Publié le 04 mai 2026
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.
Partnering for payment modernization - report 2026: How leading banks and retailers are unlocking the future of payments
Partnering for payment modernization - executive summery report 2026: How leading banks and retailers are unlocking the future of payments.
What our people have to say
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.
Banking: In the current economic and financial climate banks are faced with a multitude of business challenges that need to be addressed.
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