5 payments trends to watch in 2026

March 12, 2026

Shifts in the payments landscape are creating new ways for businesses to unlock efficiencies, deliver value for their organization and better serve customers. Image credit: Shutterstock

By Luxury Marketer Intelligence

Shifts in the payments landscape are creating new ways for businesses to unlock efficiencies, deliver value for their organization and better serve customers.

J.P. Morgan Payments has identified five key trends to explore in 2026 and beyond, from technological innovation to evolving consumer expectations and growing fraud risks.

Key takeaways

Treasury teams are reimagining liquidity management through technology adoption and finance automation embedded into ERP platforms

To combat escalating fraud risks, companies are implementing digital IDs that combine verified data with behavioral pattern analysis

AI agents are projected to handle 15-25 percent of all U.S. ecommerce purchases by 2030

60 percent of Fortune 500 companies are implementing blockchain initiatives to help increase process efficiency

Here, in J. P. Morgan's words, are the five trends:

Reimagine liquidity: The shift to always-on treasury

Whether a business is expanding into new geographies or reconfiguring supply chains due to geopolitical strains, businesses need to be able to access funds quickly in any location or currency.

Teams also need to be able to anticipate or respond to events in real time via programmable automation, to ensure businesses have the agility and resilience to withstand shocks.

Optimizing your treasury function

Treasury teams are reimaging their liquidity approach by investing in new technologies to build resiliency into the treasury ecosystem.

For example, adopting real-time payments (RTP)²—such as PIX in Brazil or SEPA Instant in Europe —means that treasury can keep hold of liquidity for longer, enabling last-minute payments compared to traditional payments like ACH, where you would need to pay a day in advance.

New technology is also helping enable borderless liquidity, helping facilitate cross-border payments or intra-group financing for treasurers.

By adopting virtual account structures for intercompany trade settlement, treasury teams can manage internal cash flows and optimize foreign exchange without moving funds between accounts or locations, improving liquidity and multi-currency management.

Meanwhile, integrating cash-generating entities into multi-currency notional pools increases visibility over liquidity and provides an efficient way to access funding for operations.

Liquidity focus

Real-time liquidity—Real-time payments, streamlined infrastructure

Borderless liquidity—Multi-currency capabilities, VAMs, inter-company payment optimization

Resilient liquidity—API connectivity, notional pools, automated sweeping

New technologies and real-time connectivity are crucial to reducing friction and improving working capital across a more diverse landscape.

Finance automation is increasingly being embedded into enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, which is cutting the administrative load and making it easier for procurement treasury teams to get visibility over working capital and access non-debt financing, anytime and in real time.

Digital identity: The future of fraud defense

Consumers and businesses now expect transactions to clear in seconds, so verifying identity is crucial to reduce the risk of fraud.

Losses from authorized push payments (APP) scams are projected to hit $3.03 billion by 2027.

Meanwhile, 47 percent of businesses experienced fraud incidents related to ACH credits in 2023, according to a report by the Association for Financial Professionals. And $2.8 billion was lost to business email compromise attacks in 2024.

Racing against fraud

1 million+ cases of identity theft reported to FTC in 2024

Deepfakes now account for 40 percent of biometric fraud

79 percent of U.S. businesses were hit by payments fraud in 2024

Growth of digital IDs

To balance fraud prevention with the need to reduce checkout abandonment, businesses are introducing stronger security measures such as biometrics or additional pre-payment control checks in payment processing.

But there is a growing recognition of the need to combine data-based approaches with deeper behavioral pattern analysis. Digital IDs are a strong solution for this.

Growing social acceptance of digital IDs, plus the heightened risk of fraud, have prompted regulators to take steps:

In 2026, the E.U. is introducing a digital ID wallet for users to authenticate their identity

In India, the national ID scheme, Aadhaar, is powering more than 2 billion monthly authentications as of 2025

In Singapore, Singpass—a digital ID for residents to access public and private services—has 5 million active users as of 2025

These schemes underscore that digital IDs are becoming to global ecommerce what passports are to international travel.

Prevention reigns supreme

With account-to-account (A2A) payments, once money leaves an account, it is gone for good—so pre-transaction ID controls are essential for supporting faster payments.

Finance teams need to implement comprehensive counterparty validation, including real-time ID verification and layered defense mechanisms like real-time fraud detection and account intelligence tools to ensure their customers are who they say they are.

