Most merchants think disruption in payments arrives slowly. It rarely does.
According to Qi Cao, CEO of Chargeblast, the next wave of change is already underway, and it hits three pressure points at once: how transactions are initiated, how much fintech actually costs, and who Visa now holds accountable when disputes spike. These are not abstract trends. They directly affect merchant margins, processor stability, and survival for high-risk verticals.
Below are the three predictions shaping the payments landscape over the next 12 to 24 months and why merchants need to act before the fallout becomes unavoidable.
1. Agentic Commerce Will Outrun Payment Regulation
AI-driven agentic commerce represents a clean break from how payments were designed to work. AI agents can now discover products, compare prices, manage subscriptions, and execute purchases with little to no human involvement at the point of transaction.
The problem is not capability. It is governance.
Card networks and regulators built fraud rules, authentication standards, and dispute rights around human intent. Agentic systems break those assumptions. When an AI agent misinterprets a user’s preferences or executes a transaction the user did not explicitly approve, liability becomes unclear. Existing chargeback reason codes, consumer protection rules, and authentication models were never designed for autonomous buyers.
Qi Cao predicts a prolonged gap where commerce evolves faster than regulation. During this period, merchants will face new dispute scenarios that fall outside existing frameworks, forcing them to absorb losses while card schemes scramble to respond. Large platforms will build their own guardrails, insurance layers, and internal controls. Smaller merchants will not have that luxury and will feel the impact first.
Regulators will eventually intervene, but likely after high-profile failures expose consumer risk. When that happens, rules will arrive retroactively, creating compliance burdens that favor incumbents. Merchants that proactively invest in transparency, dispute prevention, and trust infrastructure now will be far better positioned than those waiting for mandates.
2. AI Will Compress Fintech Costs and Expand Merchant Margins
While AI complicates risk, it radically improves economics.
Fintech software has historically been expensive to build and maintain. Fraud tools, compliance systems, analytics platforms, and payment infrastructure required large teams and ongoing manual effort. AI changes that math. Development cycles shrink, operational overhead drops, and competition increases.
Qi Cao expects fintech pricing to compress aggressively over the next three to five years. Processing fees that sit near 2 to 3 percent today will face downward pressure as AI-driven fraud detection lowers risk premiums and automated underwriting reduces operational cost. Tools that merchants currently pay for separately will increasingly be bundled or offered at marginal cost.
For merchants, this is one of the most underappreciated margin opportunities ahead. As providers race to the bottom on pricing, those who renegotiate early or move to AI-native platforms will lock in savings before the broader market resets. The transition will be messy. Legacy providers with high fixed costs will struggle, consolidation will accelerate, and not every platform will survive. Merchants who treat fintech pricing as fixed will leave real money on the table.
3. VAMP Will Push High-Risk Merchants Toward Diversified Acquirers
Visa’s Acquirer Monitoring Program quietly changed the power structure of payments.
By shifting monitoring from individual merchants to acquirer portfolios, VAMP makes concentrated risk dangerous. A small number of high-dispute merchants can now threaten an entire acquiring relationship. For specialized high-risk processors, this is existential. Risk tolerance collapses when a single merchant can push portfolio ratios over enforcement thresholds.
Qi Cao predicts an inevitable migration. Sophisticated high-risk merchants will move away from specialized processors and toward large, diversified platforms whose low-risk volume dilutes disputes across massive portfolios. The math is simple. What breaks a small processor barely registers at scale.
This creates a brutal feedback loop. As high-risk processors terminate merchants to protect their ratios, remaining risk concentrates further, accelerating violations and merchant exits. Over the next 18 to 24 months, expect consolidation, acquisitions, and processor shutdowns. Merchants that move early will secure stable processing relationships. Those that wait risk finding themselves without viable options when underwriting tightens across the board.
What Merchants Should Do Next
These three shifts point in the same direction. Payments are becoming more automated, cheaper to run, and far less forgiving of unmanaged disputes. Merchants need to rethink how they approach chargebacks, processor selection, and cost structure before these forces fully collide.
Chargeblast helps merchants stay ahead of all three. By stopping disputes before they become chargebacks, merchants protect their processors, lower VAMP exposure, and preserve processing relationships while fintech pricing resets around them.
If disputes are creeping up or processor risk feels tighter than it used to, now is the time to act. Book a demo with Chargeblast and see how proactive dispute prevention keeps you profitable, compliant, and processing without disruption.
