The best payment experience is the one that gets out of the way. As customer expectations shift toward immediacy and relevance, and as technologies such as embedded payments, real-time rails, and emerging forms of agentic commerce mature, tolerance for friction is shrinking. The winners will be the organizations that treat payments as an embedded consequence of what a customer is trying to do, and then use data, personalization, and modern rails to make that consequence secure, accurate, and almost invisible.
“I don’t want to get involved in the process of paying. I want it to happen securely, accurately, and as a consequence of what I’m actually there to do,” says Nicki Bull Bisgaard, Founder and Group CEO of PayTech Group. Payments are fading into the background, becoming an embedded feature that supports the experience rather than interrupting it.
When Payments Disappear, Products Win
Ride-sharing offers perhaps the clearest proof that consumers have already embraced a different relationship with payments, and the lesson is that friction has become optional. Customers will tolerate complexity in what they are buying, but not in how they pay for it. “You want it to happen securely. You want it to be accurate, preferably in real time. You want to be notified of it, and you want the receipt preferably delivered digitally.”
Embedded payments already show up in corporate travel, subscription billing, and direct debit arrangements. What is changing now is not the concept itself, but the scale behind it. The strategic shift lies in recognizing how broadly this model can be applied when paired with thoughtful user journeys and automation.
Product Strategy Starts With the Pain Point, Not the Rails
“What is the problem? That is the first question,” says Bisgaard. Not what network, not what processor, not what new feature list. The product leader’s job is to identify the pain point in the customer’s life or workflow, then design the payment experience as a solution to that pain.
He uses a familiar example: healthcare billing. Many patients still receive invoices days later, then are asked to log into portals, remember passwords, and initiate payment. It’s an unnecessary gap between service and settlement. “Not much is actually stopping this,” he says, noting that the building blocks exist and the pattern has been proven elsewhere.
He also expects automation to widen the aperture of what embedded payments can cover. “Now we’re talking about how machines can do it for us, agentic commerce,” he says. “I think 2026 is the year where we’re going to see that expanding across different user experiences and use cases.”
The strategy implication is that the most durable payment products will be defined by the context in which payment happens, and by how seamlessly it supports the underlying job-to-be-done.
Hyper-Personalization: The Differentiator Banks Keep Ignoring
If embedded payments are the baseline, personalization is where differentiation should happen. However, much of today’s card and payments market looks and feels the same. “They provide the same product regardless of who you are and what your preferences are.”
The missed opportunity here is the failure to translate data into relevance. Bisgaard’s frustration becomes most vivid when he talks about generic offers and rewards. “You get loads of offers which are oftentimes incredibly irrelevant,” he says. “I get 10% on sausage rolls at Greggs. I’ve never been to Greggs. I will never go to Greggs. Why would I go to Greggs? And you know that.”
His argument is that cards, despite being “by far the most important touchpoint you’ll ever have with your bank,” are still treated as standardized commodities. Hyper-personalization, in his framing, is not a marketing flourish. It is a product discipline, one that uses behavioral signals to tailor features, controls, and value propositions to an individual’s real spending patterns and priorities.
The Hidden Constraint: Infrastructure Shapes Creativity
Bisgaard doesn’t place the blame solely on unimaginative product teams. He points to a structural reality. Much of card functionality is constrained by shared infrastructure and vendor-defined roadmaps. “A lot of these use the same technical infrastructure,” he says. “They have the same processor, they use the same network and a lot of the features and functionalities are defined by others than the card issuer themselves.”
That has two consequences. First, it limits differentiation when issuers are selecting from the same menu of capabilities. Second, it encourages organizations to compete on surface-level features instead of rethinking the experience end-to-end. Winning strategies, Bisgaard suggests, require banks and payment providers to decide where they truly need control, and where they can rely on partners, whether through modern processing stacks, analytics layers, or modular services.
Banking Is Becoming a Utility Layer
Bisgaard believes the structure of financial services is shifting from institution-centric to customer-centric, and payments is the clearest place to watch it happen. In that future, customers assemble financial services from specialists. “I’ll be buying cards from the specialist card provider, mortgages from the specialist mortgage provider, and cross-border transaction services from a specialist provider,” Bisgaard says. The strategic battleground becomes the customer interface. People won’t want seven apps to manage seven providers, and the organization that owns the unified experience will gain outsized influence.
Banks may try to slow that unbundling, but Bisgaard is skeptical they can. “Open banking regulations are there to level the playing field,” he says. “Regulators are not there to defend the incumbents.”
Payments strategy is no longer only about launching the next product. It is about designing the invisible infrastructure of daily life: secure, traceable, auditable experiences that feel effortless. “It’s not rocket science. People need a secure, comfortable, easy way of paying and managing their finances.”
Follow Nicki Bull Bisgaard on LinkedIn or visit their website.