Payments evolution: Improving next-gen experiences

AI promises to change how people shop through the rise of agentic commerce.

Agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capability lets agents use delegated authority and advanced reasoning to search for and make purchase decisions for a customer.

By 2030, AI agents are projected to be responsible for 15-25 percent of all U.S. ecommerce purchases.

To prepare for this, businesses will need to deploy “sell-side” AI agents that can optimize inventory, pricing and engagement to market their products to “buy-side” agents.

Improving the payment experience

Research shows there remains a mismatch between what consumers want and what merchants consider important.

While 65 percent of consumers expect one-click payments, only 45 percent of merchants view a frictionless checkout as necessary.

In response, using technology to create more personalized payments could include:

Providing more payment options based on customer preference, such as bank transfers, direct debits, cryptocurrencies or account-to-account payments

Personalizing payments through installment payments based on streamlined credit checks

Creating personalized loyalty schemes—especially in the U.S., where 25 percent of respondents to a McKinsey survey said being able to collect points or discounts was a key factor behind their payment choice

Embedded finance

Embedded finance will help companies launch payments ecosystems and business lines that can give customers the seamless shopping experience they crave.

Creating a closed-loop payments ecosystem—where payments and rewards remain within a company’s platform—drives loyalty by helping enable a more frictionless checkout.

BCG research estimates that the total addressable market for embedded finance in the U.S., Canada and Europe is around $185 billion across payments, capital solutions, accounts and card issuing.

Always connected: APIs, data and automation

The introduction of the ISO 20022 data standard is revolutionizing payments by providing richer transaction data to support more automation and robust transaction monitoring. Payment reconciliations will be faster, while harmonized data structures will enable more seamless cross-border payments.

AI-powered treasury

With its ability to capture and analyze huge volumes of data, AI is expected to be transformational for treasury.

Chief financial officers and treasury leaders expect AI-enabled capabilities to unlock ROI in areas such as risk management, revenue, and spend analysis and forecasting. Their confidence is well-founded—organizations with advanced insights capabilities are three times more likely to report double-digit annual revenue growth than those relying on basic information.

Embedded everything

Finance teams are also looking to build digital-first treasury operations through embedded banking capabilities.

As many as 88 percent of financial professionals believe direct bank connectivity is very or extremely beneficial, while 85 percent say they would likely switch banks to get direct accounting or ERP connectivity.

By embedding banking and treasury functionality into ERP and treasury management system (TMS) platforms, businesses can access live balances, initiate payments, track transactions, and automate cross-border reconciliation, forecasting and liquidity management.

Blockchain realized: Increased adoption and new opportunities

Blockchain technology has moved quickly from theory to reality. Some 60 percent of large Fortune 500 companies are looking to implement blockchain initiatives, with increased use of deposit tokens, central bank digital currencies and stablecoins.

The growth of asset tokenization

Asset tokenization will continue to grow, with the potential for asset classes such as bonds, securities and repos to be tokenized and recorded on blockchain networks. About 60 percent of institutional investors are looking to increase their exposure to digital assets, with tokenization being an important driver.

From systems to networks

Blockchain will also facilitate a move away from systems-based infrastructure into a world of network-based architecture that allows for greater interoperability and programmability.

Instead of having separate accounts for different financial services, individuals could have a single wallet that serves as ID and as a means for holding multiple assets, not just cash. The movement of those assets is then governed by smart contracts recognized across financial institutions.

Network-based infrastructure also enables the possibility of shared ledgers rather than a general ledger at an individual institution, allowing use cases to extend beyond cash and payments into assets such as derivatives, securities and FX, and capabilities such as composability, atomic settlements and new clearing gateways.

Integrated processes

Systems-based architecture often requires disparate financial processes, sometimes across different legal entities in different geographies.

Networks enable organizations to integrate processes and payments so they can be automated and run in parallel. Tasks that used to take days can now be completed in hours.

AS BUSINESSES NAVIGATE these shifts, progress in one area can pave the way for opportunities in another.

For example, reimagining liquidity can help improve opportunities across working capital, which can then be used to fund AI projects that can in turn help improve fraud detection and security.

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5 payments trends to watch in 2026

5 payments trends to watch in 2026

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