Consult Hyperion’s annual Live Five is our opportunity to pause, look back at the past year, and distill what we see emerging next across payments, digital identity and AI. It is informed by our work with clients, regulators, schemes, and technology providers, as well as our hands on involvement in standards, testing and assurance.
The Live Five 2026 reflects a clear and growing trend with focus on things such as post quantum security and sovereignty, the convergence of identity and payments within transit sector, the rise of tokenized money, the emergence of agentic commerce and the need for accountable and trustworthy AI. The themes that follow set the context for how these forces are shaping the industry and why they will matter in the year ahead.
1. Planning for a post-quantum, sovereign, and resilient payments world.
By Gary Munro, VP of Payments.
Quantum computing is moving from theory toward practical impact, and the payments and digital identity ecosystem needs to prepare long before real vulnerabilities appear. Post-quantum cryptography is not just a new set of algorithms. It represents a redesign of how the industry builds cryptographic agility, operational continuity, and sovereign control into the payment and identity stacks.
Around the world, governments and schemes are already thinking about sovereignty and resilience. They want to ensure that critical payments and identity infrastructure can operate securely, even if networks fragment or regions become disconnected. This requires full inventories of cryptographic assets, long term migration plans, updated trust models, and new testing programs that make sure systems remain interoperable while still giving national authorities the control they need.
Consult Hyperion’s role: helping card networks, issuers, regulators, and infrastructure providers plan, test, and migrate to architectures that are ready for PQC and aligned with sovereignty and resilience goals. Our work ensures payment and identity systems remain trusted, operational, and secure in a post-quantum future.
2. Digital Identity, transit, and beyond.
By Simon Laker, VP of Smart Mobility.
Transit continues to lead the way in how identity and payments converge. Account-based ticketing, open-loop acceptance, and verified digital credentials are creating travel experiences that are faster, simpler and all the while preserving privacy. What is happening in transit is now influencing how retail, mobility, and even border processes think about digital trust.
The next phase is the digital travel credential. Credentials that can prove identity, eligibility, and payment capability across transit, retail, and potentially government services whilst preserving the traveler’s privacy. Delivering this requires systems that read only the data they need, maintain high transaction speeds, and support reliable inspection and validation. It also reduces the need for agencies to issue specific closed-loop concession cards. Open-loop systems, combined with digital identity, allow benefits and entitlements to live within a trusted credential rather than a dedicated piece of plastic – ultimately saving transit agency money.
Consult Hyperion’s role: drawing on decades of experience in fare collection, EMV, reader standards, and identity systems, we help clients design, test, and certify these connected ecosystems. This includes privacy models, inspection approaches, and digital travel credentials that support account-to-account payments or even CBDC-linked accounts.
3. Digital currency, stablecoins, and the rise of tokenized money.
By Raphael Guilley. SVP of Consulting.
Digital currencies are shifting from experimentation into mainstream adoption. Central banks are advancing CBDC programs. Commercial banks are exploring tokenized deposits. Stablecoin issuers are building for scale. All of this points toward a broader requirement for tokenization across the financial sector, not just for digital currency but for value itself.
Digital currencies will not exist in isolation. They will form part of a tokenized ecosystem that includes CBDCs, stablecoins, bank-issued deposits, and programmable value that must behave consistently across payment networks. This makes interoperability and assurance critical. Privacy, liquidity, settlement finality, and regulatory alignment all need to be validated before tokenized money can be trusted at scale.
Consult Hyperion’s role: we have spent years advising central banks, issuers, and card networks on the design, testing, and evaluation of CBDC systems. This work gives us a deep understanding of how digital currency should be issued, governed, and trusted. That experience now underpins our broader tokenization guidance, helping clients ensure that digital value behaves safely, consistently, and in line with regulatory expectations across jurisdictions.
4. The road to agentic commerce: trust, standards, and certification.
By Howard Hall, VP of Growth.
Agentic commerce is emerging as one of the most significant shifts in how transactions will be conducted. Intelligent agents will compare offers, negotiate on behalf of users, and execute payments automatically. The opportunity is enormous, but only if the industry builds the right trust foundations.
For agentic systems to function safely, clear rules are needed around who or what can act for a consumer or a business, what authority is delegated, and how accountability is enforced when something goes wrong. This demands global trust frameworks, industry standards, and certification programs that validate identity, intent, and compliance in machine-driven transactions. Without these guardrails, agentic commerce risks fragmentation, fraud, and lack of transparency.
At the same time, there is significant tension between how today’s digital ecosystem authenticates, monitors, and monetizes consumer interactions and the ways agentic AI proposes to operate. End-user license agreements, anti-fraud controls, consent models, and commercial data-driven business models all assume a human decision-maker at the point of interaction. These structures were not built for autonomous agents acting independently on behalf of users and may become meaningful roadblocks to the agentic future unless re-engineered.
Consult Hyperion’s role: our deep experience at the intersection of identity, delegation, payments, regulation, and liability equips us to engage with the full complexity that agentic AI commerce implies and to help clients navigate, test, and deploy trustworthy agentic systems in the real world.
5. After the AI bubble: authenticity, privacy, and accountability.
By Gilad Rosner, Principle.
The rapid rise of general-purpose AI has generated enormous hype — and much of the current bubble stems from deploying these broad, fast-evolving systems without fully understanding their limits, risks, or operational requirements. Many organizations are experimenting with general models without sufficient training, internal governance, or reliable metrics to assess their real-world performance. The speed at which these systems update introduces instability, while global AI regulation remains fluid and varies significantly across jurisdictions. Businesses may feel compelled to adopt AI to stay competitive, but critical evaluation and careful, governed implementation are essential to avoid costly mistakes.
In contrast, special-purpose AI systems designed, trained, and constrained for well-defined tasks such as fraud detection, risk scoring, identity verification, or payment orchestration is where sustainable value will emerge. These systems can be evaluated, certified, and monitored against clear domain-specific criteria. As AI becomes embedded in digital identity, payments, and customer journeys, the winners will be the systems that can prove that their content, decisions, and automated actions are authentic, privacy-preserving, auditable, and accountable.
Success will require stronger mechanisms for provenance, model transparency, data minimization, explain ability, and evidence of compliance. Whether the output is an automated payment, a risk decision, or an identity assertion, trust will hinge on the ability to demonstrate how the system reached the result and that appropriate controls were applied.
Consult Hyperion’s role: building on our expertise in assurance, testing, and certification, we help clients determine whether AI-enabled systems, particularly those used in regulated domains such as payments and identity meet the standards required for safety, privacy, and accountability. Our approach ensures that automation remains responsible, explainable, and trusted, giving organizations the governance and evidence needed to deploy AI with confidence.
