What shapes consumer transactions and payment technologies, and where is it going?
Any conventional wisdom about payments—how they’re made, the currencies being used, the cards presently in favor—doesn’t last long before the next wave of technology, innovation, and regulation. Javelin’s analysts conduct research at the forefront of payments, identifying the emerging trends for financial services companies and payments providers and offering insight into how they can best position themselves not just for what is current but also for what is coming.
Payments Research
Reports
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...
Consumer Debit Payment Choice: Understanding Debit Card User Preferences
Amid a dynamically changing landscape for payments, debit remains a steadfast performer, serving as a workhorse payment method for everyday transactions. As consumer behavior shifts, driven by economic uncertainty and technological innovation, i...
AI in the Payments Ecosystem
Merchants and payment service providers are working diligently to turn the promises of artificial intelligence into tangible business advantages. AI promises to deliver new levels of automation and efficiency to merchants and payment service pro...
AI in Commercial Payments: Do Payables Bots Dream of Dynamic Discounts?
AI’s transformative effects are becoming evident in how businesses source and buy things. The growing use of AI—predictive, generative, and agentic—across the source-to-settle value chain is poised to make a considerable impact on commercial pay...
Bots in the Back Office: Agentic AI and Commercial Payments
Agentic artificial intelligence stands to reshape commercial payments, from sourcing to settlement. Accordingly, banks, enterprise resource planning providers, and fintechs would be wise to take a page from the playbook Visa and Mastercard are n...
Stablecoins, the Agentic Secret Sauce
Although it may sound like the ultimate marketing pitch combining two very hyped technologies, a very real overlap exists between the rise of agentic commerce and blockchain. This connection will become more apparent as AI-powered buying matures...
The Proxy Economy: AI Agents and the Payment Stack
For technology leaders at financial institutions, the change in assumptions brought about by agentic commerce—removing people from transactions—also changes how systems are designed. Trust, control, and verification requirements are fundamentall...