What shapes consumer transactions and payment technologies, and where is it going?
Rapid changes in technology, regulation, and consumer behavior continue to reshape the payments industry. Javelin’s payments research team tracks commercial and consumer payment trends, evaluates emerging payment technologies, and anticipates what’s next. Through unbiased research, data-driven insights, and actionable advice, we help financial institutions, payments providers, and technology companies develop strategies that position them for success in a rapidly evolving market.
Payments Research
Reports
Cash Isn’t Dead: How ATMs Are Evolving to Secure a Digital Payments Future
Cash may no longer be the center of consumer payments, but it is far from irrelevant. As digital payments gain share, consumers still depend on cash for access, certainty, budgeting, and immediate settlement—and ATMs remain the critical infrastr...
Credit Card Metrics Matter: Five Lenses for Measuring Portfolio Performance
Credit cards are measured very differently depending on who is doing the measuring. A cardholder may focus on fees and rewards, while portfolio managers, investors, risk executives, and regulators each rely on differing sets of metrics to evalua...
PCI DSS v4.0: Reframing Compliance, Cost, and Cybersecurity for Merchants
PCI DSS has undergone continual revision since its inception over 20 years ago. In 2025, PCI expanded horizontally with the advent of version 4.0, which looks at all aspects of an enterprise’s data security health. The latest version has increas...
Payments Partners With AI: Incumbents Have an Advantage
Agentic commerce is producing plenty of headlines, but not every AI partnership or protocol launch points to the same future. Financial institutions, payments providers, vendors, fintechs, and merchants need a clearer way to separate signals fro...
Embedded Risk: Risk Management Finds a Home in the Tech Stack
As payments become faster and automated, risk management is moving from the sidelines to the center of transaction processing. Real-time payments, open banking, and agentic AI are forcing banks to rethink how fraud, compliance, identity, and aut...
Finding Opportunity in Uncertainty: A Macro Framework for Supply Chain Finance Targeting in 2026
Supply chain finance opportunity is not distributed evenly across industries or supplier populations. This report shows how providers can use public U.S. economic and industry data to identify where cash cycles are lengthening, liquidity is weak...
3D Secure’s Next Act: From Checkout Friction to Trust Orchestration
3D Secure was developed to help e-commerce merchants guard against fraud by authenticating cardholders at checkout. But merchants balance fraud losses, liability shifts, checkout completion, authorization approvals, customer experience, and repe...
2026 Prepaid Holiday Preview: Gift Cards Are Reliable Winners, Even in Uncertain Times
Holiday gift card sales can still deliver dependable growth, but success relies on knowing which buyers to prioritize and how they plan to spend. This report shows how economic signals, repeat buyer behavior, retail placement, and gift card desi...
Emerging Payments Survey 2026: Agent Adoption Surges, Biometric Authentication Grows
Consumer behavior regarding emerging payments is moving in different ways than conventional wisdom suggests. New Javelin research finds that biometric authentication has already reached mainstream use, but not everyday adoption, with availabilit...
Beyond The Card: Preparing for the A2A Economy
Account-to-account payments will grow in importance, but they are unlikely to displace cards as the dominant retail payment method in the U.S. because consumers remain attached to cards’ convenience, rewards, dispute protections, tokenization, a...