Partnering for payment modernization

Building new partnerships

Across Belgium and the Benelux, banks and retailers are accelerating payment modernization. They respond to evolving customer needs, tougher regulations, and rising competition. As in other advanced European markets, priorities now include frictionless customer experiences, instant payments, actionable insights, and deeper ecosystem integration, moving beyond compliance and cost control.

The report details how leading banks are transforming core payment systems, adopting ISO 20022, utilizing AI for fraud detection and analytics, and exposing their infrastructures via APIs to facilitate embedded and omnichannel payment journeys. Retailers are prioritizing transaction speed, user-friendliness, and choice at checkout, while seeking richer data, improved integration, and enhanced value-added services from payment providers.

In the Benelux, these trends are reinforced by the introduction of new digital wallets like Wero and pan-European disruptors such as Revolut, which continually elevate customer expectations for usability, transparency, and instant experiences. Additional services, such as Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) for consumers and the integration of payments with tax management and inventory reconciliation for retailers, are gaining traction. Simultaneously, regulatory initiatives like the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and the anticipated PSD3 directive are reshaping the sector, requiring resilient digital infrastructure and promoting open banking.

Dave Remue

Head of Fintech | Advisory

KPMG in Belgium

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Partnering for payment modernization - report 2026

How leading banks and retailers are unlocking the future of payments

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Partnering for payment modernization

Executive summary report 2026

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What our people have to say

Payment modernization has become a strategic balancing act. Organizations must upgrade platforms and ecosystems rapidly to satisfy customer and competitor expectations, while also ensuring resilience and regulatory compliance, or risk becoming irrelevant in an increasingly competitive and regulated payments sector

Dave Remue

Head of Fintech

KPMG in Belgium

Three key actions for banks and retailers based on the survey

Prioritize partnerships

To keep pace with rapid technological change and shifting customer expectations, banks and retailers must build dynamic ecosystems that bring together partners to accelerate modernization and create competitive advantage.
Focus on the customer

Leading organizations start by deeply understanding customer needs and expectations, using those insights to rapidly shape and deliver payment options that are simple, relevant, and trusted.
Create agility

As the payment ecosystem continues to evolve, embedding agility into payment strategies, infrastructure, and operations is essential to enable future flexibility, scalability, and ongoing evolution.

Methodology

KPMG International surveyed 500 banks and 500 retailers between the 8 September and 30 October 2025, to assess their progress on payment modernization, as well as their motivations, objectives, investment expectations and challenges.

Our survey asked respondents to rate their levels of progress against a range of modernization pillars, and we used their responses to calculate their overall maturity with respondents in the top 20th percentile ranked as ‘leaders’ and those in the bottom 20th percentile ranked as ‘beginners’. In both the banking and retail sectors, the leaders tended to be those with revenues greater than US$10 billion. In the banking sector, neobanks reported the highest proportion of leaders and in the retail sector, it was e-commerce platforms that were most likely to rank as leaders.

Forty percent of retail respondents were based in Asia Pacific, 35 percent in the EMEA region and 25 percent in the Americas. The banking sample represented 36 percent of respondents from the Americas, 34 percent from the EMEA region and 31 percent from Asia Pacific.