eCommerce Growth Makes Tokenized Checkout the Baseline

Digital wallets were on issuers’ roadmaps, but Apple Pay’s exponential adoption and eCommerce scale reset payment expectations, making frictionless, tokenized payments the standard and laying the foundation for agentic commerce.

From Wallet Readiness to Apple Pay as the Norm

Over the past five years, digital wallets have shifted from early adoption to mass deployment. Apple Pay acted as the primary catalyst for both issuer enablement and cardholder usage.

Issuers progressively enabled Apple Pay as it rolled out across new markets, laying the groundwork for transactions to scale. With the onset of COVID-19, wallet-based transaction volumes accelerated sharply, and Apple Pay captured a disproportionate share. For many consumers, the wallet became the preferred payment method rather than a secondary option.

While the pandemic served as a short-term accelerator, the momentum behind digital wallets proved both structural and sustained. Adoption outpaced expectations because Apple Pay introduced a fundamentally different and unified experience. The wallet reset user expectations by delivering a frictionless experience across in-store shopping and eCommerce. Its combination of tokenization and biometric authentication shifted payment authentication away from merchants and issuers and into the wallet layer, enabling transactions to scale without added complexity.

The eCommerce Acceleration No Forecast Fully Anticipated

At the same time, the speed and depth of the growth in eCommerce exceeded most expectations. What initially appeared to be a temporary spike caused by the pandemic became a permanent shift in purchasing behavior. Tokenized transactions moved from an edge case to the default, positioning tokenization as a core payment rail. The rapid expansion of eCommerce amplified long-standing tensions between fraud prevention, user experience and checkout conversion, forcing the industry to rebalance security and user experience. Apple Pay addressed these challenges early, establishing a benchmark the broader ecosystem has been trying to match ever since.

Today, eCommerce payment flows are increasingly designed to strike the right balance between security and frictionless experience. Secure enrollment, minimal user effort and authentication delegated to the payment device are now baseline expectations rather than differentiators. New solutions continue to emerge on top of tokenization rails, from Click to Pay to network- and wallet-led initiatives such as Paze, as well as payment passkeys aiming to deliver consistent experience across merchants and consumers with biometric authentication.

From Frictionless Wallets to Agentic Commerce

Taken together, the last five years confirmed the frictionless user experience as a strategic necessity. With trusted rails firmly in place, the industry is entering a natural next phase on the path to agentic commerce. Initiatives such as Google’s Agent Payments Protocol or Open AI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol are essential to standardize and support the fast scaling of this new payment flow where shopping agents will initiate payments. Tokenization and biometric authentication are playing a central role in this foundational infrastructure.

The past year provided a vivid demonstration of how unforeseen events can change the landscape almost overnight. Even so, there can be little doubt that agentic commerce will represent the next defining force in the payment ecosystem — and add further momentum to the shift toward tokenization.