The story of corporate payments in 2026 is (kind of) writing itself. It’s a year that payments teams will build up new resilience strategies, elevate real-time liquidity to an operational reality, and focus AI where it moves the needle most: cash, collections, and exceptions.
Underpinning this story is a set of guardrails which are key to corporate compliance; verifying all counterparties before funds move, diversifying rails to remove single points of failure, and fully audited platforms to approve, manage and execute payments.
Cyber risk and operational shocks have turned payments into a continuity of business discipline. The agenda isn’t glamorous, but it is decisive: eliminate errors and fraud at the source with pre-transaction verification; encrypt and tokenize financial data so the blast radius of inevitable breaches is contained; and design payment flows that can intelligently reroute when a bank endpoint or scheme falters. It’s a full plate.
What’s more, for treasurers and other finance leaders, the KPI set is changing from passive reporting to active resilience. That means faster payment recovery time from platform outages, straight-through processing gains, and increasing the share of payers and payees verified before funds release.
AI will continue its maturation process, with the focus less on dazzle and more on measurable lift. Scenarios include cash forecasting with new model-driven overlays, guided workflows that reduce errors in complex processes without sacrificing auditability, and collections optimization for improved outreach and fund recovery from customers.
This is according to Colin Swain, Global Head of Product, Corporate Solutions at Bottomline. He says the 2026 litmus test is no longer about AI novelty. It’s about solid outcomes in forecast accuracy, payments security, DSO improvement, and cycle time reduction in exceptions, to name a few goals for the coming year.
Meanwhile, the architectural argument grows louder. Legacy payment networks and models are straining under real-time expectations and AI-era needs. Swain says programmable payments, including regulated stablecoin options, are gaining ground in narrow, high-value corporate use cases such as intra-company treasury flows. The near-term challenge now is integration, and selecting rails that win on speed, cost, security, or programmability.
On those counts, Swain sees 2026 as the year when B2B payments pivot meaningfully to verification, optionality, and the disciplined use of AI in defining corporate payments.
Verification and Optionality: The Operating System of Resilience
Fraud prevention and operational continuity converge on one foundational capability: having trusted entities on both sides of a business payment. “One of the core defenses is for corporates to be entirely clear about who they're paying, and who they're being paid by,” Swain said. “If you can guarantee, as a corporate, that I know who you’re paying and who you’re being paid by, it's a fantastic [anti-fraud] defense."
He anchors verification not as a compliance nicety but as an upstream control that prevents misdirection, vendor spoofing, and authorized push payment (APP) fraud.
A verification-first mindset pairs well with architectural optionality. Corporates that depend on a single platform, bank, or scheme inherit that party’s resilience profile (for better or worse). Swain says the best 2026 posture is to build multiple, policy-routable paths so the business can keep moving, even when an endpoint degrades. “Having options for how you fulfill payments, how you receive payments, whether that's through multiple banks or multiple payment networks, should be a key focus for corporates going into 2026,” he says.
Swain also highlights data minimization as a resilience tool. If verification establishes counterparties with confidence, then encryption and tokenization shrink the risk around sensitive data. He says corporates should “be in a position where they can encrypt and tokenize” data so that if systems are compromised, the information is useless to attackers.
In practice, that often means shifting high-risk data stewardship from brittle internal stacks to specialist platforms engineered for secure, large-scale payments management. Swain says this is why more corporates are turning to PSPs, including Bottomline.
Regulatory momentum is pulling in the same direction, albeit unevenly across markets. Where frameworks such as Confirmation of Payee and Verification of Payee advance, they build-in pre-transaction assurance. In jurisdictions moving more slowly with rulemaking, Swain expects market-led verification and payment assurance to become table stakes.
“I hope it happens, whether that's through regulation or because the market demands it,” he said, underscoring the fact that corporates can’t wait on policy to secure critical flows.
AI, From Hype to Help: Copilots for Cash, Collections, and Complexity
The AI conversation will become more precise in 2026 as finance leaders get a firmer grip on what AI does well, and the role of humans. “AI is certainly not a silver bullet for every single problem a corporate has,” he says, “and there is always cost related to things like AI.”
His implication is that AI only pays off when processes are re-engineered to surface the right signals, and leaving human decision-makers in final control of outcomes.
Cash forecasting is a proof point here. Rather than replacing treasurer judgment, for example, the better way is a model-driven overlay that challenges the plan without dictating it. “We’ve got models that provide cash predictions and show a finance manager or treasurer what their cash will look like over the next three months as an overlay,” Swain says. The value is in triangulation: two views, one decision, more confidence.
Guided operations are the next frontier. Payments and treasury processes are dense with exceptions, approvals, and reconciliations where small mistakes are costly. Here, Agentic AI agent helps navigate. “AI agents support corporate treasurers in more complex tasks,” Swain says. “It guides them through those processes. What it doesn't do yet is complete the process.” That distinction matters in regulated functions, as assistance accelerates throughput and reduces error rates while preserving audit trails and accountability.
Collections brings the commercial upside. By analyzing outreach sequences, channel mix, timing, and messaging, AI can recommend the interventions that convert faster, then coach AI agents in the moment. It begins with augmentation, not automation. Only the most standardized and low-risk segments should shift to hands-off execution first. Across these use cases, Swain’s human-in-the-loop stance is consistent.
From Outdated Messaging to Treasury-Grade Stablecoins
If resilience and AI define how corporates operate in 2026, choice of rail defines where and how fast value moves. Swain’s critique of legacy networks is unvarnished: he says today’s systems are usually “digitized versions of paper processes” and “quite archaic in the way [they’re] modeled,” making them ill-suited to real-time and programmable payments.
Messaging between institutions will not disappear, but corporates are increasingly attracted to infrastructures where the payment is code and compliance, and business logic can travel with it.
This is where blockchain-based rails and regulated stablecoins enter the frame as architecture that aligns with shifting corporate needs. “Blockchain is built from the ground up, and it's code that represents a payment and an asset,” Swain says. The treasury advantages are concrete: speed, predictability, optionality, and programmability that enables conditional release, embedded controls, and automated reconciliations.
Swain’s forecast for 2026 on this is determined and detailed. “I expect us to move out of lots of pilots to a place where corporates can engage and use blockchain and stablecoin for specific payments, mainly treasury payments,” he said.
That means intra-company transfers, liquidity positioning across entities and time zones, and selected cross-border corridors where stablecoin outperforms wires on time and cost. None of this supersedes verification or governance. Wallet policies, segregation of duties, and vetted on/off-ramps remain essential. The right way to adopt, Swain says, is to plug programmable rails into the existing policy-based platforms and let them compete on outcomes like any other rail. How this all plays out will, in many ways, set the tone for business payments in 2026, and long after.