Digital wallets are rapidly becoming the primary interface for consumer spending, digital identity, loyalty and emerging real-time and tokenized payment rails. As the financial industry moves into 2026, the acceleration of wallet adoption is no longer a trend at the margins—it’s reshaping the economics, customer relationships, and competitive dynamics of retail and commercial banking. This panel brings together leaders from banking, payments, fintech, and big tech to unpack what’s driving the surge and how banks must respond.

The panel will delve into the drivers behind wallet dominance, the shift from card rails to platform- and real-time-centric payments, how wallets are rewriting the bank-customer relationship, and the strategic implications for banks and the priority to establish wallet-first customer strategies. Bankers will leave with a clear understanding of the forces accelerating digital wallet adoption, the threats and opportunities it creates for banks, and a pragmatic framework for building wallet-ready capabilities and partnerships that strengthen customer engagement rather than weaken it.

Agentic commerce is revolutionizing the digital shopping experience. Walmart, Shopify, Etsy and others are offering ChatGPT-enabled shopping via the instant checkout features on their platforms. Things are just getting started: AI-driven agents are rapidly moving from assisting transactions to autonomously initiating and managing them—ushering in the era of agentic payments. In this new model, intelligent software can negotiate prices, trigger payments, rebalance liquidity, and settle obligations across networks without human input. For banks and payment providers, this represents both a technological and strategic inflection point: How do you design infrastructure, compliance, and customer interfaces for a world where payments are executed by autonomous agents 24/7?

This session explores the convergence of AI, real-time settlement, and tokenized money—and what it means for banks, processors, and networks as they prepare for a future of machine-to-machine commerce and self-directed financial flows. Agentic commerce will push banks and payments providers to evolve security in a number of ways, too, including more authentication and fraud prevention practices and shifting a merchant-focused business model to a consumer-facing one. Our panel will discuss how payment players need to enable the right agents to transact for customers, the shift from subscription models and card-on-file payments from merchants to consumer agents, and rethinking how they acquire new customers while retaining top-of-wallet status among consumers who are increasingly evaluating products through an agent.

Fraudsters are advancing faster than traditional defenses can adapt—leveraging AI, exploiting real-time rails, and capitalizing on consumer expectations for instant, frictionless payments. Meanwhile, real-time payments (RTP) present the lowest recoverability of any fraud channel, intensifying the stakes for providers, banks, and merchants. Consumers now expect not only seamless user experiences but also full protection and reimbursement—even in cases of authorized fraud. The pressure is mounting: Juniper Research estimates that online payments fraud will cost companies more than $362 billion between 2023 and 2028.

This panel explores how organizations can modernize their fraud management frameworks and take a proactive approach by orchestrating identity verification, risk scoring, and behavioral insights across every stage of the customer journey. Leaders will examine how to integrate reputational data to identify and reduce first-party fraud; how to design AI-based fraud models tailored to specific products, channels, and typologies; and how to expand KYC and due-diligence disciplines across the broader payments ecosystem. Panelists will discuss how to balance fraud losses, customer experience, and revenue/risk appetite to create a cohesive, resilient, multi-layered defense strategy for the real-time era.

Merchant payments are being reshaped by open-banking rails, embedded finance, and real-time settlement. As merchants demand faster, cheaper, and more integrated payments experiences, banks must rethink their role, from traditional acquirers to data-driven, platform-based partners. This panel unpacks the new economics of merchant payments: the rise of Pay-by-Bank, buy now, pay later (BNPL) regulation, AI-driven fraud management, and the expanding role of embedded finance. Hear from leading banks, fintech innovators, and merchants on how business models, infrastructure, and customer expectations are changing—and what strategies are required for banks to stay relevant in 2026 and beyond. The panel will discuss key factors transformation, including:

• Real-time settlement and tokenization: Modernizing rails and operations.

• Pay-by-Bank and A2A payments: How open banking is changing merchant economics.

• Embedded and platform finance: Banks’ opportunity to power commerce ecosystems.

• AI and fraud management: Leveraging data and automation to preserve trust.

• BNPL and consumer credit regulation: The evolving compliance landscape.

