Senior Director, Strategy and Content
American Banker Live Media
Mary Ellen Egan is a journalist with more than 25 years of experience in business and investigative journalism. She has been a staff writer and editor at Forbes, The American Lawyer, First Amendment Watch and American Banker. She has freelanced for Bloomberg, Bloomberg Law, University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Stanford Graduate School of Business and Thomson Reuters. She is currently an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University.
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.
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.