By: Remo Giovanni-Abbondandolo, General Manager, MENA at Checkout.com

One defining shift or lesson from 2025?

A defining takeaway from 2025 has been the acceleration of tokenisation, both as a critical security layer and as a powerful enabler of faster, more intuitive payment experiences. Throughout the year, consumers increasingly demonstrated a clear preference for journeys that deliver convenience without compromising security. Tokenization emerged as the bridge between these two expectations.

We’ve seen a marked increase in the adoption of token-based payment flows, reducing fraud while enabling frictionless, one-tap customer journeys. Features like Checkout.com’s Remember Me allow shoppers to save their card details once and use them instantly across merchant networks globally. Remember Me users complete transactions in just 13 seconds, an 88% reduction in checkout time compared to non-Remember Me users. Merchants have observed up to a 7% uplift in Remember Me transactions, particularly among returning customers, with 24% of payments processed using saved Remember Me credentials. Crucially, this experience is powered by network tokenisation, ensuring sensitive card data is never exposed while improving authorisation rates and lowering fraud for merchants.

This level of convenience has quickly become a baseline expectation. Customers want to authenticate once and move effortlessly through subsequent purchases, with confidence that their data remains protected. In 2025, tokenisation proved it is no longer just a security or compliance tool, but a growth driver that strengthens trust, drives performance, and enables scalable, customer-centric payment experiences.

Ultimately, 2025 reinforced a defining principle for the future of payments: speed must be delivered without sacrificing safety. Tokenization has quietly powered both trust and convenience over the past year and will continue to shape how we design, optimize, and scale payment experiences going forward.

One bold, grounded prediction for 2026?

Across the evolution of commerce, every major milestone has focused on reducing friction and expanding access. E-commerce, mobile commerce, and social commerce have each played a defining role in that journey. 

We believe agentic commerce is the next major inflection point, set to shape 2026 and the years ahead. Agentic commerce represents a future where technology understands user intent and acts on it securely, responsibly, and within clearly defined parameters. It operates as a trusted digital assistant, recommending and executing purchases, anticipating needs, and acting autonomously on behalf of consumers. By accelerating human decision-making, agentic commerce removes friction from the buying journey. Crucially, it introduces a powerful new channel where intent becomes the currency, making listening, context, and feedback more valuable than ever.

At Checkout.com, we are investing meaningfully in agentic capabilities to build enterprise-grade, merchant-centric systems that deliver tangible commercial outcomes. In 2026, our focus is on deepening customer understanding, forming strong partnerships, and developing agentic commerce solutions that create measurable value for our merchants. We are excited about what agentic technologies mean for the future of payments and for the ecosystem we serve.