The consumer payments landscape is entering a period of concentrated disruption, with artificial intelligence (AI), bank-backed digital wallets, and streamlined checkout technology emerging as the defining forces over the next 12 months. That is the central finding of a new report from global tech strategist Juniper Research, which identifies the three innovations most likely to move the needle for merchants, payment providers, and consumers alike.
Juniper Research’s “Consumer Payments Tech Horizon” assesses 17 technologies across the payments space, ranking each as either outperforming or underperforming against market expectations. The framework is designed to cut through the noise of an industry prone to hype cycles, giving stakeholders a clearer sense of where actual value is being created.
Agentic commerce tops the list. The concept refers to AI agents that can act autonomously on behalf of consumers, browsing, comparing, selecting, and completing purchases without manual input at every step. The disruption is already playing out at scale. Google has launched Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience, a platform already being used by Kroger, Lowe’s, Papa John’s, and Woolworths to deliver autonomous shopping and service functions.
Shopify reports that orders from AI-powered searches grew 15 times year-on-year through 2025, and ChatGPT has introduced shopping features backed by its Agentic Commerce Protocol. In the first month of 2026 alone, Etsy, Target, and Walmart continued their move onto external AI platforms by partnering with Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot. The implications run deeper than convenience.
Almost 81% of surveyed retail executives believe generative AI will weaken brand loyalty by 2027, as agents increasingly act as the first filter in purchasing decisions, shifting the locus of power towards whoever controls the agent.
Bank-backed wallets represent the second major force, and the numbers here are striking. Wero, the pan-European digital wallet backed by 16 banks, reached 43.5 million registered users and processed over 7.5 billion euros in transfers in its first year. It has since crossed 50 million users. E-commerce payments went live in Germany at the end of 2025 and are rolling out across Belgium and France in 2026, with Air France, E. Leclerc, and the French government’s tax authority among early adopters.
In the Netherlands, the dominant iDEAL payment system, which accounts for over 70% of e-commerce transactions, began migrating to Wero in early 2026, handing Wero an entire national payments market. The strategic intent is explicit: Wero is designed to reduce European dependency on Visa, Mastercard, and American tech platforms, and NFC-enabled in-store payments are scheduled to go live later this year, bringing it into direct competition at the physical checkout.
The third trend, “Click to Pay,” is more incremental but operationally significant. Mastercard has committed to phasing out manual card entry in European e-commerce by 2030, using tokenization, its “Click to Pay” checkout solution, and biometric payment passkeys to deliver a consistent experience across devices and browsers.
Both Visa and Mastercard have also entered the agentic commerce space directly, with Mastercard’s CEO confirming that the first agentic transaction on its network took place in the third quarter of 2025.
Network-level mandates are now pushing “Click to Pay” adoption irrespective of individual merchant preference, which will accelerate rollout considerably.
Taken together, the three trends point towards an eCommerce environment that is faster, more automated, and increasingly shaped by forces beyond the traditional merchant-customer relationship.
McKinsey estimates the agentic commerce model could redirect between three and five trillion dollars in global retail spend by 2030. The common thread across all three is that the payment moment is becoming less visible and more contested at the same time.