Update on the Payments landscape – August 2026
The payments landscape continues to evolve and this blog shares some of the topics that caught my attention during the last three months. If you think I’ve missed anything important, do please send an email to technical@treasurers.org.
Policymakers and regulators
• The UK government has introduced the Late Payment Legislation 2026 for debate in Parliament. It has four key components:
o 60-Day Payment Cap: Large businesses will be legally required to pay smaller suppliers within 60 days of receiving a valid invoice. Any contractual term imposing a longer payment period will be unenforceable. This directly targets the common practice of large corporations dictating 90-day or even 120-day terms to suppliers who have little negotiating power
o Mandatory Statutory Interest: Statutory interest at 8% above the Bank of England base rate will become truly mandatory. Under the current Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998, businesses technically have the right to charge interest - but many contracts include clauses that waive or reduce it. The reforms will make such clauses void. You cannot be asked to sign away your right to interest
o 30-Day Dispute Deadline: Buyers will have 30 days from receiving an invoice to raise any dispute. If they fail to notify the supplier of a genuine dispute within that window, the invoice is deemed accepted and full payment becomes due. This prevents the all-too- common tactic of raising spurious disputes weeks or months after receiving an invoice as a way to delay payment
o Small Business Commissioner Enforcement Powers: The Small Business Commissioner (previously a largely advisory role) will be empowered to:
Investigate complaints about late payment practices
Adjudicate disputes between suppliers and large businesses
Issue binding financial penalties against businesses that consistently pay late
This transforms the SBC from a mediator into a regulator with the authority to punish persistent offenders.
• The Bank of England through the Payments Vision Delivery Committee has launched a consultation to address the overarching question of what the core payments infrastructure must achieve from three complementary perspectives. These perspectives correspond to the three substantive sections that follow, each of which will be considered alongside each other:
o Future payment journeys: What payment journeys should the core infrastructure support, i.e. what will ‘next-generation’ deliver for end-users? The high-level design must be grounded in the concrete outcomes sought for UK households and businesses
o Design principles: What are principles and characteristics that should guide the design of core infrastructure? The principles should support navigating trade-offs and decision-making and should act as a guide rather than prescribing specific technical solutions
o The wider payments ecosystem: What role should the core infrastructure play within the wider UK payments ecosystem?
The consultation ends on September 11.
Interesting news and reports
• Thune and Juniper Research released their Inaugural Interoperability Index which showed a striking disparity between consumer expectations and the reality of slow, fragmented cross-border networks with a lack of interoperability impacting all regions, proving that strong domestic progress does not automatically guarantee seamless international connectivity. Key findings included:
o Europe: Comprises 16 of the top 20 rankings. The region ranks highest globally, powered by the integrated SEPA network which processes cross-border euro transfers within 10 seconds. However, this friction-free experience remains largely insular to the Eurozone.
o The Americas: The US, despite being home to many cross-border companies, highlights an adaptability gap, where a distributed banking network slows integration with global real-time rails. Meanwhile, despite the massive domestic success of Brazil’s PIX, strict currency controls mean 42% of international recipients still face multi-day delays.
o Asia-Pacific: Singapore excels by building direct bilateral links with other countries, but scores low in cross-border connectivity. India and China rank lower because their hyper-efficient systems focus domestically, leaving 46% of Indian recipients and 30% of Chinese waiting days for overseas funds. In addition, mobile wallets adoption across East, South and South East Asia are heavily siloed and not natively interoperable at a global scale.
o Middle East: Markets like the UAE and Saudi Arabia have advanced tech infrastructure, but daily habits remain heavily anchored to physical currency. 72% of Saudi citizens use cash at least weekly, limiting the immediate scale of digital cross-border networks.
o Africa: The region pioneers local fintech innovation, particularly mobile money in Kenya and digital assets in Nigeria, but lower overall rankings reflect broader global headwinds, as international banks cut back correspondent relationships in these corridors.
• A new Fintech 2040 from Riverty entitled Agentic Commerce: China’s Lead, Europe’s Choice, argues that the next battleground in digital commerce will no longer be consumer attention alone, but the hidden "trust and protocol layer" behind AI-driven transactions.
While companies once competed for clicks, rankings and conversions, the rise of agentic commerce shifts competitive advantage toward machine-readability, payment authority, trusted execution and interoperability between AI systems. China already offers an early glimpse of this future with ecosystems such as Alibaba's Qwen and ByteDance's Douyin showing how AI agents can seamlessly combine commerce, payments, recommendation systems and digital services into highly integrated consumer environments.
A recent representative consumer survey conducted by Riverty and Adyen found that while many consumers are open to AI-assisted shopping, 93% want the ability to review or stop AI purchasing decisions at any time. Most respondents would only allow AI agents limited spending authority and expect full transparency around how decisions are made.
• A study on blocked payments and chatbot failures by DECTA found that:
o Just 5.4% trust a chatbot to fix problems. 65.2% want a human
o Only 11.4% of blocked-payment users say the chatbot actually resolved their issue
o 48% of affected users say the transaction died and they had to find another way to pay
o Negative reviews blaming chatbots rose 55.49% year over year across Europe's 10 biggest money apps
Naresh Aggarwal
11 July 2026
