Agentic commerce takes Europe
Let’s start with one of the biggest developments in payments and ecommerce generally: agentic commerce, where AI agents not only recommend products, but actively search, negotiate, and execute purchases on a consumer’s behalf.
In short, AI is becoming a new sales channel.
In this world, payment flows are adapting to support machine-to-machine transactions, with authorisation happening invisibly in the background.
However, with smarter buyers come smarter threats. Fraudsters will use AI to create sophisticated deepfakes and synthetic identities, so companies will need to deploy AI-native operations to fight back. It’s an all-new arms race.
Why it matters:
New revenue streams: Optimising your checkout for agentic commerce lets you tap into the growing market for automated browsing and purchasing.
Cost protection: AI-driven fraud prevention is now the only reliable shield against modern, automated fraud attacks.
“When optimising for humans, we avoid information overload. But that logic does not apply to agentic commerce. The more data an agent has, the higher the probability it will champion your product. If you leave blank spaces, the agent gets nervous and defaults to ‘I don’t know.’ You must adapt your strategy to inspire trust in the algorithm.” – Bernardo Caldas, Director of Data and AI, Mollie
Pay by Bank goes mainstream
Pay by Bank payments have always been a promising alternative payment method, but in 2026, Account-to-Account (A2A) payments are moving mainstream.
Driven by rising card fees and regulatory pushes (like the EU's Instant Payments Regulation), the friction that once held A2A back – clunky logins, slow interfaces – is vanishing.
New standards and open banking APIs now allow for one-click bank transfers that rival the speed of a wallet payment. That makes it a strategic lever that can help protect your bottom line without sacrificing conversion.
Why it matters:
Lower transaction costs: By bypassing traditional interchange and scheme fees, A2A payments can significantly reduce processing fees, saving margin on every transaction.
Instant cash flow: Unlike card payments that can take days to settle, real-time A2A puts funds in your account instantly, improving working capital.
The end of guest checkout blindness
For a decade, the industry obsessed over connecting channels – making sure your online checkout and your in-store terminals fed into the same backend. That problem is solved.
The problem now? Your customers are probably still strangers.
Thanks to the rise of guest checkouts and privacy-centric digital wallets, a loyal customer buying a jacket online can look like a completely different person when they buy shoes in-store. You have their money, but you don't have their history.
In 2026, smart businesses are solving this by moving to identity-linked transactions.
Using advanced payment markers like PAR (Payment Account Reference), your payment provider can now link the tokenised Apple Pay card used online with the physical card tapped in-store. This creates a single, high-definition customer profile without forcing the user to log in or scan a loyalty card.
Why it matters:
True lifetime value (LTV): You stop measuring revenue by channel and start measuring it by person. You finally see the true worth of a customer who browses on Instagram but buys in-store.
Invisible loyalty: You can trigger marketing based on payment behaviour, not just app logins. Imagine sending a ‘Complete the look’ email for shoes that match the trousers they just bought in-store.
“You can’t optimise what you can’t see. When you can’t connect the person tapping a card in-store to the one clicking ‘buy’ online – you aren’t just missing data. You are missing the entire story of your customer’s loyalty.” – Diane Albouy, Principal Product Manager, Mollie
Europe unifies its rails
For decades, European payments have lived a double life. Domestically, many countries rely on local champions (like iDEAL in the Netherlands or Bizum in Spain). But for others – and for a lot of cross-border trade – we rely almost on global infrastructure (Visa, Mastercard, PayPal).
But in 2026, the unified European alternative to these schemes is maturing.
The foundation was cemented last year with the full implementation of the SEPA Instant Mandate, which made 10-second bank transfers the standard across the bloc. Now, the new Wero payment method is using the speed provided by the SEPA rails to challenge the status quo.
Having successfully migrated millions of users from legacy apps like Payconiq and Paylib, Wero is now attempting to unify Europe’s fragmented A2A landscape into a single digital wallet that combines the user experience of a global scheme with the governance of a local bank transfer.
Why it matters:
Commercial leverage: Currently, global schemes set the price for cross-border traffic. A viable, scaled pan-European alternative gives merchants a plan B, creating competition that could help keep scheme fees and interchange costs in check.
Strategic resilience: Relying on a single set of external rails for all cross-border commerce carries risk. This shift moves Europe towards a diversified ecosystem where businesses have a native option for international growth.
