Why Your SMB Clients are Desperate to Deliver Frictionless Payments
By Brittany Nethers, Marketing Manager at Stax Payments
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The past few years have revealed monumental changes in the payments processing sector. The digitization of payments has exploded, resulting in nearly $50 trillion globally since 2024 in consumer digital payment spending. As a result, SMBs (small businesses) are faced with the option to diversify their payments or risk losing revenue.
Yet as payment needs expand, so does the requirement for frictionless payment experiences. It’s becoming increasingly clear that fragmented systems not only negatively impact the customer experience, but also affect internal operations and the collection of complete, accurate data.
For many businesses, this is the hurdle that stands between them and payments-led growth.
Stax Payments has identified three key macrotrends affecting the payments industry:
- The need for frictionless payment systems
- The modern transformation of the point of sale
- The use of data and AI as a strategic growth asset
So, what does this mean for your business, and how can forward-thinking companies keep up with the changing landscape?
Need to Know:
- Unified Systems Over Fragmentation: To scale by 2026, businesses must replace fragmented, manual payment processes with unified systems that eliminate operational friction and data silos.
- Modernizing Checkout Experiences: Merchants must adopt omnichannel strategies including digital wallets, biometrics, and BNPL to meet consumer demands for speed, security, and flexible payment choice.
- Data and AI as Growth Engines: Integrating payments with SaaS and agentic AI transforms transaction data into a strategic asset, allowing businesses to optimize customer experiences and automate fraud prevention.
The Push for Frictionless and Unified Payment Systems
In the modern world of ecommerce and SaaS, SMBs are expected to deliver on fast and frictionless experiences. However, this often leads to complexities for businesses without a unified payment system.
Both SMBs and ISVs (independent software vendors) working with multiple systems and outdated third-parties — or those still relying on manual processing — may find themselves losing revenue.
But what does this mean? Businesses who have multiple systems implemented, i.e., one system for in-store transactions, one system for online transactions, and another for recurring invoices, suffer from a fragmented system. This often leads to manual reconciliation, which is both tedious and prone to errors. However, when your systems are able to communicate with one another, you get a real-time view of your cash flow and create a more seamless experience for your customers.
Having a unified system is key. Many larger businesses typically use multiple systems to manage payments, which is a fragmented environment that likely impacts not just internal operational efficiency and cost, but also the customer experience.
Moreover, many SMBs lose customers with clunky checkout experiences, pages with third-party branding, and long-winded forms. Designing consistent payment experiences is key for a smooth customer journey that evokes trust and encourages payment completion.
In the modern world, the goal is to create a better experience for downstream customers. Through the whole value chain, there’s a crucial need for a frictionless experience in order to support growth.
In 2026, phasing out manual, fragmented systems is essential for SMBs looking to scale with payments. By working toward a unified system, removing unnecessary friction and siloes, merchants can deliver the seamless experience modern customers demand while removing tedious reconciliation errors.
Modernizing the Checkout: Biometrics, BNPL, and Omnichannel
Digital wallets are forecasted to see a 36% growth between 2024 and 2029, and they accounted for over 80% of digital spending in 2024, per Datos Insights. Moreover, it’s predicted that Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) users will surpass 900 million globally by 2027.
Suffice to say, businesses looking to grow and remain competitive must begin diversifying their digital payment options. For forward-thinking SMBs, ensuring real-time payments and quick processing are implemented should be a top priority in 2026. Critically, they should have optionality during checkout, both in-person and online, meeting the consumers where they’re at in terms of payment diversity.
The future of payments requires an omnichannel environment, where the customer is given a consistent experience, regardless of whether they shop online, in-store, or through mobile or social. Systems that communicate with one another create a seamless customer experience, where, for instance, they can make a mobile order then return in-store, if needed.
Businesses who implement omnichannel checkout can more readily save customer preferences, history, and maintain their cart. This gathers valuable data for your business but also increases the likelihood of repeat customers.
And while the state of payments industry today surges forward with new ways to pay, there’s also new methods of payment authentication.
