The global payment industry is undergoing structural changes as digital payments rewrite the rules and new technologies including stablecoins and artificial intelligence (AI) gain traction, a new report by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) says.

The report, released in September, explores the main transformative forces reshaping the landscape, identifying digital currencies, agentic AI, real-time account-to-account (A2A) payments, and the rise of software platforms, as major trends to watch.

Digital currencies enter the mainstream

The first trend outlined is the rise of digital currencies, with US dollar-denominated stablecoins in particular having achieved clear product market fit, supported by greater regulatory clarity. In 2024, stablecoins reached a market capitalization of around US$210 billion, with transaction volumes exceeding US$26 trillion.

Tokenized real-world assets, including money market funds and private credit, are also expanding rapidly, with market capitalization reaching roughly US$28 billion, marking a nearly fourfold increase in two years.

This surge is fueling the build-out of a more modular foundation for transaction banking, payments, and banking-as-a-service (BaaS), where blockchain-native components operate largely in the background.

For banks and payment service providers (PSPs), the challenge will be now to determine how to connect to this architecture in ways that match their competitive strengths, risk appetite, and regulatory constraints. Strategic options include acting as custodians of digital assets, issuing stablecoins or tokenized deposits, forming consortiums to scale adoption, or focusing on infrastructure and “as-a-service” models.

Agentic AI moves into the payment stack

AI agents are another prominent trend in the payment landscape. These agents leverage AI to make decisions, take actions, and pursue objectives over time with minimal human intervention. They are able to solve complex problems, interpret and create actionable plans, and execute these plans using a suite of tools.

Within the payment landscape, AI agents are expected to take on tasks such as budgeting, bill payments, and dispute resolution. Merchants and small businesses will deploy customer-facing agents to deliver faster, more personalized service, and simplifying other touchpoints, and manage financial workflows such as vendor onboarding, invoicing, reconciliation, and payment scheduling, more efficiently. AI agents may also be used to optimize marketing budgets, trigger reorders, and adjust pricing in real time, allowing businesses to save resources while making faster and better-informed decisions.

PSPs, meanwhile, will adopt similar tools across their operations, using AI agents to autonomously resolve inquiries, enhance onboarding and fraud detection, and deliver personalized offers informed by transaction history.

According to a 2025 BCG consumer survey, 81% of consumers expect to shop using agentic AI. In the coming years, more than US$1 trillion in spending, representing about 50% of total e-commerce expenditure today, could be agent assisted, with early adoption focused on routine purchases such as groceries, restaurant orders, and personal care products.

BCG expects payment networks to gain the most from the agentic commerce trend. These players will get to define roles, set standards, and shape economics, unlocking new monetization opportunities. Issuers, meanwhile, will find opportunities in creating category-specific agents for sectors like traveling and dining, while acquirers will need to establish advanced fraud and risk capabilities to help merchants participate effectively in AI-driven commerce.

Cost excellence to lift margins

Across the payment industry, margin pressures are intensifying, making operational efficiency a critical priority. BCG believes that PSPs which specialize in a small set of high-impact moves, and which focus on cost and productivity measures, can improve margins by 30% to 40% while sharpening performance across the board.

According to BCG, payment acquirers and issuers can improve profitability by optimizing transaction routing and authorization processes, using data-driven, real-time routing to cut costs and boost success rates, especially in cross-border payments. Issuers can further improve outcomes by applying advanced analytics to raise approval rates and reduce false declines.

Merchants, meanwhile, can use advanced analytics and generative AI (genAI) to target high-value customer segments with personalized and timely engagement, reducing acquisition costs, boosting conversion rates, and maximizing return on investment (ROI).

Finally, payments-integrated software-as-a-service (SaaS), especially independent software vendors (ISVs), can use genAI to streamline operations, and automate support queries. They may also use genAI to accelerate software development.

Software platforms gain ground

Software platforms with embedded financial services are experiencing rapid growth, especially in the small and medium-sized enterprise (SMEs) segment. From 2020 to 2024, software platforms increased their total revenue by roughly 40% annually, twice the pace of digital acquirers and nearly triple that of incumbents.

As a result, revenue in payments is shifting from basic transaction processing toward value-added services and embedded finance. Between 2019 and 2023, the revenue share from value-added services (VAS) and embedded financial services grew sharply, rising from a share of 0-10% to 15-25% in Europe.

Projections suggest that VAS could reach 20-25% of revenue in Europe by 2027 and embedded finance could reach 15-20% in the same time frame.

Unlike traditional payment providers which mainly focus on processing transactions, platforms like Shopify, Toast, and Lightspeed integrate payments, lending, payroll, fraud prevention, and other financial tools directly into SME workflows, creating a seamless “all-in-one” operating system. SMEs are attracted to these platforms because they are easier to use, offer better support, and deliver more value than traditional acquirers or banks.

To stay competitive, banks and acquirers must shift from volume to value. They should also build full-service merchant propositions either by developing proprietary solutions or forming partnerships. Furthermore, investment in embedded finance and modular, API-enabled VAS platforms will allow providers to deliver personalization, benchmarking, and insights at scale.

Instant cross-border payments accelerate

Real-time A2A transactions are gaining momentum worldwide, with now more than 70 countries having real-time systems in place. By 2024, real-time A2A payments represented around a quarter of global retail digital payments, up 40% YoY.

Asia-Pacific (APAC), Latin America (LatAm), the Middle East, and Africa are leading A2A adoption, with LatAm topping the charts with penetration of around 45%, followed by APAC, the Middle East, and Africa at roughly 30%.

Notable systems include India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which now handles more than 20 billion transactions per month; Brazil’s Pix, which serves over 160 million users and 16 million merchants; and Thailand’s PromptPay, which processes 2.3 million transactions per month.

According to BCG, the next stage of growth will come from cross-border real-time payments. These capabilities offer an alternative to traditional correspondent banking and SWIFT-based transfers, and are poised to capture up to 30% of total transaction-related revenue pools in high-priority remittance and trade corridors.

Within cross-border instant payments, real momentum is underway. UPI International is already live in Singapore, Sri Lanka, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), France, and several other countries, with expansion to more than 10 other countries planned. Meanwhile, Pix is moving toward cross-border integration, with Brazil’s central bank prioritizing corridors to nations such as Uruguay and Argentina. Finally, Project Nexus, led by the Bank for International Settlements, focuses on linking domestic instant payment systems across countries for faster and lower-cost cross-border payments. The Eurosystem, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand are among those part of the initiative.

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