Consumer payments are entering a new phase, with AI-led shopping, bank-backed wallets and one-click checkout set to have the greatest impact on the market over the next 12 months, according to new research from Juniper Research.
The analyst house’s new Consumer Payments Tech Horizon identifies agentic commerce, bank-backed wallets and Click to Pay as the three technologies most likely to reshape the way consumers pay online between now and mid-2027.
The report assesses 17 consumer payments technologies, ranking them either “above the line”, where they are performing strongly against market expectations, or “below the line”, where they are failing to live up to the hype (see below).
Payments on many tracks
For the telemedia sector, the findings are significant because they point to a payments market that is no longer moving along a single track. The next wave of growth is unlikely to be driven by cards, wallets, carrier billing or bank payments alone, but by the way these rails are embedded into richer, faster and increasingly automated digital commerce experiences.
Nick Maynard, VP of Research at Juniper Research, says “Consumer payments are shifting rapidly, with agentic commerce set to reshape how a transaction occurs.” Merchants, he warns, “will need to keep pace with changes in consumer behaviour or risk being left behind in an ecommerce market increasingly shaped by user experience”.
Agentic commerce: from theory to deployment
The biggest shift identified by Juniper is agentic commerce: the use of AI agents not only to search for products and services, but to evaluate, select and potentially complete purchases on behalf of consumers.
For telemedia, this is not a distant concept. We have already reported on Worldline’s move to connect AI agents to its global payment ecosystem, allowing merchants to experiment with payment-enabled AI workflows. Worldline’s Model Context Protocol servers act as a bridge between large language models and payment APIs, enabling AI agents to initiate actions such as payment creation, refunds, payment captures and status checks through natural language.
That matters because agentic commerce changes the front end of digital services. Instead of a user finding a piece of mobile content, clicking an advert, landing on a payment page and choosing a billing method, an AI agent may increasingly do much of that discovery and decision-making on their behalf. In that world, payment rails need to be machine-readable, secure, API-based and capable of being selected by a non-human intermediary.
Telemedia has previously argued that ChatGPT’s move into embedded checkout could have a profound impact on mVAS, not least because autonomous agents will need to support existing billing rails, including direct carrier billing, wallets, A2A payments, BNPL and crypto. The implication is that the old consumer journey of manual browsing and checkout may increasingly give way to API-driven, agent-mediated purchasing.
This creates both opportunity and risk. Telemedia businesses that can expose services, prices, subscriptions, cancellation terms and payment methods clearly to AI-driven discovery tools may find new routes to acquisition. Those that rely on opaque flows, poor metadata or payment methods that are hard for agents to interpret may find themselves filtered out before the customer ever sees them.
Wallets become strategic infrastructure
Juniper’s second major mover is bank-backed wallets, with Wero singled out as evidence of growing momentum in Europe. Wero has moved from peer-to-peer payments into merchant commerce, with Telemedia reporting in March that the instant account-to-account payment app had gone live for commerce payments in Belgium and Germany. The service already had 50 million users, with retail payments live in Germany from the end of 2025 and progressive roll-out across France and Belgium during 2026.
This is important for telemedia because Wero is not simply another payment button. It points to a wider shift towards sovereign, bank-backed and account-linked payment tools that can sit alongside cards, DCB and local alternative payment methods.
Wero also plans migrations involving Payconiq in Luxembourg and iDEAL in the Netherlands, as well as future value-added services such as merchant loyalty, recurring payments and subscription management.
The same pattern can be seen beyond Europe. Pix Automático in Brazil has rapidly become central to subscription commerce. Just six months after Nord Security introduced recurring Pix payments through EBANX, Pix already accounted for 28% of its Brazilian payment volume, with merchant-initiated Pix transactions achieving approval rates around 20 percentage points higher than cards.
Wallets and instant bank payments are no longer simply local preferences to be added at the end of a payment roadmap. They are becoming acquisition, retention and conversion tools. In markets where cards are less trusted, less available or more prone to failure, wallet and bank-backed payment options may be the difference between a subscriber joining, renewing or silently dropping away.
There is also a DCB angle. Telemedia reported last year how DIMOCO’s partnership with Croatia’s Aircash wallet, which allows users to top up wallet balances through their mobile phone bills, shows how carrier billing can remain relevant in a wallet-led world, not by standing apart from other payment tools, but by becoming part of the wallet funding and mobile commerce layer.
Click to Pay and the battle against checkout friction
The third technology highlighted by Juniper is Click to Pay, which it says is gaining momentum as card network mandates reshape ecommerce checkout. At one level this is still a card story, but for telemedia it is really a friction story.
Visa recently announced the launch of Click to Pay for eligible Revolut Visa cardholders, describing it as a scale moment for the technology in Europe and a faster, simpler and more secure way to pay online. Mastercard, meanwhile, says it is scaling tokenisation, Click to Pay and payment passkeys across Europe, with Click to Pay available in 32 European markets and returning customers accounting for more than 70% of Click to Pay checkouts.
This matters because failed or clunky checkout is already a direct commercial problem. Telemedia recently reported that 46% of UK consumers had experienced a payment failure at checkout in the previous 12 months, creating a reliability gap that can cost sellers revenue and damage customer experience. For telemedia companies, where transactions are often low-value, impulse-driven and expected to be one-click, a failed payment can mean the user simply disappears.
Click to Pay therefore needs to be seen as part of a wider checkout reset. It may not replace DCB, wallets, Pix, Wero or Pay by Bank, but it raises consumer expectations around how simple, secure and repeatable digital payments should feel. As cards become more tokenised, biometric and passkey-driven, the benchmark for all other payment types rises with them.
Taken together, Juniper’s three predictions point to a clear direction of travel. Consumer payments are becoming more automated, more embedded and more fragmented at the same time.
For telemedia, that means the winners will not necessarily be the companies with the most content, the cleverest campaign or even the cheapest payment rail. They will be the ones that can orchestrate multiple payment methods around the user, the market and the context of the transaction.
DCB still has a big role to play
DCB still has a role, especially in digital content, gaming, subscriptions and markets where card penetration is limited. Juniper itself has previously forecast that global DCB transaction value will rise from $51bn in 2026 to more than $87bn by 2030, provided operators and payment providers respond to HTTPS disruption, fraud requirements and competition from wallets and A2A payments.
However, the direction is clear – DCB will increasingly have to sit inside a broader payments stack that also includes wallet funding, bank-backed wallets, instant payments, Click to Pay, tokenised card flows and AI-readable checkout infrastructure.
That is the real message from Juniper’s Tech Horizon. Agentic commerce may change who, or what, initiates the transaction. Bank-backed wallets may change where the money comes from. Click to Pay may change how card payments behave online. But the combined effect is bigger than any one technology: consumer payments are becoming part of the intelligent infrastructure of digital commerce.
For telemedia businesses, the challenge now is to make sure their payment options are not only compliant and available, but visible, trusted and usable in a world where the next customer may arrive through a wallet, a bank app, a card token, a carrier bill — or an AI agent acting on their behalf.
