The Pay Later market is entering a new phase. In January, BNPL use declined among younger consumers, while demand remained steady among households living paycheck to paycheck. At the same time, credit card installment plans held firm, with more than three in 10 consumers using them—unchanged from the previous month.

Generation Z showed the sharpest pullback in BNPL use, while millennials and bridge millennials also declined to their lowest levels in nearly a year. But financially constrained consumers continued to rely on BNPL at similar rates as in December, highlighting its role as a liquidity tool rather than a discretionary one.

The physical wallet isn’t dead, but it’s now optional. A growing share of shoppers now pay entirely with their phone, whether they’re buying online, picking up in store or browsing a pop-up on a Saturday morning. One in five digital wallet users regularly leave home without a physical wallet.

That shift creates a missed opportunity for retailers who haven’t kept pace: a customer standing at your register, ready to pay, but unable to complete the purchase because your setup doesn’t support how they want to pay.

Digital Wallet Statistics: A digital wallet, often called an e-wallet or mobile wallet, is a software, online service, or electronic tool that lets people make digital transactions by using digital money to pay for goods and services. Their use has grown quickly worldwide in recent years, driven by e-commerce, tap-and-go payments, and mobile banking. As cash and even physical cards are used less often, digital wallets are becoming central to the move toward a cashless economy.

Cross-border payments underpin global trade, remittances and economic growth. Improving their speed, transparency and cost is a shared priority for the global financial community. To support this, the G20 and the Financial Stability Board (FSB) defined a set of global targets to enhance how money moves across borders by 2027. Swift continues to play an active role in supporting this progress, working with the global community to strengthen existing infrastructure, improve data quality and drive greater coordination across the ecosystem. This page explains what the G20 goals are, why they matter and how the global payments ecosystem is progressing towards them.

Agentic commerce represents the next frontier of payments, where AI agents conduct purchases autonomously on behalf of consumers and businesses. Until now, all commerce has been buyer on one side, seller on the other. Now, we have empowered digital agents making payment decisions on behalf of others. This paradigm shift moves beyond traditional human-to-human commerce toward a model where intelligent agents make purchasing decisions within predefined parameters and trust boundaries, such as booking travel, ordering groceries, or even managing subscriptions.

Our annual Global eCommerce Payments & Fraud Report, produced by the Merchant Risk Council along with Visa Acceptance Solutions, surveyed merchants of all sizes from around the world to offer valuable insight into current payment acceptance and fraud trends. The report includes how merchants accept payments and what’s coming next, how fraud is managed across the commerce lifecycle, where disputes, refunds, and abuse are showing up, how payments and fraud trends differ globally as well as how merchants are integrating AI into their fraud strategies.

Buy now, pay later, the supposed credit card killer, has done something more consequential than steal market share in the Pay Later industry. It has forced card issuers to wake up. The payment alternative may have arrived with a fresh consumer proposition and a disruptive narrative, but one year of PYMNTS Intelligence data suggests the real story isn’t that BNPL is replacing cards. Instead, it’s that credit card installment plans are absorbing the Pay Later surge faster, at scale and from inside the issuer and merchant relationships consumers already have.

The 2026 Global eCommerce Payments and Fraud Report is your go-to resource for understanding the latest trends shaping the eCommerce payments and fraud prevention landscape. Based on our annual global survey of 1,200+ eCommerce merchants, this report provides insights from businesses of all sizes—SMBs, mid-market, and enterprise merchants—across 35+ countries in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC), and Latin America (LATAM).