Payments in 2026 Will Be Defined by Acceleration in Canada
GUEST POST by: Dina Vardouniotis, Founder and CEO of Payments+Partnerships
The payments industry is entering 2026 with enough structural change, global turning points and regulatory momentum to move from trendspotting to prediction-making.
We’re seeing multiple forces converging at once – AI-enabled journeys, wallet-led adoption, loyalty compression, data portability and the early signals of a digital-asset future. Together, they’re pushing the sector past incremental change and into a period of accelerated transformation.
For Canada, the stakes are particularly high.
Payments modernization, open banking readiness, consumer trust, escalating fraud and tighter economic constraints are all demanding sharper prioritization from financial institutions. At the same time, the landscape is being reshaped by three structural shifts.
First, FIs are increasingly rejecting the limitations of legacy infrastructure, recognizing meaningful competitiveness now depends on delivering instantaneous and seamless experiences.
Second, AI and data intelligence are beginning to govern customer journeys and reshape value pools, which gives institutions that can harness these capabilities a decisive advantage.
Third, money movement itself is being reinvented through real-time infrastructures, digital-assets and programmable payments that expand what’s possible beyond traditional rails.
These shifts underpin the “big bets” of 2026 and define the strategic commitments banks and credit unions must make to remain relevant in a world where money movement becomes instant and increasingly invisible.
Prediction 1: Card Economics and Loyalty Are Redefined Under Interchange Compression
Interchange and merchant discount rate value pools continue to compress internationally.
We saw this with Australia, then the EU, and now Canada with blended-rate commitments set by the Ministry of Finance for some time. Recently, the U.S. Credit Card Competition Act further underscored how fragile rewards economics truly are.
Because loyalty programs are overwhelmingly funded through interchange, institutions are facing a full reset.
The work ahead includes reassessing the value they create, redesigning shared economics with cardholders, merchants and partners, plus exploring new forms of loyalty-linked offers and micro-earn strategies tied to emerging spend categories. As loyalty economics continue to shift, organizations should consider rebuilding their programs around measurable lifetime value rather than legacy earn-and-burn structures.
What does this mean? Anchoring rewards in relationships instead of interchange alone.
Prediction 2: Embedded Finance and Wallet-Led Adoption Outpace Traditional Rails
With traditional network rail economics tightening, institutions are accelerating toward stored-value, wallet and embedded pathways.
Wallet-led ecosystems – tied to digital identities, app-based experiences and daily-use platforms – are now central to global payments. Datos reports digital wallet spending reached roughly $41 trillion USD globally in 2024, underscoring how deeply embedded wallet-led commerce has become.
As micro-transactions and embedded payments expand across sectors like health, hospitality, transportation and the creator economy, value pools are increasingly forming outside traditional card rails.
Banks and credit unions must develop a partner strategy that positions them inside customers’ digital lives. This should be supported by the right combination of strategic partners and technology capabilities to participate directly in wallet-led spending rather than competing from the periphery.
Prediction 3: Real-Time Rails Force a New Fraud and Risk Paradigm
Canada’s upcoming Real-Time Rail (RTR) represents one of the most significant shifts in payments infrastructure in decades.
But its launch on legacy foundations introduces meaningful challenges. Instant settlement compresses the time available for authorization, reconciliation and fraud checks, which creates material risk gaps for institutions still reliant on batch-based or manual processes.
Compounding this is the rapid escalation of sophisticated fraud. A 2025 analysis of global fraud trends reports deepfakes now represent 6.5% of all fraud attacks, reflecting more than a twenty-fold increase since 2022. Combined with synthetic identities and advanced social engineering, the fraud landscape is evolving faster than most operational frameworks.
How do we combat this? Canadian institutions must adapt through real-time fraud engines, behavioural analytics, adaptive authentication and end-to-end operational redesign.
FI readiness also requires educating consumers and small businesses on the new risk landscape to strengthen customer trust.
Prediction 4: Stablecoins, Tokens and Digital Assets Will Reinvent Money Movement
Stablecoins and tokenized assets are moving from experimentation to early-stage infrastructure.
