Payments Executives on What Worked, What Failed and What Comes Next for Commerce in 2026

The first half of the 2020s didn’t just accelerate payments and commerce. It stress-tested every assumption the industry carried into the decade — and forced leaders to decide, in real time, what to keep, what to kill and what to rebuild. That is the premise of this eBook: an “Over/Under” look back at the developments executives saw coming and prepared for, and the unexpected turns that demanded course-corrects, pivots or entirely new opportunity maps.

If the “Over” had a headline, it might be this: the wallet won. Not as a feature, but as the default. Cyril Villemin at Thales frames how Apple Pay and the pandemic-era surge reset what “good” looks like — frictionless, tokenized and authenticated at the device layer, turning tokenization from a security upgrade into foundational infrastructure. And with that foundation in place, the conversation is already shifting from tap-to-pay to the next interface: agentic commerce, where software agents initiate payments on trusted rails.

The responses also showed that speed stopped being a differentiator and became a promise you must operationalize. Real-time expectations didn’t arrive politely; they kicked the door in. Chuck Fagan at Velera details how credit unions leaned into real-time capabilities and account validation to cut friction from “first transaction” moments — while discovering that speed quickly exposes weak links in onboarding, identity and risk. Prashant Shah at Galileo Financial Technologies puts it even more bluntly: Once you promise faster money movement, exception handling and recovery can’t be afterthoughts, because that’s where trust is won or lost.

Payments didn’t just digitize; they became informational. David Keenan at FIS points to basket-level intelligence and real-time analytics as the “Over” bet — using granular data to power personalization, loyalty and better outcomes across the ecosystem. And on the B2B front, Boost underscores the same reality from the CFO’s seat: interoperability and usable data aren’t nice-to-haves, they’re what make modernization feasible at scale.

The “Under” was trust: governance, compliance and resilience moved to the top of the agenda.

If there’s a surprise theme threading through these pages, it’s that trust became a product requirement, not a legal checkbox. Drew Edwards at Ingo Payments calls the BaaS shakeout a predictable outcome of fragmented vendor stacks and a reminder that accountability doesn’t outsource. Galileo adds the operational corollary: Buyers stopped asking what a platform does and started asking what happens when it fails.

Technology headlines can obscure the oldest truth in finance: Liquidity is personal. Paymentus writes from the bill-pay front lines, where cost-to-serve pressure and customer experience collide — and where “every bill is worth more than the balance due.” Ingo goes further, arguing the real story is still the worker; the tens of millions living on timing, not theory and the urgency of access to earned wages.

These chapters — spanning leaders from Velera, Paysafe, One Inc, FIS, Boost, Ingo Payments, Paymentus, Thales and Galileo — don’t just recap the last five years. They offer a field guide to the signals that mattered, the assumptions that broke and the rewired priorities that will shape 2026 and beyond.

The post Payments Executives on What Worked, What Failed and What Comes Next for Commerce in 2026 appeared first on PYMNTS.com.