The next major shift in U.S. payments may be less about how consumers tap to pay than about whether they need to think about paying at all. A new report from the Interledger Foundation argues that Americans are increasingly comfortable with subscriptions, automatic payments and digital wallets, putting pressure on financial institutions and payment providers to make the infrastructure underneath those experiences more interoperable.

The most successful payment experience may eventually be the one consumers barely notice.

That is the central idea behind The Interledger Foundation’s new report, Out of Sight, Out of Mind: What US Payment Preferences Reveal About the Future of Finance, the second installment in its Future of Digital Finance series.

The report argues that U.S. consumers are increasingly receptive to payment methods that require little or no action at the point of purchase. Cash and physical cards remain important, but subscription billing, automatic payments and mobile wallets are changing expectations around what a transaction should feel like.

The trend is not simply about convenience. It is creating a more difficult infrastructure problem underneath the interface.

A customer may see a single tap on a smartphone or an automatic subscription renewal. Behind that transaction can sit a chain involving banks, card networks, payment processors, digital wallets, merchants and, increasingly, account-to-account payment systems.

The easier payments become for consumers, the more complicated interoperability can become for the companies responsible for moving the money.

Consumers are becoming comfortable with passive payments

According to the Interledger Foundation’s research, 51% of Americans would be open to giving up cash entirely, while 35% would consider abandoning physical payment cards.

The report also found strong consumer acceptance of recurring payments. Sixty-eight percent of respondents said they love or like subscription-based payment models, including 27% who said they love them and 41% who said they like them.

Taken together, the figures point toward a behavioral shift: consumers are increasingly willing to authorize payment once and let technology handle subsequent transactions.

That does not mean cash and cards are disappearing overnight.

Federal Reserve data provides an important counterpoint. Its latest consumer-payment research found that cash, credit cards and debit cards remain the three most commonly used payment methods, with 83% of adults reporting a cash payment in the previous month, 72% using a credit card and 67% using a debit card.

The distinction is therefore between continued usage and changing expectations.

Consumers can continue using cards while simultaneously expecting those cards to disappear into a digital wallet. A physical card may remain the underlying funding instrument even when the customer simply authenticates a smartphone or smartwatch.

Worldpay’s 2026 Global Payments Report illustrates that dynamic. Digital wallets accounted for 40% of U.S. online transaction value and 17% of in-store point-of-sale value in 2025, according to the company. Globally, wallets represented 56% of e-commerce transaction value and 33% of in-store spending.

The physical card may disappear without the card ecosystem disappearing

This is an important distinction for banks and payment companies.

The transition toward digital wallets does not necessarily mean consumers are abandoning traditional payment rails. In the U.S., wallets frequently use credit and debit cards as their funding sources.

The Federal Reserve has similarly noted that cards remain dominant in U.S. retail payments, while alternative payment methods such as digital wallets and peer-to-peer applications continue to expand.

In other words, the user interface is changing faster than the underlying financial infrastructure.

That creates both an opportunity and a problem.

Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal and other digital wallets can make transactions feel almost instantaneous. But a seamless front end does not automatically mean the underlying systems are interoperable.

For businesses, that can mean integrating multiple payment providers, managing different authorization flows, handling disputes and fraud, and maintaining compatibility with the payment methods customers expect.

Merchants are also moving away from cash

The Interledger Foundation’s report suggests the change is happening on both sides of the transaction.

It found that 78% of businesses reported cash representing 50% or less of their transactions, while 10% said they accept no cash at all.

The reasons are practical. Handling physical money costs time and creates operational and fraud risks.

That creates a reinforcing cycle. As consumers become comfortable paying digitally, merchants have greater incentive to support digital-first transactions. As more merchants support those methods, consumers have less reason to carry cash.

But the move toward cashless commerce also raises questions about resilience and inclusion.

