Every year, Global Payment Schemes publish their vision of the future. The vocabulary varies (this year was all about AI, digital identity, instant payments, embedded commerce, crypto rails), but the underlying structure never does. The centrality of Payments Networks is a matter of existence. No matter how broad their horizon looks, everything ultimately returns to the same point: the transaction
That precise moment when the network prices, secures, authorises, and recognises.
This is not surprising in itself. But it becomes interesting when set against the reality of how commerce is evolving. A chunk of the industry is moving toward more continuous, contextual, and fluid journeys. Payments are just one element embedded in a much wider flow.
And yet, networks continue to imagine a world organised around the moment that made them relevant in the first place. The tension between these two logics is the starting point of this reflection.
Commerce Has Become Fluid: Journeys that no longer have edges
Consider how people shop today, and the traditional notion of a “checkout” quickly loses its centrality, and therefore the Payments Networks, too. A customer discovers a product online, tries it in-store, completes the transaction days later through a digital wallet, and receives post-purchase support through yet another channel. Those steps overlap, branch, reverse, and recombine, and it certainly does not unfold in sequence; they are shaped by context.
AI accelerates this shift by anticipating preferences, automating reorders, and compressing decision-making long before a classical checkout ever appears. New business models, from subscriptions to pay-per-use services, shift the payment moment upstream or push it quietly into the background. Even further, mobility services, digital tickets, and connected devices generate small, contextual transactions that barely register as “payments” in the traditional sense.
Commerce has become a continuous environment. We no longer organise the journey around the checkout; it is one event inside a larger relational flow.
For merchants, it is daily reality, they no longer design funnels, but contexts, services, and ecosystems where payment appears and disappears according to the logic of the experience.
Payment Networks Still Think in Moments : The transaction remains the anchor
Payment networks, however, remain anchored to a very different centre. For them, the transaction is not just a step in a journey; it is the place where the entire system finds meaning. A transaction is a trigger point where Risk and Liability come alive, Interchange pricing is defined, etc.
For this reason, the Payments Networks’ vision always returns to the same gravitational point, the same centrality. Let’s look at all the theme of Mastercard in 2026 and how they relate :
When they talk about AI, it implies decisioning at the transaction.
About identity, they say strengthening the moment of verification.
About crypto, they imagine conversion into a form that is compatible with their idea of “transaction”
Even instant payments (which in theory bypass card rails entirely) are reframed through “value-added services” that recentralise the network’s role around the moment itself.
Networks do not expand horizontally in the value chain of commerce, they deepen vertically within the same moment. They are not here to change the object, but rather reinforcing it. The transaction is not just what they do; it is what keeps them at the centre of game.
Invisibility vs Disappearance :The checkout can hide, but it cannot die
Networks never speak of eliminating the checkout, but only of making it invisible. They imagine a payment experience that slips quietly into the background: tap-and-go, auto-billing, tokenised one-click, unattended commerce.
But invisibility is not the same as disappearance. In every case, the underlying architecture insists on a recognisable moment, even if the user never sees it.
By contrast, looking at Super Apps, they treat the checkout as something that context can absorb entirely. Payments happen inside conversations, mobility steps or mini-programs. The transaction is no longer an explicit moment; the environment, the context took it all.
Interestingly, networks by their organisational and economic identity cannot adapt to that logic.
Transaction invisibility is acceptable, its disappearance is a threat.
This is what makes the difference between a super app and the global Payments Networks ( between making centrality disappear or protecting it). It sits at the core of how payment systems start diverging.
A Cultural Lens on the Difference : Context-first vs object-first
Part of this divergence reflects two distinct ways of imagining digital systems.
Erin Mayer, in her essay Cultural Map distributes cultures according to the need of context to guarantee effective communication. This matrix is based on the work of American Anthropologist Edward T. Hall.
Chinese culture is considered highly contextual, in contrast to the American one.
Therefore, if Chinese platforms were built within a culture that understands meaning through context, Services live inside flows. A payment is simply one expression of that flow, embedded in surrounding activity. The system does not need clearly bounded moments for clarity or trust; it derives coherence from the relationships between actions.
Global Payment networks, by contrast, come from a tradition where we tie meaning to explicit objects. A transaction is not only a practical step, it embbeds a legal, economic, and operational unit. Roles, responsibilities, pricing, and governance all crystallise around that object. We built an entire architecture to protect it, because the object is what makes the system legible.
This cultural distinction (context versus object) is crucial and has implications on payments and transaction:
One model diffuses the centre, where as the other one fortifies it.
The Growing Mismatch : Fluid commerce, fixed infrastructure
Here lies the quiet friction shaping today’s payment landscape. Businesses operate in a world that behaves like a continuum. However, Payment networks still operate in a world that behaves like a sequence.
One side designs for context; the other defends the checkpoint. One sees payment as part of an evolving relational state; the other treats it as an event that must remain structurally intact.
And this reveals something important: Schemes are not trying to reinvent payments; they are trying to preserve their centrality within them. Every new narrative, whether about AI, identity, instant rails, or crypto, is filtered through a single reflex: how to ensure the network remains indispensable.
What appears as adaptation is, in reality, a disciplined form of optimisation and recentralisation. The Scheme’s governance tolerates the most decentralised models only as long as they can fold back to its perimeter. The transaction cannot disappear because the centre cannot afford to move.
The Centre That Refuses to Move
In the end, the schemes’ logic shows something simple and revealing: they do not evolve by abandoning the centre, but by reinforcing it. They do not consider decentralised models as alternatives, but rather as a canvas of loose threads to weave back into their original form, the one that defines their role. The transaction model even ends up reframing technologies built to bypass intermediaries by re-establishing a point of control aligned with itself.
Beyond being a moral judgement (it is a good thing or not), this conservative architecture of the system raises a clear question for the coming decade: can a structure built to recentralise everything around a single moment coexist with an economy that increasingly has no fixed moments at all?
That tension, between a world of flows and an infrastructure that insists on a centre, will surely define the next chapter of payments.
