📝 Boston Consulting Group report on the state of the global payments market in 2026 (part 2)

📝 Boston Consulting Group report on the state of the global payments market in 2026 (part 2)

Original report; part 1.

5⃣ Acquirers can help merchants extract greater value from payments

Payments are becoming increasingly complex and costly for large companies: 79% of nearly 500 respondents reported higher costs over the past 5 years, while only 10% managed to reduce them. Just 12% have a highly effective payments management model, characterized by:

🟢 a dedicated payments team;
🟢 a dynamic structure or a well-designed model with a single acquirer;
🟢 managing payments as a profit center.

These companies have higher conversion rates, lower fraud levels, and a lower rate of false declines.

6⃣ The leaders’ approach

🟦 Main criteria: Customer experience, costs, fraud, resilience, and profitability.

🟦 Key practices:

🔵 Providing the simplest and most seamless payment experience possible;
🔵 Personalizing payment methods;
🔵 Using intelligent routing and recovering failed payments;
🔵 Managing fraud and false declines;
🔵 Ensuring infrastructure redundancy and protection against disruptions;
🔵 Selecting embedded finance, co-branded card, or BNPL models in line with the business model.

7⃣ BCG recommendations for companies:

🔴 Identify points of leakage;
🔴 Benchmark performance against competitors and identify activities that can be outsourced to providers;
🔴 Develop a program based on responsibilities, priorities, and KPIs.

8⃣ The new role of acquirers

🟣 Acquirers must move beyond a basic provider role and develop broader capabilities. Over the past 5 years, 44% of merchants changed acquirers or added an additional one. The main selection criteria are price, authorization, reliability, and fraud prevention.
🟣 Agentic commerce: 73% would be willing to switch acquirers if they offered better support for transactions initiated by AI agents.

(To be continued)

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