Insights

In the agentic payments era, are financial firms and retailers looking in the same direction?

“Agentic payments” — where an AI agent handles everything from product discovery to checkout — is becoming reality. Fast, easy, secure payment is no longer a differentiator; it is the default. According to a KPMG International survey of 500 global financial firms and 500 retail/consumer-goods companies, the two industries are heading toward the same destination — “payment modernization” — but are looking at different points along the way.

Mismatched problem definitions. Retail and consumer-goods firms cite the biggest challenges as fragmented legacy infrastructure (48%) and limited consumer-data access (54%). Financial firms cite these at just 27% and 35% respectively — a roughly 20-percentage-point perception gap. There is also a mismatch in the opposite direction: cross-border payments (40%) and cost/fee transparency (56%), which financial firms emphasize, are lower priorities for retailers (4% and 22% respectively).

Mismatch in payment methods. The temperature gap is starkest in the payment methods to be adopted next.

Retailers feel that tokenized payments (+38ppt), BNPL (+25ppt), and stored wallets (+24ppt) are still underdeveloped. By contrast, biometrics (-64ppt), in-app payments (-48ppt), and real-time cross-border payments (-39ppt) — which financial firms have invested in heavily — rank far lower among retailers' priorities. Financial supply and retail demand point in opposite directions.

Ecosystem building is the battlefield. 51% of financial firms said “the future winner of the payments industry will be whoever builds the ecosystem.” 47% of retail and consumer-goods companies expect to partner with multiple payment-service providers within the next five years. Partnerships spanning fintechs, technology providers, and even regulators — beyond bilateral cooperation — themselves become competitiveness.

M&A implications. This structure points to three M&A directions in payments. First, financial firms are likely to acquire targets with tokenization, BNPL, and wallet capabilities to close the supply-demand mismatch. Second, retail and consumer-goods companies will expand strategic investment in fintech bolt-ons or payment-data analytics solutions to modernize their own payment infrastructure and implement embedded finance. Third, in an ecosystem-driven competition, “capability combinations” — not “standalone capabilities” — determine valuation. Demand for deal sourcing and positioning advisory at the finance–retail intersection will rise along this trend.