In the first of this two-part blog series, we introduced Gartner® 2026 ‘Magic Quadrant™’ assessment of global banking payment hubs, highlighting Volante’s inclusion in the report, and how we believe our positioning in the Leader Quadrant reflects the continued strength of our platform and expertise, as well as our unbroken commitment to supporting payments innovation in today’s highly competitive and rapidly evolving financial landscape.

However, the Gartner report serves not only as a useful report for banks in their search for the right payments vendor, but also as a timely overview of the various radically shifting market trends currently reshaping the global financial services sector. As such, we’ll dedicate part two of this blog series to further illuminating the specific trends informing Gartner Magic Quadrant, as well as their growing impacts on both the design of banking payment platforms and the broader trajectory of payments modernization in the age of rapid and unprecedented technological advancement.

Understanding core market trends driving payments modernization

While Gartner analysts have evaluated banking payment platforms based primarily on the Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute for customers, as represented in the graphic above, it’s important to keep in mind that these capacities are inevitably tied to a thorough and active understanding not only of what banks need individually, but also of the underlying industry and market trends from which virtually all of those needs are bound to arise.

More specifically, in addition to factors like payment hub resilience and ability to address payments in a global context, the determination of a vendor’s positioning in the Magic Quadrant accounts for how their products and services align with the following four payment trends:

1. Composability

Since the introduction of real-time payment capabilities, banks have been all but required to ensure their customers can not only send and receive payments in a matter of seconds but can do so at all hours of the day, seven days a week. And while facilitating more and faster transactions is a demand most banks are happy to satisfy, offering this capability 24/7 also means working from a payment hub that can remain online and process transactions during regular maintenance activities and scheme updates.

As Gartner points out, this has resulted in many banking payment platforms being built and/or redesigned around composability, as well as the broader abandonment of traditional monolithic payments infrastructure in favor of a microservices-based architecture, providing banks with the flexibility to treat individual components within their systems without disrupting the others, including real-time payment processing. In fact, composability has become so essential that one could argue it now constitutes more of a non-negotiable feature of modern payment systems than a trend in the conventional sense, and that payment hubs today are increasingly judged not only on their surface-level capabilities but equally on the underlying architecture that enables those capabilities to be accessed 24/7 without interruption.

2. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

The ability to outsource payments technology to a third-party vendor has radically transformed the global financial services sector, and the impacts continue to broaden rapidly as more platforms integrate a SaaS model to offer cloud-based payment processing solutions. More specifically, by providing the same always-on, real-time payment capabilities leveraged by larger institutions, and without the burden of performing internal maintenance and compliance activities, platform vendors offering SaaS-based payments infrastructure are enabling an entirely new competitive paradigm, in which smaller Tier 3 and 4 banks have the potential to capture more attention and market share than ever before.

3. ISO 20022

Given that ISO 20022 messaging has now solidified itself as the standard format for enabling interoperability between payment schemes, support for ISO 20022-native processing is another virtually non-negotiable feature of competitive banking payment platforms. However, what seems to be setting payment hubs apart in today’s landscape is the ability to leverage the standard to provide increasingly intuitive and efficient low/no-code formatting solutions that banks can align with their own needs and strategies.

As Gartner analysts put it, “not only does this reduce the risk of not meeting payment scheme updates, but it also allows financial institutions to add additional optional data to messages without relying on a vendor making software changes.”

4. AI

Finally, it’s no secret that the importance and impacts of AI integration into payment systems are growing by the day. In addition to well-established fraud detection and prevention use cases, we believe Gartner notes the rising use of AI co-pilots for operations support, automated payment repair based on historical transaction data, and even contextually intelligent payments routing tools capable of adjusting schemes in real-time to process transactions using the fastest, lowest-cost option available.

However, Gartner also points out that although AI adoption appears to be speeding up and expanding, it has so far remained inconsistent across the payments vendor landscape. For example, while the Volante Payment Platform has already incorporated a wide range of AI-powered tools across API, Payments-as-a-Service (PaaS), ISO 20022, and real-time payment applications, other vendors positioned in the Leader quadrant are only beginning to incorporate AI tools into their products and services.

The Importance of a deeply informed, strategic, and active vendor selection process in an evolving landscape

In providing additional context to its assessment of banking payment hubs, we feel Gartner has highlighted a crucial point of friction emerging today between the criticality of resilient payment processing infrastructure and the visibility of differentiating payment capabilities across financial institutions. Put simply, it’s now easier than ever for customers to compare banks based on the capabilities they do or don’t support, which adds another layer of pressure to the decision-making process. “The success or failure of the banking payment hub platform selection can be very visible.”

Moreover, in a modern financial landscape increasingly defined by near-constant technological evolution and innovation, aligning payment capabilities solely with today’s market trends carries the risk of not aligning with tomorrow’s trends. In our view, this suggests that banks and CIOs need to be uniquely targeted in establishing a vendor selection process that is both informed by their existing payment processing needs and strategic goals—i.e., identifying the current and specific role of payments in supporting growth and customer acquisition initiatives—and that prioritizes ongoing flexibility and innovation based on deep and active market expertise.

In other words, while individual requirements will necessarily vary based on the institution, they should also be expected to evolve regularly within the institution based on the movement of trends, and more specifically, how those trends relate to the bank’s positioning in the market. And from our perspective, this indicates that the right vendor for almost any institution will be one whose capabilities move with and not after the evolution of technology and customer preferences, and that operates with the understanding that payments infrastructure must now be viewed not as a static but a living system.

Read the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Banking Payment Hub Platforms here.

Disclaimer: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Banking Payment Hub Platforms, Peter Ryan, Debbie Buckland, 20 January 2026

Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product, or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from VOLANTE TECHNOLOGIES INC-US-NJ.

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