The Future of Payments to 2030: 10 Trends Backed by BCG, McKinsey, BIS

Predictions about payments tend to age badly. In 2016 plenty of people expected cards to be dead by now, and in 2021 others expected every central bank to have a digital currency. So rather than another list of buzzwords, here are ten trends where the data already shows movement, each with a concrete sign to watch between now and 2030. We have tried to say where we think the hype outruns the evidence.

The big picture: slower revenue, faster change

Boston Consulting Group's 2025 Global Payments Report estimated global payments revenue at $1.9 trillion in 2024 and projected $2.4 trillion by 2029. That sounds like growth, but the annual rate is expected to slow to about 4%, from 8.8% since 2019, according to BCG. The fastest growth is projected in Latin America (7.9% a year) and the Middle East and Africa (6.8%). In short, the industry is getting bigger more slowly while the plumbing changes faster.

Rails: instant at home, linked abroad

1. Instant account-to-account becomes the default. Real-time account-to-account volumes rose 40% globally in 2024 and now make up about a quarter of digital retail payments, BCG found, with more than half of transactions in India and Brazil already running on such systems. BCG expects adoption in the Middle East and Africa to pass 50% by 2030. Watch whether merchants in Europe and the US start steering customers away from cards. Our primers on UPI and Pix show how this happened in two countries.

2. Domestic rails get linked across borders. The next step is connecting those national systems. Project Nexus, incubated by the BIS, aims to link instant payment systems in Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and India, with Indonesia joining in 2026, so cross-border payments settle in 60 seconds or less, reaching a market of 1.7 billion people in its first wave. The sign to watch: real consumer volumes, not just announcements.

Money itself: stablecoins and tokenised deposits

3. Stablecoins grow up, from trading to payments. BCG's 2025 report counted $26 trillion in annual stablecoin transaction volume, but only about 1% of it was real-world payments. A joint McKinsey and Artemis analysis put actual stablecoin payments at $390 billion in 2025, with business-to-business transfers the largest slice at $226 billion, according to McKinsey. That is still a tiny share of global payments. With the US GENIUS Act and EU MiCA in force, the question for 2030 is whether that share grows tenfold or a hundredfold. See our stablecoin market report.

4. Tokenised bank money and the BIS counter-vision. Central banks are not ceding the ground. The BIS argued in its 2025 annual report that stablecoins fail three tests for sound money: singleness, elasticity and integrity. It proposed tokenised platforms built around central bank reserves, commercial bank money and government bonds, as reported by The Block. By 2030, we expect both models to coexist, with tokenised deposits winning inside banks and stablecoins winning at the edges.

Who presses pay: AI agents

5. AI agents start paying. Visa launched Visa Intelligent Commerce in April 2025, and by late 2025 both Visa and Mastercard had frameworks for transactions initiated by AI agents. In June 2026 Visa announced it would integrate payments into OpenAI products, while Mastercard unveiled tools for machine-to-machine payments, as covered by Digital Commerce 360. McKinsey estimates agentic commerce could reach $1 trillion of US retail sales by 2030. We think that number is optimistic; trust, liability and refunds are unsolved. More in our piece on agentic payments.

The hardest question for AI agents is not how to pay, but who is liable when they pay for the wrong thing.

Central banks: CBDCs find narrower jobs

6. CBDCs narrow to specific jobs. Retail central bank digital currencies have mostly struggled for users where good private options exist. The digital euro project continues, China's e-CNY keeps expanding pilots, and India's e-rupee is testing offline and programmable uses. By 2030, we expect CBDCs to matter most in wholesale settlement and cross-border pilots rather than in shoppers' pockets. Our CBDC tracker follows the details.

Invisible finance: embedded, tokenised, faster

7. Embedded finance becomes invisible. Payments are moving inside software that is not a bank: accounting tools, ride-hailing apps, marketplaces. The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and World Economic Forum's 2025 Future of Global Fintech study, covering about 250 firms, found 84% of fintechs collaborate with incumbent institutions, most often through API integrations. That is the infrastructure of embedded finance. The sign to watch: whether customers can tell, or care, who the regulated entity is.

8. Passwords give way to biometrics and tokens. Mastercard committed in 2024 to 100% tokenisation of e-commerce transactions in Europe by 2030, replacing card numbers with tokens and one-time passwords with biometric passkeys. It said tokenisation already secured a quarter of global e-commerce transactions. Expect typing a 16-digit number online to feel as dated as signing a receipt by 2030.

9. Fintech revenue keeps outgrowing incumbents. BCG found payments fintechs generated $176 billion in revenue in 2024, growing about 23% a year, with top performers expanding three times as fast as incumbents. That pressure will keep fees on cross-border transfers and merchant acquiring under strain. Payments fintechs already make up 45% of total fintech revenue in BCG's count, and they have attracted more than $135 billion in equity funding over 25 years. Some of that capital will be wasted; enough of it will force incumbents to cut prices that have been stable for decades.

Households: bills get rebuilt

10. Bills and recurring payments get rebuilt. The least discussed trend may matter most to households: recurring payments. Instant rails, request-to-pay and open banking make it possible to pay utilities, rent and school fees on the due date, from anywhere, without card fees. A welder in Jeddah paying his family's water bill in Madurai, or a student in Dublin paying rent from a parent's account, are the kinds of use cases that move from awkward workarounds to standard features. We explore this in the future of bill payments.

What we would bet on

If we had to pick three for 2030: instant account-to-account becomes normal in most large economies; stablecoins become a standard tool for business and cross-border settlement but remain a small share of consumer spending; and agents start paying for low-risk, repeat purchases first. The rest will move, just more slowly than the conference slides suggest.

About this researchMuffinPay InsightsIndependent analysis of stablecoins, CBDCs, cross-border payments and digital public infrastructure. Every figure is linked to its source. Read our editorial standards →