmonize identity, authorization, and evidence across protocols.
Winners provide proof, not just pipes. The leading platforms will anchor themselves in tokenization, protocol-agnostic design, and the ability to offer immutable, end-to-end proof to resolve disputes.
Trust—machine-verifiable and consistent—will become the core currency of autonomous commerce, and the trust orchestrators who can reliably broker it will define the next generation of payments.
Payment Methods Will Continue to Diversify — And Global Merchants Must Keep Up
Alternative Payment Methods (APMs) are no longer “alternatives.” For many global consumers, they are the primary method of paying. From mobile wallets and QR payments to real-time bank transfers and regional wallets like India’s UPI or Brazil’s Pix, APMs are reshaping checkout expectations.
According to Visa Consulting & Analytics, alternative payment methods are projected to account for 58% of e-commerce transactions globally by 2028.
In India, UPI (Unified Payments Interface) handles more than 18 billion transactions monthly in 2025, accounting for 85% of India’s digital transactions.
Brazil’s instant payment system, Pix, is on course to surpass seven billion monthly transactions for the first time, potentially reaching 7.9 billion in December. This growth is expected to push Pix’s total transaction volume in 2025 to USD 6.7 trillion, a 34% year-over-year increase.
This means that merchants entering new markets or optimizing existing ones must support a growing array of APMs or risk losing customers at the final step. Leading orchestration platforms like IXOPAY address this challenge by enabling merchants to add new APMs without new direct integrations.
We expect global merchants that prioritize payment method diversity, especially in high-growth regions, will see higher conversion rates, stronger brand trust, and faster expansion. Payments must be designed with geographic and demographic context in mind, not just compliance or legacy PSP infrastructure.
Agentic Commerce Will Outpace Consumer Trust
Agentic commerce, where autonomous agents or AI systems transact on behalf of users (automatic subscription renewals, reorder flows, or procurement bots), is on the horizon, but adoption will be gradual.
From a technology perspective, payment providers and orchestration platforms are building infrastructure: tokenization, delegated authentication, and credentials‑on‑file.
However, in Forrester’s March 2025 Consumer Pulse Survey, only 24% of U.S. online adults trust AI agents to act on their behalf to make routine purchases. Muted consumer trust in AI agents stems from a combination of privacy concerns and a lack of transparency about whether they are communicating with an agent.
Likewise, a recent Omnisend study found that 85% of shoppers still have concerns about AI shopping, with privacy and data security still topping the list.
From Boston Consulting Group: Traffic to U.S. retail sites from GenAI browsers/chat services jumped 4,700% year-over-year in July 2025. And those users engaged more deeply (spent ~32% more time, browsed ~10% more pages).
The high growth rates in traffic and engagement signal a rapid acceleration of adoption in the “assistive” part of the journey, even if many consumers aren’t yet comfortable handing over the full checkout to an agent. For merchants and platforms, preparation today is key: ensure your payment stack supports tokenized credentials, reusable identity tokens, and agent workflows.
The March Toward Tokenization
A key structural shift in payments will be the decline of PAN usage (Primary Account Numbers) and the rise of token-first transactions. IXOPAY has adopted a multi-token approach to help future-proof its customers.
Tokenization reduces merchant exposure by storing no sensitive PANs, lowers audit scope, and reduces breach implications.
Tokenized volumes are forecasted to accelerate significantly.
For merchants, tokenization offers many benefits, including:
Authorization rates improve when credentials are kept updated via tokens.
Compliance burden decreases as PCI DSS scope is reduced.
Vaulting and card‑on‑file infrastructure becomes simpler and more secure.
With mandates such as the end‑of-2030 PAN sunset by card schemes, merchants with traditional PAN and secure card number storage approaches will need to migrate or risk being left behind.
By 2026, token‑first infrastructure (network tokens, PAR tokens, virtual cards) will be the default for new merchants and a standard upgrade path for existing ones.
