Payments in 2026 #5 – Agentic AI

This year firms will need to apply pre-AI regulation to their adoption of the latest technologies.

Automating customer journeys

Advancements in AI continue at pace. For example, payments firms are at the forefront of assessing how they and their consumers could use AI agents, and what the implications will be for their business models. Several legal considerations arise including authority to bind, transaction authorisation and anti-fraud controls.

However firms use AI, they will need to comply with existing regulation. In the UK this includes the Consumer Duty, the operational resilience regime and payment services regulation. In the EU this covers PSD2 and DORA, as well as the AI Act which is currently under review. The European Commission's AI Omnibus suggests delaying the start of the Act’s regime for high-risk AI systems to December 2027.

There is no equivalent of the AI Act in the UK and the regulators have said that, for now, their rulebooks are broad enough to capture AI use cases. Looking further ahead, however, the FCA has opened a review into the long-term impact of AI on retail financial services. This review, to be led by Sheldon Mills, includes asking about the implications of agentic AI over the coming decade and whether control of the customer relationship is expected to move from incumbent firms to Big Tech providers.

Date for the diary: 24 February 2026 – Deadline for contributing to the Mills Review.

This is the final blogpost in a series looking at the outlook for payments regulation in the UK and EU. Read our Payments Outlook 2026 for more.