New research points to a shift in consumer perception of brands that extends well beyond payments. The findings reflect changes we’ve been tracking for years.
Every interaction between a business and its customer communicates something. Marketing sells you the dream. Products determine whether those expectations are realistic. Now, increasingly, the payment experience tells customers something else: whether the business actually understands them.
That’s what struck me when I read Nuvei’s recent How America Pays research. On the surface, it’s a study of consumer behavior. Read more closely, and it reveals something much broader about how customers build trust, the information they use to evaluate brands, and ultimately the criteria in play when they decide who they buy from. Many of its findings reflect changes we’ve been tracking for years at my company, Prosper Insights & Analytics.
One customer no longer fits all
According to Nuvei’s research, 57% of Americans say the payment method they use depends on the context of the purchase. More than a third say they switch their payment method regularly. That tells us two important things.
First, there is no longer a single ‘preferred’ payment method equation that can be uniformly applied. Consumer preference changes depending on what they’re buying, how much they’re spending, the device they’re using and the level of confidence they have in the transaction itself.
Second, consumers are thinking far more deliberately about payments than they were even a few years ago. The payment experience has become an active part of the purchase decision rather than a functional step at the end of it. If consumers are factoring payments this deeply into how they buy, businesses need to think just as carefully about how they enable those purchases.
We’re seeing the same breakdown of uniformity in our own research. According to a recent Prosper Insights & Analytics survey, almost 40% of Gen-Z consumers regularly use Apple Pay, compared with fewer than 10% of Baby Boomers.
Millennials are also substantially more likely to use Buy Now, Pay Later services than older generations. The point isn’t simply that younger consumers favor different payment methods. It’s that payment behavior has become increasingly fragmented, making assumptions about the ‘average customer’ less useful than ever. Consumers increasingly expect businesses to recognize the context behind each purchase rather than treating every customer the same.
That creates a challenge for businesses, and the answer can only be found by cultivating a deeper understanding of its customer base. Consumer payment preferences are no longer static, and they aren’t universal, but they are expected. Nuvei found that 49% of consumers expect retailers to offer their preferred payment method, while 37% say they would abandon a purchase altogether if that option wasn’t available, meaning there are revenue-denting consequences to getting it wrong.
Every payment tells a story
Perhaps the most revealing findings in Nuvei’s research relate to trust. Fifty-five percent of consumers say they trust the payment method more than the retailer’s brand when buying something online. Even more telling, 38% say the payment options available make them take a retailer more seriously.
Those numbers suggest something fundamental has changed. Consumers aren’t simply using the payment experience to complete a purchase. They’re using it to form opinions about the business itself.
Think about what that means from the customer’s perspective. Payment methods have become trust signals. They communicate familiarity, security and confidence. Just as importantly, they communicate whether the retailer has designed the experience around the customer or around its own systems. Consumers increasingly infer not only whether they trust the business, but whether the business understands them.
Prosper’s data points to the same conclusion. Payment behavior is becoming increasingly contextual, influenced by age, familiarity with different technologies and financial preferences. Consumers aren’t asking for more payment options simply because more choice is better. They’re looking for experiences that reflect how they already manage their money.
This has significant implications for businesses expanding internationally. Payment behavior is shaped by local banking systems, regulation, financial habits and culture. Success in a new market increasingly depends on recognizing those differences. Localization is no longer just about language, currency or pricing. It’s about understanding how consumers expect to pay and what creates confidence at the moment of purchase.
The commercial implications are difficult to ignore. Forrester’s 2025 Customer Experience Index found that customer experience has fallen to an all-time low in North America for the fourth consecutive year. Just 7% of brands improved their customer experience scores year over year, while 25% declined, highlighting how difficult it has become for businesses to meet rising consumer expectations.
“Every retailer wants to understand its customers better,” says Yuval Ziv, President of Nuvei. “Far fewer think about whether their customers feel understood. But consumers are increasingly making that judgement through the payment experience. Checkout is one of the few moments where customer strategy, technology and execution all become visible at once.”
Agentic changes the game, but not the player expectations
The obvious question is whether these trends will survive the arrival of agentic commerce. If AI increasingly takes responsibility for completing purchases, does the payment experience still matter?
I think it does. Agents are beginning to move beyond helping consumers discover products towards completing purchases on their behalf, but while consumers may increasingly delegate the mechanics of checkout, they won’t delegate their expectations. They will still demand that purchases to happen in ways that reflect their preferences, their trust requirements and their financial habits.
In many respects, the opposite may be true. The more consumers rely on AI to act on their behalf, the more important it becomes that those systems faithfully represent how they already choose to buy.
“Agentic commerce doesn’t remove the need to understand customers; it raises the standard,” Ziv adds. “An agentic agent can only make good purchasing decisions if it understands the consumer’s preferences and has access to the right payment options. The businesses that succeed will be the ones whose payment experiences are flexible enough to reflect how different customers actually want to buy.”
If the data tells us one thing, it’s this: consumers increasingly use the payment experience to judge the businesses they buy from. Retailers shouldn’t assume that lesson stops applying as AI enters the purchasing journey. If anything, understanding customer payment preferences becomes even more important when those preferences have to be interpreted by software rather than expressed directly.
Beyond conversion
Retailers have traditionally optimized checkout to improve conversion. Nuvei’s research suggests it’s time to think just as carefully about what the payment experience communicates.
Businesses invest enormous resources trying to understand their customers. What this research suggests is that consumers are increasingly making the same assessment in reverse. They’re using the payment experience to judge whether a business understands them, whether it can be trusted and whether it’s worth buying from.
That’s a significant shift. The last click is no longer simply where transactions are completed. It’s where perceptions are formed.
Disclosure: The consumer sentiment study referenced above was conducted by my company, Prosper Insights & Analytics. This is the same dataset used by the National Retail Federation, and available from Amazon Web Services, Bloomberg, and the London Stock Exchange Group for economic benchmarking.