Network Tokenization Adoption Accelerates
Network tokenization, where card schemes (Visa, Mastercard) issue “tokens” to replace PANs (Primary Account Number) for card‑on‑file and recurring flows, is rapidly approaching standard adoption by the card networks, although more merchant education is needed to reach adoption across the payment ecosystem.
Research from Juniper forecasts global network tokenized transactions will nearly double from approximately 283 billion in 2025 to about 574 billion by 2029.
According to industry reports, Mastercard and Visa are switching globally to tokenization and sunsetting PAN‑based card‑not‑present (CNP) flows, with a commitment by Mastercard to have all e-commerce transactions use tokenization by 2030.
What this means for merchants:
Reduced fraud risk and improved approval rates (data shows ~4.7% uplift in authorizations and ~34–50% fraud reduction)
Lower PCI DSS scope thanks to the replacement of PAN with tokens.
Better resilience: when cards are reissued or expire, tokens stay valid, reducing declines and churn.
While the PAN is being phased out of the processing experience, it is still required to obtain a network token, and token providers will continue to support PANs.
Until network tokenization reaches 100% adoption, lifecycle services like Card Account Updater will still be needed to maintain current card-on-file data.
Marketing teams will increasingly need to rely on services like Payment Account Reference (PAR). Because a single PAN can be used to generate multiple network tokens—through Click to Pay, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and merchant-initiated tokenization—PAR becomes the only consistent identifier. It provides a unified reference that connects transactions across channels and devices back to the underlying cardholder account.
In 2026, network tokens will become a vital element for card‑on‑file integrations, and merchants still relying solely on PANs will have to seriously evaluate the benefits as card networks promote incentives for network token use.
VAMP and the Rise of Chargeback Data Tracking
As Visa tightens rules around disputes and fraud, chargeback and dispute data observability will become a core compliance and performance discipline.
VAMP (Visa’s Acquirer Monitoring Program) defines dispute/fraud thresholds that acquirers and large merchants must meet; the updated rules will apply globally (excluding MENA) from April 1, 2026.
For example, in many regions, the threshold for excessive dispute ratio is being tightened from ~2.2% to ~1.5% of transactions.
What this means for merchants:
Merchants who exceed VAMP ratio thresholds may trigger fines, acquirer restrictions, or termination — even if their own dispute ratio seems modest because the acquirer’s aggregated risk is impacted.
Merchants that have traditionally calculated chargeback and fraud ratios manually using data from a single PSP will face increasing pressure to calculate and monitor these ratios across all their processors. However, real-time monitoring will be next to impossible without automation.
In practice, payment operations will need tools to track chargebacks, disputes, VAMP ratios, and fraud cases by provider, BIN, region, and APM. Orchestration platforms are increasingly bundling “observability” modules into payment stacks.
Merchants impacted by acquirers that don’t meet aggregate VAMP thresholds may turn to payment orchestration to set up fallback providers in the event a PSP goes down for any reason.
In 2026, if you do not have real‑time dispute analytics and proactive chargeback alerts integrated into your payments stack, you risk delays, more lengthy disputes, and higher costs.
Final Takeaways: Prepare Now, Lead Later
Payments are no longer “just operations." They have become strategic enablers of growth, customer retention, and global expansion. The seven predictions above reflect structural changes that will shape payments in 2026 and beyond.
To stay ahead:
Evaluate your payments stack now: Are you token‑ready? Can you link multiple PSPs through orchestration? Do you have real‑time observability?
Invest in data and AI tools: If your payment systems still silo reporting or lack automated insights, you are likely missing opportunities.
Explore new rails strategically: Alternative payment methods, agentic commerce, and tokenization are all viable, but start with pilot use cases aligned with your business model.
Strengthen risk and compliance infrastructure: With VAMP requirements and global regulatory pressures mounting, proactive controls matter.
Think global and modular: Payment orchestration allows you to treat payments as a growth engine: expand markets, add methods, optimize globally.
Want to future‑proof your payments strategy for 2026 and beyond? Talk to IXOPAY about how orchestration can help you simplify complexity, improve control, and scale globally.