Pi Squared Highlights 2026 As Turning Point For Payments, Driven By Regulation, AI, And Blockchain Modernization
In Brief
Pi Squared’s 2026 report predicts a pivotal year for payments, highlighting real-time rails, regulated BNPL, AI-driven transactions, embedded and open finance, stablecoins, and scalable blockchain infrastructure as the key trends.
Blockchain infrastructure project Pi Squared published a report outlining key payment trends for 2026, emphasizing that the coming year will see payments evolve into a truly reliable, always-on, and globally integrated infrastructure.
The report suggests that companies succeeding in this environment will focus less on surface-level user experience and more on strengthening the underlying rails to ensure scalability and trust.
According to the analysis, 2026 will be defined by integration and reliability rather than speed or product novelty. Regulatory frameworks, real-time payment behavior, and the adoption of autonomous systems are identified as the three forces reshaping the industry.
Regulators are formalizing previously fast-growing markets, with measures such as the UK’s BNPL consumer credit rules and Europe’s PSD3 standards improving transparency, consumer protection, and interoperability, thereby supporting sustainable growth and higher adoption.
Real-time transaction capabilities are becoming standard across major markets, with instant settlements, refunds, and liquidity updates increasingly expected by merchants and consumers. Open banking APIs are driving wider adoption, while back-office operations are adapting to immediate reconciliation requirements.
Meanwhile, autonomous AI systems are beginning to execute transactions at scale. Initiatives such as Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol and Mastercard’s Agent Pay illustrate that AI-driven commerce is moving from experimentation to mainstream use, with projections suggesting significant growth in AI-managed transaction volumes.
The report notes that blockchain networks may face scalability challenges as AI-driven transactions expand exponentially, highlighting the need for infrastructure modernization in 2026.
Real-Time Rails, AI-Ready Systems, Regulated BNPL, And Corporate Virtual Cards To Define Payments In 2026
According to Pi Squared, successful organizations will treat payments as core infrastructure, design systems that are massively parallel rather than globally sequential, integrate compliance and transparency, and accommodate transactions executed by both humans and AI agents in milliseconds.
The first trend highlights the normalization of real-time payment rails, which now underpin business operations, treasury management, and customer interactions. Markets with early adoption, such as India and Brazil, demonstrate that instant settlement and 24/7 visibility allow organizations to manage liquidity and operations in real time, while also requiring fraud and risk prevention to occur immediately rather than retroactively.
Account-to-account flows and Variable Recurring Payments are expanding beyond basic internal transfers to include retail payments, subscriptions, and utility bills. These systems reduce intermediary fees, carry richer transaction metadata, and, when combined with biometric and API-based authentication, enhance operational efficiency and user experience.
Buy Now Pay Later is transitioning from an unregulated convenience to a fully regulated credit product in key markets, with frameworks such as the UK’s FCA regulations and Europe’s Consumer Credit Directive II introducing stricter affordability checks, disclosure requirements, and consumer protections. This shift is expected to increase compliance obligations, raise operational standards, and protect consumers from unmanageable debt.
Virtual cards are increasingly integrated into corporate spend strategies, offering per-transaction control, instant issuance, and metadata that streamlines reconciliation. Adoption across enterprise accounts payable and procurement systems is rising, reducing operational risk and cycle times.
Embedded And Open Finance, AI-Driven Transactions, Stablecoins, And Next-Gen Scalable Infrastructure
Embedded finance is evolving from a convenience feature into enterprise infrastructure, offering composable, regulated services for onboarding, account creation, payments, lending, insurance, and treasury. The combination of regulatory pressure and the need for best-of-breed solutions is driving firms toward modular architectures that allow faster innovation, clearer compliance oversight, and operational resilience.
Open finance extends access to a broader range of financial data, including payroll, utilities, pensions, tax, insurance, investments, and cryptocurrency holdings. By enabling real-time affordability assessments, personalized financial journeys, and dynamic pricing models, open finance emphasizes orchestration and consent management as key differentiators for organizations.
AI agents are increasingly acting as economic participants, performing high-frequency transactions autonomously, which requires the development of new rails and verification frameworks to handle machine-native commerce at scale.
Payment fraud is entering an AI-driven arms race, with emerging threats such as deepfakes, synthetic identities, and real-time impersonation. Industry response involves adaptive, layered defenses using behavioral biometrics, device fingerprinting, anomaly detection, and continuous identity scoring to provide real-time security.
Stablecoins are moving into mainstream enterprise payments, particularly for B2B treasury and cross-border settlements. They offer near-instant settlement, programmable transaction logic, lower costs for specific flows, and transparent audit trails. Their value is maximized when integrated with mature liquidity, audited reserves, and compliant workflows, allowing firms to capture operational efficiencies and new product capabilities.
Finally, the report highlights blockchain limitations as a bottleneck for global-scale payments. Current architectures enforce sequential global ordering, which constrains real-time commerce and high-volume AI-driven transactions. The industry is expected to pivot toward massively parallel, verifiable settlement systems that scale horizontally and maintain correctness without global bottlenecks, exemplified by Pi Squared’s FastSet initiative, which aims to enable the next generation of payment infrastructure.
Industry observers note that 2026 marks a turning point as payments begin to evolve into fully developed financial infrastructure. Key drivers include regulatory frameworks that prioritize resilience, the widespread expectation of real-time transactions, the emergence of AI systems as active economic participants, and the adoption of new settlement tools such as stablecoins that offer speed and programmability.
Analysts emphasize that the organizations positioned to succeed are those designing systems with scale, trust, and verifiability at their core, rather than focusing solely on user experience. As payment networks transition toward massively parallel architectures, real-time analytics, and programmable money, the coming decade is expected to favor firms that rethink the underlying foundations of financial infrastructure.
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About The Author
Alisa, a dedicated journalist at the MPost, specializes in cryptocurrency, zero-knowledge proofs, investments, and the expansive realm of Web3. With a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies, she delivers comprehensive coverage to inform and engage readers in the ever-evolving landscape of digital finance.
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Alisa, a dedicated journalist at the MPost, specializes in cryptocurrency, zero-knowledge proofs, investments, and the expansive realm of Web3. With a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies, she delivers comprehensive coverage to inform and engage readers in the ever-evolving landscape of digital finance.
