The digital payments industry is in the middle of its second revolution. The first one, replacing cash and checks with digital alternatives, took the better part of two decades and is largely done in most developed markets. The second is harder to see and more consequential.The 2024 McKinsey Global Payments Report captured the paradox clearly: Global payments are getting simpler for users while the systems underneath them grow significantly more complex. The industry processed 3.4 trillion transactions in 2023, generating $2.4 trillion in revenue. The infrastructure handling all of that is being rebuilt from the ground up.The act of paying is becoming invisibleAcross mobile apps, subscription services, and embedded checkout flows, the deliberate act of completing a payment is being designed out of the consumer experience. Ride-hailing, streaming, and food delivery established the pattern. Automated procurement and AI-driven purchasing are extending it into categories where no human ever consciously initiates a transaction at all.That shift is changing what payment infrastructure means competitively. What was once a back-office function is now a product decision that shapes conversion rates, customer retention, and market reach. Platforms that eliminate payment friction are building structural advantages over those that have not moved.Related: Fintech firm that raised $200 million files for Chapter 7Eric Swartz, Founding General Partner and General Counsel of Panther Hollow Ventures, said the real transformation is not happening at the payment moment itself.”We’re moving toward a world where capital can move as quickly as information. That’s a much bigger shift than whether someone pays with a card, a wallet or something else,” Swartz told TheStreet in an interview.The practical implication is that settlement speed and payment reliability are becoming product features rather than utility concerns. How fast money moves after a transaction, and what it can do once it settles, is increasingly what separates one financial product from another.The infrastructure making faster money movement possibleMoving money invisibly for consumers requires infrastructure that is far more interoperable and programmable than what most financial systems have historically operated on. Real-time settlement networks, digital wallets, QR rails, and local bank transfer systems have developed separately rather than together. The next phase of payments depends on getting them to work as one.Real-time payments are already growing faster than most businesses realize. McKinsey estimates the number of instant-payment transactions in the EU alone will grow from around three billion today to nearly 30 billion by 2028. In India and Brazil, where mobile-first habits took hold earlier, instant payments are already capturing a growing share of consumer-to-business spending.On June 22, KuCoin Pay announced the expansion of its payment network into Argentina and Peru, integrating directly with the local QR payment systems that power everyday retail and peer-to-peer transactions in both countries.In Argentina, the integration connects with Transferencias 3.0, a government-regulated framework that mandates QR interoperability across competing digital wallets, including the market-dominant Mercado Pago. In Peru, it reaches Yape and Plin, two apps that have largely replaced cash for everyday transactions across the country. Merchants in both markets do not need to configure any new infrastructure. KuCoin Pay handles the currency conversion automatically, making the checkout experience indistinguishable from a standard mobile payment.More Tech:Microsoft CEO sends a blunt warning on AI and the tech ecosystemAmazon CEO just made things uncomfortable for AnthropicMicrosoft has bad news for a key AI partnerAlicia Kao, Managing Director of KuCoin, described the infrastructure philosophy driving the expansion.”The next decade of payments will be defined by multi-rail infrastructure, where real-time settlement, digital wallets, QR payments, local bank transfers and AI-driven commerce work together rather than compete in isolation,” Kao said.The same convergence logic is playing out at the established end of the market. As TheStreet reported, Mastercard recently acquired a stablecoin-focused payments firm for up to $1.8 billion and secured a New York BitLicense, a signal that card networks are building next-generation payment rails rather than waiting to see whether faster competitors route around them.What QR payment growth actually measuresQR codes have grown fastest in markets where mobile-first payment adoption outpaced legacy card infrastructure. India, Brazil, and Southeast Asia built their payment habits on a relatively clean slate with no established card ecosystem to compete with and no incumbent revenue model to defend. The behavior that formed in those markets, consumers expecting to initiate a payment by pointing a device at something simple, is more durable than the format itself.Ran Hammer, Chief Business Officer at Orbs, said the industry tends to misread what that adoption actually represents.”The real story isn’t ‘QR wins,’ it’s that direct payment wins, and QR is one front-end for it. Emerging markets leapfrogged to it because they had no card infrastructure to protect. The West will get there too, just slower, dragged by incumbents protecting their take rate,” Hammer said.The same shift is coming to developed markets on a delayed timeline. Card networks and banks are incumbents with existing revenue models to defend. The pressure will build through consumers already accustomed to faster, simpler experiences on mobile platforms and through businesses looking for lower-cost settlement alternatives.Once a payment behavior is established, the underlying technology can evolve without losing the habit. What QR built in emerging markets is an expectation, not a dependency on a specific format.
