The ISO 20022 migration in 2025 laid the foundation for the next phase of payments innovation by establishing a common language and introducing richer, structured, machine-readable data across the payment lifecycle. This enables far greater automation, more effective fraud risk management and enhanced customer experiences. With this foundation in place, the payments and treasury landscape is entering a decisive phase in 2026, driven by artificial intelligence, real-time data analytics, regulatory reform and emerging payment infrastructures.
Open banking APIs and agentic AI are transforming treasury operations and fraud prevention from reactive processes into intelligent, automated capabilities. Simultaneously, instant payments regulation, Verification of Payee (VoP) and real-time data are redefining trust as the key differentiator in high-speed payment ecosystems. Tokenization is reshaping how value is moved, settled and experienced across Europe. Together, these shifts signal a move from speed and compliance toward strategic control, transparency and customer-centric payment models.
AI-enhanced corporate APIs: transforming treasury automation
Open banking APIs are increasingly integrating artificial intelligence to provide instant, multi-bank cash positions, enabling real-time forecasting and automated liquidity optimization. This transformation reduces manual reconciliation and supports dynamic cash sweeps, with AI analyzing patterns for proactive adjustments and real-time liquidity stress testing.
AI-driven ‘self-driving’ treasury functions leverage APIs for seamless connectivity with ERPs, banks and payment systems, automating complex processes like FX hedging, invoice parsing and investment decisions. By 2026, this convergence with open banking will enable agentic AI to handle adaptive forecasting with minimal human input, shifting treasury teams from reactive fire-fighting to strategic value creation.
Payment APIs are increasingly bundling real-time anomaly detection, combining behavioral and transactional signals, alongside beneficiary-change monitoring and payment consistency checks. These capabilities are especially critical for faster payments and cross-border corridors where fraud attempts exploit speed. Several banks and fintech risk platforms are doubling down on AI for scam and fraud detection, with partnerships forming to combine comprehensive behavioral and transactional intelligence.
How Capco helps: We bring broad, hands-on experience in designing and implementing AI-driven, API-enabled solutions that transform treasury, liquidity and payment risk capabilities for our clients. Our approach combines technical architecture with business process redesign to unlock measurable ROI from treasury automation.
Banks' most effective defense against fraud: real-time data
By 2026, the primary challenge in expanding instant payments will shift from execution speed to fraud prevention. Even if banks execute transactions in seconds, the same high-velocity infrastructure designed to boost efficiency can create new exposure points. Duplicate payments may slip through unnoticed, and scams can be completed before warning signs surface. The faster money moves, the less time institutions have to verify funds are going to the right recipient and for the right reason.
To meet this growing risk, banks must evolve beyond basic automation and adopt intelligent, AI-enabled controls. Having fast, accurate, transaction-level data is essential. Institutions need to capture and assess rich information, leveraging the structured data from ISO 20022 migration (about every payment and its initiator), ensuring insights are instantly accessible when needed. When built into flexible payment orchestration platforms and VoP frameworks, this capability shifts fraud management from reactive investigation to preventive action, spotting anomalies early, blocking repeat attempts and stopping fraudulent transfers before settlement.
Banks that balance cost, speed, security and authentication will be better positioned to thrive in real-time payment ecosystems, meeting customer expectations while protecting both trust and brand reputation.
How Capco helps: We combine deep cash management expertise with advanced data and analytics capabilities to help banks design, build and scale secure, real-time payment and liquidity solutions. By aligning data architecture, technology platforms and operating models, we help banks balance speed, security and cost, protecting trust while enabling growth across instant payments and cash management services.
Tokenization: the future of payment settlement
Tokenization is driving the future of payments by enabling instant, programmable and always-available movement of fiat money, with transformative potential to enhance payment efficiency, liquidity management and settlement models for both domestic and cross-border flows. It encompasses digital representations of fiat currency on distributed ledger technology, including central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), fiat-backed stablecoins and tokenized commercial bank deposits. This represents a pivotal shift where money itself settles in real time, rather than merely exchanging payment messages.
This innovation delivers profound benefits: near-instant settlements compared to multi-day processing, round-the-clock 24/7/365 operations, lower costs through minimizing intermediaries and reconciliations, full end-to-end transaction visibility for greater transparency and streamlined global payments. High-impact applications span cross-border payments and liquidity optimization, on-chain settlements for digital assets, intraday cash management in corporate treasury and embedded finance models.
Essential considerations for tokenization adoption include aligning with regulatory and compliance standards, ensuring interoperability with legacy payment systems, strengthening operational resilience and digital custody capabilities and addressing liquidity alongside balance-sheet effects. Organizations should focus on high-value, low-risk use cases, initiate pilots with key ecosystem partners, develop expertise in digital settlement and custody and engage proactively with regulators from the outset.
Tokenization is evolving from experimental phases to widespread adoption. Proactive preparation will empower organizations to drive operational efficiencies, foster innovative business models and maintain competitive advantage amid the shifting landscape of payment infrastructure.
How Capco helps: With deep expertise in payments infrastructure and tokenization, we help clients design and roll out tokenized products, stablecoin-based flows and CBDC-enabled use cases that enable real-time, 24/7 settlement. We support banks and corporates from strategy to pilot implementation and scaled deployment.