The Federal Reserve has been researching offline digital payments precisely because digital systems can become unavailable when connectivity is disrupted. Its research notes that cash remains an important fallback during crises or prolonged internet outages and explores smartphone-based offline payment mechanisms.

The lesson is that making payments invisible cannot mean making the infrastructure fragile.

Interoperability becomes the bigger issue

For Interledger Foundation President and CEO Briana Marbury, the consumer trend exposes a structural weakness in the current payments landscape.

“When they stop thinking about” payments, Marbury argues, consumers may also stop scrutinizing them.

That creates a challenge around transparency, control and interoperability.

An automatic payment is convenient, but consumers still need to know what they authorized, how to cancel it, which institution is handling the transaction and what happens when something goes wrong.

For financial institutions and payment providers, interoperability becomes increasingly important as the number of digital payment experiences expands.

The Federal Reserve is also examining alternative rails. Its research on Pay-by-Bank describes account-to-account payments as a potential alternative to cash and cards for merchants, while noting that adoption, security and consumer behavior will determine how significant the model becomes.

That suggests the next stage of payments competition will not simply be about which wallet has the best interface.

It will increasingly be about which infrastructure can connect banks, wallets, merchants and payment networks reliably while preserving security, consumer choice and regulatory compliance.

The enterprise payment stack is becoming more invisible

For enterprise teams, the implications extend beyond checkout.

Subscription businesses need reliable recurring billing. Marketplaces need to move money between multiple parties. Global platforms need cross-border payment capabilities. Financial institutions need to connect legacy systems with modern APIs and digital channels.

In each case, the customer experience is moving toward less visible payment activity while the technology stack underneath becomes more sophisticated.

That is where open and interoperable payment infrastructure could become strategically important.

The Interledger Foundation has made interoperability a central part of its mission, and its recent work on instant-payment-system design has emphasized the importance of getting technical standards and governance right early because those choices can become difficult to change later.

The broader industry is moving in the same direction, although through different architectures.

Digital wallets, instant payments, account-to-account transfers, embedded finance and recurring billing are all pushing payments away from a single moment at a physical checkout.

The eventual winner may not be the payment method consumers consciously choose.

It may be the infrastructure capable of making money move reliably without forcing consumers to think about how it happened.

Market Landscape

The U.S. payments market is changing at two speeds.

At the consumer layer, mobile wallets, subscriptions and automatic payments are making transactions increasingly frictionless. At the infrastructure layer, banks, payment processors and fintechs are still operating across a mixture of card networks, ACH, bank accounts, wallets and emerging instant-payment systems.

The Federal Reserve’s 2025 triennial payments study found that U.S. consumers and businesses made 236.6 billion noncash payments in 2024, more than triple the number recorded in 2000. Cards accounted for more than three-quarters of noncash payments by number, while ACH represented almost three-quarters by value.

That scale helps explain why payments infrastructure changes slowly. Even when consumers adopt a new interface, enormous transaction volumes continue flowing through established systems.

The strategic opportunity is therefore not necessarily to eliminate existing rails. It is to make them work together more effectively.

For banks, fintechs and merchants, the next competitive frontier is likely to include payment orchestration, digital-wallet integration, account-to-account payments, recurring billing, fraud prevention, identity and interoperability.

Top Insights

• Interledger Foundation reports rising consumer acceptance of automatic payments, signaling demand for digital experiences that reduce friction while increasing pressure on payment infrastructure.
• Digital wallets are growing without eliminating cards, as U.S. wallets often use existing credit and debit infrastructure while changing how consumers interact with payments.
• Businesses are also reducing reliance on cash, driven by handling costs and fraud concerns, reinforcing the move toward digital-first merchant experiences.
• Invisible payments create new infrastructure risks, making interoperability, transparency, dispute resolution, security and offline resilience increasingly important for financial institutions.
• The next payments battle may happen beneath the interface, as banks, fintechs and networks compete to connect wallets, accounts and merchants seamlessly.

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