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.

Handicapping the Under

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.