PSD3 in 2026: what banks and corporate customers can expect
The introduction of the Payment Services Directive 3 (PSD3) alongside the Payment Services Regulation (PSR), marks a significant evolution in the EU payments framework. Expected to come into effect from 2026 onwards, these reforms address shortcomings of PSD2 while reflecting the realities of digital payments, open banking maturity and rising fraud risks.
For banks, PSD3 brings greater regulatory clarity but also higher expectations. Supervisory rules will be more harmonized across the EU, reducing national interpretation variations while increasing institutional accountability. A key focus is enhanced fraud prevention, including mandatory payee verification and strengthened Strong Customer Authentication (SCA). Banks will face clearer liability rules, requiring robust controls, improved customer communication and continued investment in technology and cybersecurity.
PSD3 reinforces open banking by improving API reliability and performance while strengthening customer consent management frameworks. This pushes banks to treat data-sharing capabilities not merely as compliance obligations, but as core components of their corporate value proposition and competitive differentiation.
For corporate customers, the changes are largely positive. PSD3 is expected to deliver stronger protection against payment fraud and impersonation risks, greater transparency on payment status and charges and improved access to innovative payment and cash-management solutions through open banking ecosystems.
However, corporates will also need to adapt. Enhanced security measures and evolved data-sharing models may require updates to internal processes, treasury systems and governance arrangements, particularly where third-party providers are involved.
Overall, PSD3 represents a shift from a compliance-driven payments regulation to a more operationally embedded, customer-centric framework. Banks that prepare early and engage proactively with corporate clients will be best positioned to turn regulatory change into competitive advantage as the 2026 timeline approaches.
How Capco helps: Building on our extensive PSD2 experience, Capco is well-positioned to work with banks and corporate clients in workshop mode to perform comprehensive PSD3 readiness impact assessments. The outcome of this exercise gives clients a clear view of initiatives required to become PSD3 compliant and, if desired, the actions to become a frontrunner in applying the improvements described in the PSD3 directive.
Instant payments and Verification of Payee: from speed to trust
Instant payments have fundamentally transformed the payments landscape, facilitating money movement in seconds, 24/7, without settlement delay. Simultaneously, fraud has grown more sophisticated, exploiting urgency and human error with increasing effectiveness.
Verification of Payee (VoP) addresses this challenge directly. It was introduced to fight payment fraud by harmonizing fraud prevention at EU level and strengthen consumer protection by offering accurate, verified payment data.
Since October 2025, payment service providers (PSPs) operating in the Eurozone must confirm the payee's name and account number prior to executing SEPA credit transfers. By July 2027, PSPs operating in non-Euro areas will also need to comply, adhering to the broader Instant Payments Regulation (IPR) rollout. Given the tight regulatory timeframes on instant payments screening, PSPs must keep pace with the evolving payment landscape, identifying risks, verifying identity and checking account details in real time.
VoP introduces a real-time check between beneficiary details and the account information provided by the payer, adding significant value for banks beyond compliance. Fraud and operational costs reduce substantially, as VoP minimizes misdirected payments and therefore reduces fraud losses and payment investigations. Banks can proactively warn customers and demonstrate duty of care, stepping up as trusted financial partners. VoP is also reshaping liability and responsibility discussions, shifting the conversation from ‘who reimburses’ to ‘who failed to prevent’.
The challenges in delivering effective VoP lie in data quality (with accurate name and account matching being fundamental), managing false positives (which impact customer confidence), maintaining positive customer experience (with understandable security controls), dependency on legacy infrastructure (as real-time validation requires modern, API-driven, ISO 20022-native platforms) and ensuring cross-channel consistency across retail and corporate banking.
In 2026, differentiation will come from how safely and transparently instant payments are delivered. Consider VoP as a seatbelt for real-time payments: rarely noticed when it works, but decisive when it fails. Banks who embed VoP as a core capability, supported by strong data governance and intelligent decision-making, will not only reduce fraud risk but also set a new standard for trust in real-time payments.
How Capco helps: Capco has helped banks translate VoP regulation into scalable capabilities by designing end-to-end VoP operating models, aligning data standards with ISO 20022, integrating VoP into instant payment flows and balancing fraud prevention with customer experience. We bring proven methodologies from regulatory gap assessment through to implementation and optimization.
Conclusion: from compliance to strategic transformation
The convergence of AI, real-time payments, tokenization and regulatory reform requires coordinated transformation across technology, operations and risk management. At Capco, we partner with banks and corporates to navigate this complexity by:
- Prioritizing intelligently: using our payments transformation framework to sequence AI, VoP and tokenization investments based on regulatory timelines and measurable business impact
- Implementing pragmatically: drawing on our deep experience in payment modernization to navigate legacy constraints while building API-first, cloud-enabled capabilities that scale
- Delivering measurably: establishing clear KPIs around fraud reduction, cost savings, operational efficiency and corporate client satisfaction, ensuring that transformation drives tangible value.
Institutions that will thrive in 2026 are moving beyond compliance checklists to strategic transformation. We help clients make that shift, from PSD3 gap assessment to VoP implementation, AI-enabled treasury automation and tokenization pilots.