"By acquiring local champions like Payconiq, Wero has inherited a whole ecosystem. For a business, this means you’re not waiting for adoption – the audience already exists. But whether customers immediately want to use it over other methods? That remains to be seen." – Iryna Agieieva, Head of Payments, Mollie
The consumerisation of B2B payments
For too long, B2B payments were stuck in the dark ages of PDF invoices, manual bank transfers, and endless email chains. 2026 is the year B2B finally catches up to B2C.
The trend is automated payables and receivables. We’re moving away from ‘emailing an invoice’ to ‘sending a payment request’ that integrates directly into the buyer’s procurement software. This shift brings the click to pay simplicity of ecommerce into the complex world of high-value business transactions. It also solves the biggest headache in B2B: reconciliation.
Instead of a finance team manually matching bank deposits to invoice numbers, automated systems use virtual IBANs and reference codes to reconcile payments instantly as they arrive.
Why it matters:
Reduced DSO (days sales outstanding): When you make it easier for business clients to pay (via card, instant transfer, or BNPL), you tend to get paid faster, improving cash flow.
Operational savings: Automating the reconciliation process removes hours of manual data entry every week, allowing finance teams to focus on strategy rather than spreadsheets.
The rise of the decoupled checkout
For 20 years, ecommerce has forced most customers into the same rigid path: Add to cart > View cart > Login > Pay. And while this linear flow works for browsing, it can act as a brake on high-intent shoppers. So, 2026 might just be the year of the checkout – or pay button – you can add anywhere.
Why? Because this year more and more businesses are using new, component-based payment tools to dismantle the traditional checkout page and embed the ‘Buy’ function directly in the place where the customer actually wants to pay.
And what’s driving this is the more widespread adoption of one-click wallets (Apple Pay, Click to Pay) and secure tokenisation that finally allows you to place a fully functional payment button anywhere – without compromising security.
We’re seeing this manifest in some distinct ways:
The product page 'express lane': Businesses are placing digital wallet buttons directly on Product Detail Pages (PDPs), allowing high-intent buyers to skip the cart entirely.
The shoppable email: Instead of sending abandoned cart emails that link back to a login screen, brands are embedding secure, tokenised payment links that lead straight to a pre-filled payment page.
The endless aisle: Physical stores are placing QR codes on out-of-stock items that trigger an instant digital checkout for home delivery, saving the sale without moving the stock.
Why it matters:
Conversion velocity: By moving the payment upstream, you capture the sale at the exact moment of intent, significantly reducing drop-off.
Future-proofing: Decoupling your checkout from a specific URL is the first step towards headless commerce. If your payment logic is an API call rather than a page, you’re ready for whatever interface comes next – whether that’s a voice assistant, an AI agent, or something else.
Embedded finance in ecommerce
In 2026, the trend of embedded finance means businesses can expand from simply offering goods to becoming providers of financial services.
The first step in this process was initiatives like branded credit cards. In 2026, we expect to see more ecommerce companies embedding insurance, extended warranties, and instant lending directly into the purchase flow with a single API call.
Instead of sending your customer to a third-party site to ensure their purchase or apply for a loan, it happens natively within your environment. This keeps the user experience smooth and the data in-house.
Why it matters:
New profit centres: By earning a commission on embedded services like shipping insurance or financing, you turn the cost of payment processing into a net-positive revenue stream.
Higher average order value (AOV): Providing customers with instant access to purchasing power (such as point-of-sale lending) encourages larger basket sizes and reduces hesitation on big-ticket items.
Hyper-personalisation at scale (with AI)
The days of a static checkout page, where every customer sees the same list of ten payment methods, are over. In 2026, hyper-personalisation uses AI and machine learning to curate the checkout experience for every visitor.
Using real-time data (device type, location, past purchase history, and spending behaviour), your payment gateway can now predict the payment method a customer is most likely to use and present it immediately.
If a customer always pays with a specific digital wallet, that wallet appears first. If they are buying a high-value item and have a history of using credit, a financing offer appears. While convenient for the user, removing the cognitive load of choosing how to pay also gives them one less thing to worry about.
Why it matters:
Higher conversion: Reducing the time-to-pay by showing the preferred method first significantly lowers cart abandonment rates.
Strategic steering: You can subtly steer customers toward payment methods that cost you less to process (like A2A) by incentivising them dynamically based on their profile.
