Introduction
The shift from cash to digital payments has moved faster than most financial institutions anticipated. Global digital payment transactions are projected to exceed $10 trillion in 2026, according to Juniper Research, with contactless payments driving a significant share of that volume. The global contactless payment market, valued at USD 55.74 billion in 2025, is forecast to reach USD 227 billion by 2035, growing at 15.1% annually (Market Techie, 2026).
Mobile wallets including Google Pay and Apple Pay now represent primary payment instruments for hundreds of millions of consumers globally, with 48% of businesses accepting them. By 2025, there were an estimated 4.4 billion unique digital wallet users worldwide, more than half of the global population (Mastercard).
India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) processed over 228 billion transactions annually in 2025, up from 172 billion in 2024, handling more than 85% of India’s retail digital payments volume (NPCI, 2026). The UPI model is now being studied and replicated across South Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Three structural forces are defining what comes next: the contactless revolution, biometric authentication, and the emergence of open payment ecosystems. Each is reshaping how payments work, who controls them, and what experiences consumers expect. And beyond these three, a fourth force is emerging: agentic commerce, where AI makes purchases on behalf of consumers entirely without human input.
The Contactless Revolution
Contactless payments have crossed from convenience feature to baseline expectation. Visa research shows 78% of global consumers now use contactless payments, with adoption accelerating across Europe and Southeast Asia. NFC payments and QR code technologies are the primary delivery mechanisms, and both are becoming embedded in the retail and transit infrastructure of major economies.
Comviva’s own research, drawn from a survey of 200+ global CXOs across fintech and payments, found that 27% of businesses already offer contactless payment methods and 36% plan to implement them within the next year. This near-universal adoption trajectory means contactless is no longer a differentiator. It is an entry requirement.
Beyond smartphones, wearable payment devices such as rings, bracelets, and smartwatches grew 24% year on year in 2025 (Deloitte Fintech Review 2025). SoftPOS technology, which transforms any NFC-enabled smartphone into a merchant payment terminal, is growing at 200% annually (Visa), dramatically lowering the barrier for small and micro-merchant acceptance globally.
The next layer of contactless innovation goes beyond tapping a card or scanning a code. Accenture’s global payments research describes invisible payments, where consumers walk into a store, select products, and leave without a checkout interaction at all. Computer vision, AI-powered shelf tracking, and linked payment credentials handle the transaction automatically.
Enabling this seamlessly requires a robust tokenisation layer. Network tokenisation, which replaces static card details with secure digital tokens, is rapidly becoming the default standard for contactless and card-on-file transactions. Visa reports that merchants implementing tokenisation see a 3%+ lift in authorisation rates. By 2030, Mastercard has committed to having all e-commerce transactions globally use tokenisation. For digital wallet platforms supporting this transition, token-first infrastructure is not optional. It is the architecture of the next payment era.
Biometrics: Where Security Meets Personalisation
Convenience without security is a trade-off that neither consumers nor regulators accept. Biometric payment authentication has emerged as the mechanism that resolves this tension, providing stronger security than passwords or PINs while reducing friction in the authentication journey.
The global biometrics for banking and financial services market reached USD 10.04 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow to USD 40.97 billion by 2035, at a CAGR of 15.1% (Precedence Research, 2026). Mobile biometric authentication transactions are projected to exceed 18 billion annually by 2026, a 181% increase from 2021 figures (Juniper Research).
Fingerprint scanning, facial recognition, and voice identification are now standard features in major mobile operating systems and banking applications. By 2025, over 1.4 billion people globally used facial recognition for payments. A 2025 Juniper Research study found that biometric payments will authenticate over $2.5 trillion in transactions in 2025. Visa’s Biometric Payments Report found that over 65% of consumers feel more secure using biometric authentication compared to traditional credential-based methods.
The security advantage is clear: biometric credentials cannot be stolen the way passwords can, cannot be shared, and cannot be guessed. But BCG research points to a secondary benefit beyond security: personalisation. Biometric identification creates a verified identity layer that payment providers, retailers, and financial institutions can use to deliver contextually relevant offers, loyalty rewards, and financial recommendations at the point of transaction. The payment becomes not just a settlement event but a personalised service touchpoint.
The frontier of biometric security is now behavioural biometrics, which analyses how users interact with their devices such as typing speed, pressure, and swiping patterns, to continuously authenticate throughout a session. Combined with facial recognition, this multimodal approach reduces fraud false-positive rates below 1% while adding no friction for legitimate users (Trust Payments, 2026).
Open Ecosystems and the Subscription Economy
Open banking is the regulated practice of sharing customer financial data with authorised third-party providers via secure APIs, enabling more personalised and integrated financial services. It is transforming financial services in Europe, the US, and increasingly across Asia-Pacific. Juniper Research forecasts open banking will enable over $5 trillion in payment transactions globally by 2025.
