Peter de Wit is Head of Financial Institutions EMEA at Aevi
Paying in person remains one of the most frequent and important financial interactions in our lives. From supermarket self-checkouts and fuel pumps to parking meters, ticket machines and restaurant terminals, millions of transactions pass through physical payment touchpoints every second. Because of their sheer scale, even small changes to payment infrastructure have an enormous impact.
Behind the scenes, a new wave of fintech innovation is redefining how in-person payments are processed, authorized and experienced. Soon, the simple, daily act of paying may look very different from what we are used to today.
AI is beginning to assist payments
First, we’ll start with the ‘obvious’: Artificial intelligence is already transforming many areas of financial services, from fraud detection to credit risk modeling. In-person payments are now entering a similar phase.
A concept gaining attention across the fintech industry is ‘agentic commerce’, which refers to software agents that assist in automating elements of the purchasing process, on behalf of customers or businesses.
These systems aim to support users by analyzing context and simplifying routine actions. It may also help detect unusual activity, optimize how transactions are routed between payment networks, or support merchants in managing complex payment environments across multiple locations.
In physical payment environments, AI is already beginning to appear as a supporting layer around transactions and, increasingly, within the moment of transaction itself.
Recently, Santander and Mastercard carried out what has been described as Europe’s first live payment executed by an AI agent within a regulated banking framework. The trial tested how AI systems could initiate a payment on behalf of a user while operating within strict permissions and security controls.
For banks and payment service providers, developments like this highlight an important question: how can AI support payments while maintaining transparency, trust and customer control?
Digital currencies are moving closer to everyday payments
Meanwhile, fintech innovation is also starting to challenge a more fundamental question: what ‘money’ itself could look like in the future.
Central bank digital currencies (or CBDC for short), stablecoins, cryptocurrencies and other forms of tokenized money are increasingly being explored by governments, banks and financial technology companies.
2025 marked a significant step toward the legitimization of digital currencies, as governments introduced clearer regulatory frameworks. These included the GENIUS Act in the US and the UK’s Financial Services and Markets Act-driven cryptoasset framework.
While most of the public debate around digital currencies has largely revolved around trading and online transactions, these new forms of value are also likely to influence physical payment environments in the near future.
In this context, digital currencies could present advantages in areas such as settlement speed, cross-border transactions, and programmable payments. This is particularly relevant in sectors such as mobility, transport, and international retail, where payments often occur across borders or through automated systems. The challenge will be to ensure that payment infrastructure remains flexible enough to accommodate both traditional payment methods and emerging digital assets as experimentation continues across the financial system.
From self-checkout to unattended cities: the rise of self-service payments
Another highly visible trend reshaping physical payments is the rapid expansion of self-service and unattended transactions.
Consumers have become increasingly accustomed to making payments without any direct staff involvement. Self-checkout systems, vending machines, parking systems, ticket machines, and EV charging stations are examples of environments where payments are embedded directly into devices and infrastructure, creating opportunities for businesses to operate services around the clock and in locations where staffed checkouts would not be practical.
For financial institutions, however, these environments also introduce new operational requirements.
Payment devices may be distributed across large geographic areas, operating on different networks and accepting multiple payment methods. Ensuring reliability, security and consistent payment experiences across these environments requires flexible and scalable payment systems.
Biometrics could turn the body into your payment key
Biometric payments allow transactions to be authorized using physical characteristics such as fingerprints, facial recognition, eye scans, or palm scans. By removing the need for signatures, PINs or passwords, these systems aim to simplify authentication as well as to strengthen security.
However, our recent consumer research shows that widespread adoption still depends heavily on knowledge and trust. Nearly half of US respondents remain unfamiliar with biometric payments, while security and privacy concerns continue to be the main barriers to wider use.
Where consumers are comfortable with the technology, fingerprints remain the most widely preferred form of biometric authentication. As devices and payment systems continue to integrate biometric capabilities, biometric authentication is likely to become a more common layer within everyday payment journeys.
Given their scale and frequency, in-person payments are becoming a central arena for fintech innovation, with physical payment environments growing more connected and intelligent.
About Peter De Wit
Peter de Wit is Head of Financial Institutions EMEA at Aevi, where he works with banks, acquirers, and PSPs to modernize in‑person payment environments. With more than 20 years in financial services, he focuses on how emerging technologies and new payment models are reshaping physical payments and the way people pay.
