Payment industry leaders discuss which changes in 2026 changed their views

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PYMNTS invited executives from companies including PayPal, Synchrony, and Paysafe to look back on the evidence that changed their views in 2026 and explain how they adjusted their decisions as Q4 approached. Several executives noted that AI’s effectiveness depends not only on the most powerful models, but also on specialized use cases, testing, controls, and internal knowledge, and that human judgment still needs to be retained during deployment. In digital payments, brick-and-mortar stores adopted account-based wallets faster than expected, while the discussion expanded from stablecoins to commercial use cases and tokenized deposits.