Open payment ecosystems allow banks, fintechs, and payment platforms to collaborate rather than compete. The result is a more integrated financial experience: a consumer uses a single digital platform to access payment, lending, insurance, and investment services from multiple providers without switching applications. Accenture reports that businesses using open payment systems reduce customer acquisition costs by 20% and retention costs by 15%.
Concurrent with open banking, subscription-based payment models are reshaping the commercial relationship between consumers and brands. KPMG data shows subscription payments now account for 80% of all consumer spending on digital services in the US. For payment platforms, this creates a requirement to support automated recurring billing, embedded loyalty programmes, personalised offer delivery, and churn prediction. The payment orchestration layer becomes the operational infrastructure for managing these relationships at scale.
The Security Imperative: Digital Identity and Fraud in the Contactless Era
Greater convenience in payments carries an equal and opposite responsibility around security. As contactless, biometric, and open payments become the norm, identity fraud is evolving in parallel. Mastercard reports that 94% of consumers surveyed say it is important that financial institutions keep their financial data secure. Visa projects a material increase in the sophistication and volume of AI-powered identity attacks in 2026.
The response from the industry is a shift toward digital identity wallets and verified digital credentials that help consumers prove who they are quickly and securely across financial services, age verification, and high-value transactions. Biometric fraud prevention, powered by AI and behavioural analytics, is becoming the standard defence. For payment infrastructure providers, building security into the transaction flow from the start, not as an afterthought, is the defining requirement of the next generation of payments.
Where Contactless, Biometric, and Open Converge
These three forces are not parallel trends. They are converging into a single architecture for the future of payments. A consumer paying at a smart retail outlet may have their biometric identity verified at entry, their payment handled via an NFC-enabled device linked to an open banking account, and their loyalty rewards automatically applied through a subscription agreement with the retailer. The entire experience requires no explicit payment action from the consumer.
Looking further ahead, a fourth layer is emerging: agentic commerce. In 2026, AI agents are beginning to transact on behalf of consumers and businesses autonomously. Google launched its ‘Buy for Me’ feature in the US in late 2025, and Amazon found that consumers using its AI agent were 60% more likely to complete a purchase. Major payment networks are already building the infrastructure: Visa’s Intelligence Commerce and Mastercard’s Agent Pay provide tokenisation services for secure AI-executed transactions. For payment orchestration platforms, the implication is significant. The ability to validate agent intent, authenticate AI-initiated transactions, and route them intelligently will define the next generation of payment infrastructure.
For markets where financial inclusion remains an imperative, this convergence also opens access pathways. Mobile-first biometric onboarding can extend payment access to populations without traditional identity documents or bank accounts, using the same infrastructure that serves premium consumers in developed markets.
India as a Template for Global Payment Evolution
India’s payment ecosystem offers the most advanced real-world evidence for where this convergence leads. UPI processed over 228 billion transactions worth Rs 299.7 lakh crore in 2025, accounting for over 85% of India’s digital transaction volume (NPCI, 2026). Aadhaar biometric authentication provides the identity infrastructure. Mobile wallets provide the contactless interface. The combination has driven financial inclusion at a scale and speed no other market has achieved.
The frictions that remain in Indian digital payments, including UPI Lite adoption in rural areas, merchant acceptance in Tier 3 and Tier 4 geographies, and cross-border UPI interoperability now active in 12 countries, are exactly the problems that the next wave of payment infrastructure investment is designed to address.
How mobiquity One Powers the Future of Payments
The convergence of contactless, biometric, and open payments places new demands on the underlying payment infrastructure. Platforms must support real-time biometric verification, NFC and QR tokenisation, open API connectivity to multiple financial institutions, and subscription lifecycle management simultaneously.
Comviva’s mobiquity One is an AI-powered payment orchestration platform built for digital-first businesses navigating this convergence. It provides intelligent routing across payment methods and gateways, automated retry logic, real-time analytics, and unified integration for new payment methods including contactless, UPI, and digital wallets. As the future of payments moves toward agentic and invisible transactions, mobiquity One provides the orchestration layer that makes reliability, personalisation, and security scalable.
Conclusion
The future of payments is being built on three converging pillars: contactless experiences that make the payment moment invisible, biometric authentication that makes identity the payment credential, and open banking ecosystems that make financial services integrated and personalised. Beneath all three sits a critical security imperative around digital identity and fraud prevention.
Businesses that treat payment infrastructure as a strategic capability, not a transactional layer, will be the ones that lead in this era. The cashless payments economy is not coming. It is already here.
