What Will the New Year Bring for Payments?

January 2026

Fintech & Payments

Nick Maynard

VP of Research

2025 was an eventful year for payments. Whether it was stablecoin hype taking payments by storm, Pay by Bank scaling up across different markets, or A2A payments growing with the launch of Wero, 2025 saw big shifts in the world of payments.

The important question is, what will the new year bring?

In our Top 10 Fintech & Payments Trends 2026 whitepaper, we highlighted several key trends that will have a major impact on payments this year. Let’s explore three of the most important.

Stablecoins to Rival Existing Interbank Settlement Layer

Cross-border payments are seeing significant change; given their challenges around speed, cost, and transparency. As part of this transformation, we predict that stablecoins will take an important role as a way for banks to settle cross-border payments; bypassing much of the legacy infrastructure in place. This will reduce reliance on traditional rails, and reduce costs and time to send payments.

Agentic Commerce to Reshape B2B & Consumer Purchasing

AI is having a major impact on all walks of life. eCommerce will be no different, with AI agents set to transform the way we buy goods and services online. Payments companies were preparing for this in 2025, and we will see much more progress on building the infrastructure this year.

AI Agent Authorisation Flow

Source: Juniper Research

Pay by Bank to Scale in the UK Via Commercial VRPs (cVRPs)

Late 2025 saw clear signs of intent made by the PSR and FCA, in terms of building the foundations to push this alternative payment option into the mainstream. As such, we predict cVRPs will cement themselves as a practical payment option beyond 2026; thereby fuelling Pay by Bank payment options throughout the UK.

Not only will cVRPs become available on a more widespread basis, but international examples show that recurring payments have an important accelerative effect on A2A payment schemes. Recurring payment features such as Pix Automάtico are enabling A2A payments to scale rapidly, and we anticipate that a similar impact will be seen with cVRPs.

What Is Driving These Shifts?

Taken together, these three trends represent a major shift in payments, towards a more programmable, alternative payments-focused future. However, in a payments market many had traditionally seen as slow moving, what is driving this shift?

Clearly, the payments market is moving faster than it has for some time – many changes outside of these trends are also occurring. Fundamentally, there are several reasons why the payments market is changing quickly:

• AI & the Need for Programmability - With the rise of AI, and agentic AI in particular, traditional payment systems designed for humans are not optimised for AI use. Methods such as payment cards are older, and while they have been redesigned to feature elements such as network tokenisation, they are still designed around usage by humans. As such, the need to optimise payments for AI is a major trend, and is driving transformation. 
• Sovereignty of Payment Systems - With international events showing no signs of slowing down, governments around the world are increasingly concerned with reducing their reliance on international and US payment systems by having more direct control over which payment systems are used in country. This means that different countries and bodies are focusing on how they can stimulate local payment system growth, which is boosting alternative payment methods.
• Intense Market Competition - Payments and the broader fintech ecosystem are highly competitive, with many large international fintechs, as well as vibrant startup ecosystems and country-level providers in nearly every country. As such, the payments market is saturated in many ways, so there is intense competition to innovate and create new solutions as a way to differentiate. This is a major force in driving the market forwards.

These are not the only factors driving shifts in payments, but they are major forces; powering many of the trends we have predicted for 2026.

What Will We See Longer Term?

In the longer term, we expect to see a continuation of these trends – more payment innovation, more payment methods launching, and more investment. Critically, this will not directly translate into end user adoption. Indeed, we anticipate that the payments market will consolidate as alternative payment methods mature. Having a key reason why users should adopt a service, rather than innovation for innovation’s sake, will be vital to success. 

Nick Maynard is VP of Fintech Market Research at Juniper Research, where he leads analysis on key trends shaping the future of finance. With deep expertise across digital payments and commerce, his recent work includes reports on Instant Payments, eCommerce Payments, and Chargeback Management; helping stakeholders stay ahead in a rapidly evolving market.