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
2025 Prepaid Holiday Preview: Gift Cards Could Provide Safe Harbor
With retailer preparations for the 2025 holiday shopping beginning in earnest, Javelin Strategy & Research highlights the chaotic retail environment, economic impacts on consumer confidence, and ability of prepaid products to fill gaps if the su...
The Future of Payments Is Coming. Is Your Core Ready?
Modernizing core banking systems is now essential for delivering real-time, secure, and scalable payments. This Javelin Strategy & Research report examines how legacy cores are being replaced or rebuilt with cloud-native, event-driven, and API-f...
Typecast for P2P: How Venmo and Cash App Are Expanding Beyond Paying Friends and Family
Popular person-to-person payment apps such as Venmo and Cash App pioneered the easy digital payment of friends and family with easy-to-use and engaging apps. The problem: Now, these platforms are finding it a challenge to go beyond the functiona...
CBDCs Are Dead—for Now. What Comes Next?
In halting the development of a central bank digital currency, the current presidential administration has signaled a major shift toward private-sector innovation in digital currencies. This Javelin Strategy & Research report looks at what that ...
From Hype to Impact: How AI is Transforming Credit
Advances in artificial intelligence have generated a high level of excitement and marketing spending as financial organizations seek to rebrand their technologies with “AI” and develop new credit decisioning and issuance solutions that leverage ...
Global Biometric Pilots Help Smooth the Way for U.S. Adoption
The use of biometrics in merchant payments—such as facial scans and palm scans—has been slow to take root in the United States. But several pilot programs in other global markets, featuring the participation of companies active in the United Sta...
In-House Payment Options for Merchants: Time for a New Look
The big household names in retail, in-store and online, have always offered customers the most choices of ways to pay, along with deferred terms like layaway or installment credit. The category leaders have been early adopters of new payment met...
Amex and Chase Face Off on Premium Credit Cards, but the Backstory Is More Interesting
Moves by American Express and Chase to revamp their signature card reward products will bring the issuers into greater competition for the most affluent cardholders and carry reverberations for the rest of the industry. This Javelin Strategy & R...
Javelin Prepaid Consumer Sentiment: 3-Year Trend Highlights
As Javelin’s research into consumer sentiment toward prepaid products completes its third year, the findings highlight relative stability in most products, and that’s significant in today’s wildly fluctuating economic market. However, the data s...
The Virtual Economy: Measuring Buyer Industry Receptiveness to Using Virtual Cards
Virtual cards are a fast-growing force in business-to-business payments, but adoption remains uneven across buyer industries. This report analyzes 147 U.S. industries using a composite scoring system that incorporates supplier acceptance, workin...