Biometrics is a monumental new development in the sector, and one that merchants will quickly need to get on board with in 2026.
A study from Juniper Research estimated that biometrics authenticated over $3 trillion in payment transactions in 2025 alone. These biometrics include facial recognition and fingerprint identification, actively replacing the chip and PIN methods of verification. The rise of mobile payments like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay is a driver of this growth, as customers become more concerned about fraud and privacy and prefer a quicker checkout.
In this new wave of payments, customers are becoming very used to being able to seamlessly order a product or service without having any credit card details or personal information. Businesses must keep up to leverage payments-led growth.
The rapid rise of digital wallets and biometric authentication signals a permanent shift in consumer expectations toward speed and optionality. SMBs that integrate these technologies into a unified system will not only protect themselves against fraud but will also secure a competitive advantage in a near-cashless economy.
Harnessing Data and Agentic AI for Growth
2025 saw a major shift toward the use of agentic AI, with a global AI market size valued at USD $390.91 billion in 2025 and an expected growth to $3,497.26 billion in 2033. However, ISVs and merchants likely won’t see the full value of AI in growing their business without unified, accurate data.
AI is dependent on data, and moving forward, data will be a strategic asset for the fintech sector that drives partners and merchants to increase agility and scale faster.
As agentic AI begins to revolutionize payment processing, there’s increased potential for AI to change retail and online commerce through autonomous agents.
It’s likely that online shopping as we know it may be forever changed by the possibilities of agentic commerce. In the near future, marketing and commerce are likely to be driven by agentic engine optimization and generative engine optimization instead of search engine optimization.
In fact, over 39% of consumers — and over half of Gen Z — are using AI for product discovery. But as agentic AI quickly takes the place of SEO in ecommerce, businesses who harness the data from their payments gain a strategic asset in developing their growth strategy.
We are continuing to redefine payments as a growth opportunity, both from an ISV perspective and a merchant perspective. The data that SMBs get from payments will help them grow their business, while the value that SaaS businesses get from embedded payments will help them grow their revenues and overall performance.
Through AI optimization, integrated software becomes a core intelligence layer, deepening the relationship with the customer and making the businesses more scalable and efficient.
Embedded software combines powers of business management and payments that open more doors for ISVs and merchants. To meet the growing market, businesses and payments providers need to be maturing together, coordinating their offerings, and providing flexibility for the consumer.
Moreover, AI is now regularly being used in fraud prevention and monitoring, becoming artificial workers capable of flagging fraudulent transactions and reconciling complicated refunds – a concept that echoes Stax’s AI approach: “AI-assisted, human-approved.”
As agentic AI redefines how consumers discover and purchase products, the ability to capture unified payment data becomes a critical competitive advantage. For modern merchants, the invaluable combination of SaaS and AI-driven payments ensures they are not just reacting to market shifts but are actively optimized for the future of commerce.
The Future of Embedded Finance and Strategic Partnerships
We are transitioning from an era of standalone payments to embedded finance, where clunky checkouts are transforming into a frictionless, integrated customer experience.
By unifying the entire commerce ecosystem, businesses remove data siloes and dated third-party systems that hinder payments-led growth.
The merchants and SMBs who will succeed will adopt strategies that combine frictionless experiences, payment choice, real-time analysis, and data-driven insights while relying on their modernized payment service providers and attribution platforms.
Looking forward into 2026, businesses must weigh the costs and benefits of innovation in their systems, be it leveraging agentic AI, diversifying the payments they accept, or working with a full-stack payments provider.
Businesses must conduct thorough research, understanding their needs and goals. Instead of shopping by cost, they must consider the future and the cost falling behind more innovative, agile peers.
The modern consumer expects fast transactions, with payment options catered to their preferences. In 2026, businesses must begin optimizing for the future or risk falling behind. Going forward, payments should be treated as a customer experience, not a “nice to have.” Diversify your payment options in 2026, and unlock the value of payment data.