Real-time payments are already growing faster than most businesses realize.Focus/Getty Images
AI agents are becoming economic actors in the payment systemThe most structurally significant change in payments may not involve consumers at all. As AI systems take on purchasing, procurement, and subscription management, they need to move money without a human authorizing each transaction. Standard payment systems were built around someone presenting a card or logging into an account. Neither model works for a machine acting at speed and volume, around the clock, across multiple services simultaneously.Michael Heinrich, CEO of 0G Labs, described the scale of the coming shift.”The biggest shift in payments over the next decade is not a new interface for people. It is a new payer,” Heinrich told TheStreet.0G Labs has built a settlement infrastructure designed specifically for AI agents, where every agent carries a verified digital identity and every transaction leaves an auditable record. The governance question it solves is straightforward: When a machine is spending real money autonomously, the record of what happened, who authorized it, and whether it can be reversed needs to exist somewhere accessible.The 2025 McKinsey Global Payments Report identifies agentic commerce as one of the major forces reshaping the payments landscape over the next five years. Financial firms from retail brokerages to enterprise platforms are already building early versions of these systems.What payment rails built for machines need to handle:Programmable conditions: Payments that trigger automatically when a defined rule is met, without manual approval at the point of transaction.Around-the-clock availability: AI agents cannot wait for next-day settlement windows or business-hours processing cycles.Verified digital identity: Machines need credentials to authorize payments, replacing the card numbers and passwords only humans can practically manage.Auditable records: When a machine spends money autonomously, the record of what happened and who authorized it needs to be accessible, verifiable, and reversible.Hammer described what the shift to machine-driven commerce does to payment systems built around human behavior.”Once commerce goes agent-to-agent, the traditional rails are structurally obsolete. They were built around a human with a card,” he added.What this means for businesses and payment strategiesFor businesses, payment infrastructure is moving from a cost center to a strategic layer. Which systems to build on, how to handle settlement across geographies and currencies, and how to use payment capability as a market access tool are becoming executive decisions rather than IT procurement calls.The companies that get this right are building compounding advantages. Every time a payment experience gets faster or simpler, some customers shift toward the business that offers it. The gap between companies treating payments as a product and those treating it as a utility is widening.Heinrich described how the experience of commerce itself changes as payment becomes fully embedded: “As paying becomes ambient, consumers stop experiencing it as an event and start experiencing it as an outcome,” he said.For B2B companies, that transition restructures what accounts payable and procurement look like operationally. Manual approval loops give way to policy-based rules that a system executes against. The accountability question moves from whether a human signed off to whether the policy was designed well and the transaction record is accessible to anyone who needs to review it.Swartz framed the competitive divide in terms of what the winning companies will actually be selling.”The companies that win won’t just process payments. They’ll be the ones providing the infrastructure for settlement, liquidity and capital to move in real time,” he said.That infrastructure race is already underway. Payment capability is no longer a commodity that any provider can deliver equally well. The speed of settlement, the ability to operate across rails and geographies, and the readiness to serve automated commerce as well as human buyers are becoming the things that separate one business from another. Companies that treat payments as a back-end utility are increasingly competing against those that treat it as a product, and the gap is widening.Related: Michael Burry buys another beaten-down forgotten fintech stock