By Sanjib Kalita, Chairman, Fintech Meetup
Payments are transforming, and so has the way to win. Once treated as a back-office utility with little differentiation, payments are now emerging as a strategic growth engine for banks, merchants, and fintechs alike.
Whether moving money globally for the largest organizations or fulfilling daily consumer needs, payments increasingly rely on emerging technology; they naturally sit at the intersection of regulation, innovation, and the customer experience. This combination creates enormous opportunities to improve payments in 2026 and beyond drastically.
In parallel, this evolution is happening at an ideal time, as the renewed push for US leadership in payments innovations is being rapidly advanced – from real-time payments, to stablecoins and open banking frameworks. To win, the payments ecosystem must go beyond enabling commerce to shape it actively.
The Payments Mindset Shift: From Cost Center to Opportunity
The global payments industry now generates an estimated $2.5 trillion in annual revenue, making it one of the largest and most dynamic segments of the financial services industry. Compared with other revenue streams like lending, payments typically carry lower balance-sheet risk while creating more frequent customer touchpoints.
When properly managed, every payment becomes a potential source of engagement. This has fundamentally changed how merchants, banks and fintechs think about payments – not just as necessary infrastructure, but as a strategic, front-facing layer to be continuously improved.
Personalization has become the new differentiator in payments. For today’s consumers, winning payment experiences are flexible, seamless, and contextual. This could mean being offered multi-currency payment options at checkout, deferred payment options, or digital wallets embedded directly on their favorite e-commerce sites.
One non-financial example to highlight this shift in expectations is music. Recently, MTV shut down all its 24-hour music video channels worldwide. With streaming video and audio platforms like Spotify, YouTube, and others, listeners can select specific songs, whether they’re in their car, home, or office, with data feeding into a centralized profile for further personalization. As one of the highest-frequency financial services, payments are well-positioned to follow a similar path.
Personal finance expectations are increasingly spilling over into business banking as well. Small businesses want the same speed and simplicity they experience with their P2P platforms, but applied to actions like invoicing, payroll, and supplier payments. It’s clear that the industry is moving away from one-size-fits-all payment solutions toward personalized, user-centric journeys across every channel.
Seamless on the Surface, Complex by Design
Modern payment experiences are defined by customer-facing simplicity, but delivering front-end simplicity requires back-end complexity. Behind a one-click checkout or a real-time transfer lies a highly complex network of payment rails, compliance checks, fraud prevention systems, currency conversions, and API integrations, all orchestrated in real time. While customers are quick to judge their payment experiences based on speed and ease, providers are busy managing this “invisible layer” of risk, regulation, and operations behind the scenes.
To manage some of this complexity, the industry is moving toward an API-first model. Value is no longer created solely by the payment rails themselves, but by the intelligence layered on top of them. After all, today’s online shoppers expect to be proactively offered the best way to pay, for their chosen method of payment to be instantly approved, and to complete their purchase in seconds, without ever seeing the verification, routing, or fraud checks happening in the background.
From a payments provider perspective, business models for winning are shifting from long-term contracts to flexible agreements with scalable pricing. Rather than locking customers into specific solutions for years, winning providers deliver an ecosystem of products priced for that moment. The shift from fixed to variable costs reflects the fact that technology development requires significantly less time and resources.
That’s why APIs are enabling payments to move faster and work smarter, turning each transaction into a repeatable, yet highly customized workflow that enables instant identity verification, the smartest routing options, and even tailored offers at checkout.
Concurrently, AI is helping to improve fraud detection, settlement, and back-office efficiency. The emerging leaders in payments will be those who successfully leverage these technologies, delivering experiences that feel personalized and adaptive while remaining highly secure.
Payments Growth Opportunities for 2026
Looking ahead, several high-impact opportunities are shaping the future of payments, including:
- Embedded and contextual commerce: As the checkout experience becomes increasingly critical, those who embed hyper-personalized payment options directly into digital experiences, creating unified interfaces that strengthen the relationship between customers, banks, and merchants, will win.
- AI-powered infrastructure: AI is reshaping payment infrastructure through smarter routing, cost optimization, and adaptive fraud systems that learn and improve over time.
- SMB payment operations: Fintechs are increasingly offering value-added tools to enhance small business payments, such as invoice automation, reconciliation, and working capital solutions, particularly in sectors that still rely on manual processes.
- Seamless cross-border payments: Stablecoins and tokenized settlements are beginning to address long-standing pain points in international payments, cutting clearing times from days to hours or even minutes. Combined with dynamic routing, these innovations promise faster, more reliable global commerce.
Connectivity Is the New Currency in Payments
A visit to a local shop has slowly but surely evolved into a visit to the online global marketplace, unconstrained by geography, currency, or payment method. Buyers now connect with their preferred sellers from anywhere in the world – and payments are the connective tissue that enable these transactions at scale.
By adopting APIs, pursuing meaningful fintech partnerships, and modernizing technology infrastructure to support fast, personalized and effortless transactions, payments providers are rising to meet today’s evolving expectations. In tandem, countries promoting real-time payment rails and stablecoin frameworks will only serve to speed up the pace of payment innovation – paving the way for a future where money moves more freely, reliably and efficiently than ever before.
Yet, this payments evolution will not be the result of technology alone – it will depend on the coordination of a sophisticated, interconnected network of players, each with their own unique purpose. Banks will provide the bedrock of trust to their customer base, fintechs will drive the specialized agility and API-first innovation, merchants will anchor the customer experience, and regulators will be at the forefront of establishing standards for security and interoperability.
Payments providers that succeed in 2026 and beyond will be those that treat collaboration as a core capability, leveraging partnerships to balance innovation with trust, resilience, and long-term growth.
About the Author
For over 25 years, Sanjib Kalita has driven results in financial and technology companies large and small, including Google, Citi, Intel, Fintech Meetup, and Money20/20. He is currently the Chairman of Fintech Meetup and the CEO of Guppy, a fintech that brings control, quality, and convenience to the credit data industry through blockchain and distributed ledger technology. Most recently, he was CMO of Money20/20 – a business he helped grow from a 4-person startup into the world’s largest series of fintech events.
Sanjib spent 9 years at Citi in the credit card business in a variety of roles, and then worked on the business development team at Google Wallet. On the entrepreneurial side, he worked on multiple startups in education technology, financial technology and the events industry. Sanjib holds an M.B.A. degree from the Kellogg School of Management, as well as Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University.
Recent PaymentsNEXT news:
What does “orchestration” really mean in payment processing?