With fiat-backed stablecoins now recognized within OSFI’s regulatory framework, Canada has taken an important step in bringing these instruments into the regulated financial system. This supervision ensures reserve quality and redemption protections and gives both banks and consumers greater confidence in their use.
Stablecoins make money movement borderless and unbound by time, offering 24/7 settlement, faster cross-border transactions and programmable payment logic that surpasses what legacy authorization engines can support.
A new bridge is forming between traditional finance and blockchain-native assets, enabling broader participation and easing consumer adoption. Tokenized deposits like JPM Coin show the potential for distributed-ledger payments to operate with bank-grade identity and compliance, unlocking efficiencies in liquidity management and large-value transfers. Even CBDCs, though further out, carry the potential to streamline interbank settlements with the stability of digital cash.
For credit unions and smaller institutions, this moment offers a credible pathway to differentiation, as agility can support earlier product innovation and new digital-asset services.
As regulatory clarity continues to expand, there’s opportunity to develop a strategy before the competitive window narrows and early movers set the terms of participation in a more programmable model of money movement.
Is this a “today” opportunity? Maybe not, but it's enough of a signal that setting out a position, makes sense.
Prediction 5: Consumer AI Adoption Fuels Agentic Commerce and Financial Journeys
As consumers integrate AI platforms into their daily lives, the entire shopping and financial services journey is beginning to migrate with them.
Agentic commerce (where AI agents curate recommendations, manage comparisons and execute purchases within user-defined guardrails) promises to reshape how decisions are made and how loyalty is earned.
McKinsey’s Global Institute projected generative AI could create $200-$340 billion in incremental value per year in banking, with the greatest gains in corporate and private banking where AI-driven analytics and automation can transform revenue pools. But this shift also introduces new competitive dynamics.
Recent legal disputes between major marketplaces and AI platforms highlight an emerging question: who ultimately owns the consumer relationship in an AI-mediated world?
Financial institutions must anticipate how brand visibility, loyalty programs and even revenue models, such as sponsored placements, may be interpreted or intermediated by AI agents.
Companies should proactively map where they belong in this AI-first customer journey to preserve relevance and ensure AI functions as an extension of their brand rather than a new layer of disintermediation.
Prediction 6: Data and Open Banking Become the Foundation of Every Transformation
Data has never been more important in acquiring, deepening and retaining customer relationships.
Budget 2025 requires Canadian banks to support standardized, API-based data sharing across deposits, payments, investments and lending. The goal is to replace insecure screen-scraping once used by nine million Canadians. This regulatory shift lays the foundation for secure interoperability and elevates first-party data as a strategic asset.
But compliance alone will not determine who benefits.
Institutions must unify their data across channels and develop the operational capacity to share and receive information in ways that deliver intelligence across payments, credit, loyalty, fraud and customer experience.
This will help position institutions to use open banking not merely as an obligation, but as a growth engine capable of unlocking new forms of personalization, risk modelling and product innovation.
Where is Canada going?
Payments modernization has reached a point where ambition must give way to action.
We’ll see institutions thrive if they recognize this moment as a structural turning point – a year when the industry’s long-discussed transformation becomes unavoidable.
Success will hinge on readiness across several fronts: strengthening data foundations, rethinking loyalty economics, embracing embedded finance, preparing for real-time payments, exploring digital assets and understanding how AI will reshape the customer journey.
Canada stands at a unique juncture where regulatory clarity, technological progress and rising consumer expectations are aligning.
The path forward requires rejecting the constraints of legacy systems and embracing a world where money movement is instant, intelligent and increasingly invisible.
About the author: Dina Vardouniotis founded Payments+Partnerships, a boutique consulting firm with the purpose of driving value creation in the payments ecosystem through collaboration with financial institutions, merchants and fin/paytechs.
Dina has over 20 years of experience in payments and financial services, with roles at Alterna Savings/Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Citi and CIBC.
She is a board member of the Canadian Prepaid Providers Organization (CPPO) and sponsors various events to support the fintech and innovation ecosystem in Canada.
Dina is an advocate of neurodiversity in the workplace and promoting women in leadership, participating in the global Women in Payments mentorship program, speaking at various events and blogging for the Huffington Post.