Cash, check or charge: There hasn’t been a shortage of choice at checkout for decades. But the convergence of several trends, from advances in artificial intelligence to the growth of cryptocurrencies, is expanding options even further — and much faster. This is not only creating new ways to pay but reshaping how money moves, how trust is built and how value is created.

If there’s a topline trend to 2026, it’s how payments are evolving, becoming more personalized, predictive and seamlessly interoperable between traditional and new payment platforms — and how the often unsexy work of building the infrastructure, setting the standards and forging the partnerships to support these new experiences is paying off.  

In 2025, gen AI quickly proved itself to be more than a mere recommendation engine, with the promise of AI-powered agents starting to manage transactions on behalf of consumers and businesses. Agentic commerce will expand in 2026, but critically, so will the guardrails around it, making it easier and more secure for businesses to integrate agentic commerce into their transaction flows. The industry is focused on how to identify that an agent is legitimate, how to strengthen authentication with agents and reduce fraud, and how to capture intent in case an AI transaction goes awry. You can automate commerce, but you can’t automate trust.

The wild ride of crypto may be the financial story of the early 21st century, but mainstreaming cryptocurrencies beyond investing has proven elusive. The last year and a half brought regulatory clarity in the U.S. and Europe over stablecoins — cryptocurrencies pegged to government currencies — creating the confidence the financial sector needed for commercialization. Next year, expect greater collaboration between ecosystem players that will make it easier and safer for people to pay and move money with stablecoins, from facilitating payouts to stablecoin wallets to enabling stablecoin and bitcoin purchases on-chain to streamlining settlement across borders and currencies.  

Recent Mastercard research into cybercrime found that 80% of global consumers were the targets of a scam attempt in the last year. As the digital ecosystem expands, it is becoming more vital than ever that businesses and consumers know who they can trust. More robust identity verification tools that also make it faster and easier to prove your identity (and confirm those you interact with) will be essential to the growth of the digital ecosystem. We’ll see digital identity wallets that ease access to financial, government and other services, including through age verification, plus an acceleration of the ability to create verified aliases for crypto transactions, eliminating the need for the complex addresses that so often play a role in fraud. Expanding digital ID services to developing markets could even accelerate inclusion into the digital economy. The bottom line: Digital identity that feels as natural and reliable as making a payment. 

Mastercard research shows that a growing wave of consumers, led by Gen Z, are embracing the circular economy model, which prioritizes maximizing use of resources and is built on reuse, resale and repair. This is creating the opportunity for regenerative payment loops, where transactions can enable and incentivize more sustainable choices, often via micro-transactions and secure, easy peer-to-peer payments, such as refill models, take-back programs and deposits and returns for reusable items like coffee cups.  For the consumer, it’s a virtuous circle, making returning a cup as simple as single use. For retailers, there are virtues, too — from lower packaging costs to deepened loyalty. 

Payments and banking are adapting to the consumer, not the other way around. In 2026, we’ll see the rise of dynamic tools and platforms that can be customized for our own spending behaviors and financial goals. That will include payment credentials that let us set rules for how we want to pay, such as credit for big purchases or debit for everyday expenses: convenience, but with controls. By harnessing insights from billions of transactions — nearly 160 billion in 2024 — Mastercard is also delivering personalized content and far more tailored offers at precisely the right time. Small businesses and those with thin credit files may benefit as lenders access deeper insights advanced analytics and permissioned open finance data to better assess the creditworthiness of individual loan applicants.    

In-store checkout may become even more seamless with biometric solutions – smile! – while one-click checkout online is within reach by 2030, thanks to the acceleration of tokenization across the globe, which eliminates manual entry of card numbers and static passwords. On the merchant side, real-time payments are becoming real, as Mastercard Transaction Stream, the brand-new processing technology that can clear in real time and settle payments the same day, continues to roll out, freeing up capital for businesses. And with global cross-border payments expected to exceed $250 trillion by 2027, expect more innovation and investment in this arena, from alias-based remittances to make it simple to send money to loved ones back home to the expansion of fast, secure and transparent cross-border capabilities that will, among other benefits, enable small businesses to reach the global marketplace.