If you aren’t nerdy about payments already, be forewarned that 2027 might convert you. In 2026, thanks to the advent of agentic AI, we’ve seen payments take center stage again in debates about the future of commerce. Not since the popularization of digital wallets have we had this much attention on the disruptive potential of payments! We predict that 2027 will turn out to be a “make or break” year as we collectively try to boost trust and control in an increasingly open payments ecosystem. Here are three of our 2027 predictions to watch:

  • Stripe will acquire a bot and agent trust management vendor to secure agentic transactions. Agentic traffic is exploding, increasing 6,900% since 2025, and companies such as DataDome, HUMAN, and Kasada already help organizations manage interactions with inbound bots and agents. But to enable that agent to buy something on behalf of a human customer, merchants need partners that can connect this agent trust (e.g., identity, intent, provenance) to fraud management and payments processing. Stripe has been on a recent tear building (and acquiring) the foundations of a financial infrastructure for agentic commerce. Agent trust is a missing link that we expect the company to fill in short order.

What to do: Look for opportunities to implement a combined solution that adds more granular agentic control and monitoring and a broader view of the transaction and customer.

  • Machine-to-machine payments will give stablecoin a solid use case, but it won’t make the cryptocurrency mainstream. New machine-to-machine payment protocols, including MPP and x402, are gaining traction in machine-native digital commerce, but stablecoin payments in 2025 still only amounted to a mere 0.3% of fiat volumes. Why? There is negligible demand in economies with well-functioning digital payment systems; on- and off-ramps remain a friction point. There are also too many stablecoins, none of which are directly interchangeable for another. In 2027, significant bottlenecks will keep stablecoin under 1% of fiat volumes. The first bottleneck is that most suppliers won’t abandon the reliability of subscription revenues for volatile per-call models. The second bottleneck is that liability is a (crucial) open question, and third, governance frameworks are still lacking (e.g., budgets, know-your-agent auditing).

What to do: Prioritize near-term investment on bounded use cases where machine or stablecoin payments solve a clear problem, such as pay-per-use digital services or inefficient cross-border flows.

  • The surprise winner from the agentic payments hype will be humans paying for other humans. Agentic commerce is still niche, but shared finances are not: Think of scenarios in which a person can act as an observer of, partner in, or proxy for another’s financial activities (e.g., ex-spouses, dependent adult children, cohabitants, business partners, elderly parents). The generation that drove the fintech boom, Millennials, is increasingly taking care of both aging parents and dependent children and will drive demand for payment-by-proxy capabilities to do these things more easily. As luck would have it, the mechanisms needed to make payment-by-proxy work securely overlap with those required for agentic payments: thorough payer and payee provenance and reputation checks, as well as continuous, intent-based, and contextual authentication and authorization.

What to do: Take advantage of this moment of payment industry disruption to design for the shared finance needs and use cases that fit your customers and your strategy.

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In 2027, we don’t expect the whiplash-inducing velocity of payment tech announcements to taper off, but remember: Payment behavior rarely changes overnight. Prioritize near-term investment in use cases where payments innovation such as payment-by-proxy (agent or human) or stablecoin solves a clear problem. Run controlled pilots, but prioritize reusable capabilities rather than committing to a single protocol or stablecoin.

If you’re a Forrester client, you can read our full Predictions 2027: Payments report, which includes more details on the predictions above along with two additional ones. If you’re not a client, you can explore complimentary resources, including blog posts, guides, and webinars, on our Predictions hub.

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