2026 FinTech Predictions: Insights from Alex Taylor of Mangopay

We spoke with Alex Taylor, UK Managing Director at Mangopay, the wallet-first infrastructure for multi-party payment flows. With over a decade supporting platform businesses scale into enterprise operations, Alex shares their perspective on the forces reshaping financial services in 2026.

Over to you Alex - my questions are in bold:

What's the biggest shift you expect across financial services in 2026?

In 2026, agentic AI will begin reshaping the dynamics between platforms, users and the payment flows that sit behind them. Rather than customers initiating every action, machine agents will increasingly orchestrate journeys on their behalf. And as these agents begin to influence buying decisions, businesses may face new acquisition costs and will need to optimise for AI-driven referral economics.

Secondly, we're expecting to see stablecoins playing a larger role in global transfers and programmable use cases, where money can trigger actions or settlements automatically based on coded logic. This shift could unlock real-time movement of value across borders without the friction of legacy rails.

Finally, we're expecting to see continued merging between fintech and other industries. We are seeing this with non-financial platforms building financial features into their experiences - with e-commerce, SaaS, travel on-demand services, and more embedding fintech services to drive retention, monetisation, and loyalty. In the crypto space for example, most players already see themselves as fintechs.

What customer behaviours or expectations will most challenge platforms and financial service providers?

The inescapable rise of in-app wallets. With consumers' demand for seamless, flexible payments growing fast, especially among younger users, platforms will start to see in-app wallets not as a nice-to-have, but as a business-critical tool for driving loyalty, boosting engagement, and staying competitive in the evolving digital economy. Early adopters will benefit hugely from this shift, but those that don't move quickly in 2026 may lose market share quickly, and struggle to recapture it.

As well as consumers paying with wallets, we must also consider the growing number of users who rely on platforms to earn income, such as gig workers, creators, and accommodation hosts. These groups all want faster access to their income and expect their earnings to be available quickly, with transparent settlement and minimal effort on their part, including automated reconciliation and fast liquidity flows.

What risks or blind spots do you think the industry is underestimating as we move into 2026?

In 2026, the rise of autonomous and semi-autonomous AI will reshape the landscape of online fraud. Fraud was already sophisticated, but the new wave of tools means it no longer needs to be. The barrier to entry is falling, and fraudsters, skilled or not, can now scale attacks faster and more cheaply than before. This creates a dual challenge for platforms – automated, high-volume attacks on one side and precise, single-attempt intrusions on the other. Both will rise in parallel.

The data already points to this shift. In 2025, Nethone saw fraud inquiries exceed 525 million a month, nearly 50% up year-on-year, with pressure no longer tied to seasonal peaks. Fraud has become a constant presence, and autonomous tools will only amplify that trend.

This means every user account is now constantly being tested. Attackers will try leaked or stolen credentials across every platform they can find, turning credential stuffing into a year-round baseline rather than a post-breach spike. With AI lowering the cost to operate, fraud will become less about sophistication and more about volume.

In 2026, platforms will need more adaptive risk systems, with models capable of reading both the noisy automation and the subtle, high-fidelity impersonation attempts that autonomous AI will enable.

If you were advising your leadership team today, what strategic priority should they focus on to stay competitive in 2026 and beyond?

The biggest strategic priority for us has always been to listen to and learn from the ecosystem made up of partners and clients, and to use those insights to further develop our capabilities for multi-party payment flows.

We've spent over a decade supporting platform businesses and helping many of them to scale into full enterprise operations, and we're now taking these businesses to new heights by ensuring they have the flexibility they need to move money and maintain control over the full payments cycle. For enterprise-level businesses, payment flows have to add value, not just be seen as a cost line.

Our second area of focus will be about reinforcing our value proposition in the crypto space. Conversations with crypto and blockchain platforms have revealed they face the same fundamental challenges as traditional marketplaces when collecting and distributing funds and that our wallet-first payments infrastructure resonates because it lets them unify flows within a single, trusted framework. This will be a strategic priority area for us into 2026.

And finally, we will be making sure platforms outside Europe, especially from the US, are aware that if they want to enter a fragmented, heavily-regulated region, we are here to help them navigate the process. We have the experience in multi-party payments and the know-how when it comes to regulations and user preferences to support complex new market entry for a range of platform businesses.

Thank you Alex! You can connect with Alex on their LinkedIn Profile and find out more about the company at https://mangopay.com.