The Phone Is the Platform: How Mobile Is Redefining Payments

What began as a convenient alternative to physical cards has become something far more ambitious. Mobile devices–and digital wallets–have quietly become the most powerful point of sale in history. Phones are transforming acceptance, enabling new merchant experiences, and reshaping expectations for security, flexibility, and speed across the payments landscape.

BNPL and embedded finance aren’t just new lending channels. They’re changing who owns the customer, who controls underwriting, and who captures the economics. As nonbanks and platforms insert themselves between banks and consumers, financial institutions face a high-stakes tradeoff: pursue scale through partnerships and risk becoming invisible, or maintain control and risk losing distribution. In this session, American Banker shares new research from U.S. banks and credit unions on how leaders are approaching BNPL and embedded finance right now, and what strategies are gaining momentum, where institutions are drawing hard lines, and which partnership models are proving viable. The research explores the regulatory and compliance friction points, the operational realities behind launching BNPL at bank-grade risk standards, and the competitive pressures forcing faster decisions. The discussion delivers a benchmark view of how banks and credit unions are navigating the tension between growth, control, and risk—and what that means for their role in the next generation of lending.

This research examines how the relationship between banks and their issuers and processors is evolving as payments infrastructure modernization accelerates alongside increasing consolidation across the payments ecosystem and intensifying competition from non-bank players seeking bank charters.

Once viewed primarily as legacy technology or middleware – providers, issuers and processors are now fewer in number and more deeply embedded as strategic partners supporting banks’ growth, innovation, and customer experience initiatives. The study explores how this shift, influenced by a more concentrated provider landscape and the emergence of newly chartered, digital-first competitors, is shaping banks’ modernization priorities, including technology architecture, data access, flexibility, and speed to market. In doing so, it assesses how banks of different sizes are redefining expectations around service, collaboration, accountability, and long-term risk as they navigate choice, innovation, and dependency in an increasingly competitive payments environment.

The combination of AI and blockchain is moving payments beyond faster transactions toward smarter, more autonomous systems, driven by machine learning, smart contracts, and decentralized networks that enable predictive risk management, dynamic pricing, and programmable money.

So what happens when payments systems can learn, adapt, and self-execute? This panel brings together experts in AI, blockchain, and financial services to explore how intelligent automation and trustless infrastructure are converging to redefine payments. From autonomous fraud detection to self-settling transactions, the discussion will highlight the opportunities, risks, and strategic decisions shaping the next generation of global payments.

Account-to-account (A2A) payments are moving from a low-cost alternative to cards into a core strategic capability for banks, reshaping how money moves, how value is captured, and how customer relationships are owned.

This panel brings together senior bank leaders to examine how A2A payments will evolve in 2026 and beyond, and what that evolution means for revenue models, infrastructure investment, risk, and competitive positioning. The discussion will explore the shift from batch to real-time rails, the impact of open banking and API-driven payments, and how banks can move from simply providing access to delivering differentiated, monetizable A2A experiences.

Panelists will debate where banks should lead, where they should partner, and where they risk being disintermediated, particularly as fintechs, merchants, and embedded finance players increasingly sit between banks and end customers. Discussion points to include A2A as a strategic asset (not a utility); real-time payments and customer expectations; monetization and business models; open banking, APIs, and control of the customer experience; risk, fraud, and trust; the future of cross-border A2A and interoperability.

Global payments are entering a new phase, shaped by real-time expectations, growing complexity, and rapid advances in technologies such as blockchain, biometrics and artificial intelligence. At the same time, mission-critical payments infrastructure needs to be modernized while maintaining the resiliency and security that clients depend on.

In this fireside chat, Umar Farooq, will share his perspective on where the payments industry is headed and what it takes to innovate at a global scale. Drawing on his experience leading one of the world’s largest payments franchises and helping shape the firm’s blockchain strategy, Umar will discuss how client needs are evolving, where innovative breakthroughs are emerging, and how new technologies are being applied in payments today.

The conversation will explore how J.P. Morgan Payments is using blockchain infrastructure, biometric authentication and AI-driven capabilities to enhance speed, security and transparency across payments. Attendees will walk away with a high-level view of the payments landscape and a practical understanding of how large institutions can responsibly scale innovation without compromising trust or stability.