In this post, Tabitha Odom, Chair of the EMVCo Board of Managers, reflects on EMVCo’s key activities in 2025 and how its 2026 initiatives will continue to enhance seamless and secure card-based payments across the world.
Guided by the enduring principles of global interoperability and security, EMVCo is responding to the transformative technological shifts now accelerating change across the payments industry. As such, in the past 12 months, EMVCo has announced various key advancements to its specifications.
Firstly, EMVCo is evaluating how EMV® Specifications can support innovation in agentic payment solutions. To support this, it has established a dedicated Digital Identity and Payments Task Force to address the opportunities and challenges posed by digital identity technologies across emerging e-commerce use cases.
EMVCo also reached a significant milestone by outlining an open payment solution for electric vehicle (EV) charging, with this initiative aiming to help enable a seamless and secure payment experience for EV drivers worldwide.
In 2026, EMVCo will build on this momentum and continue its work to enhance seamless and secure card-based payments across the world. As always, this will be enabled by extensive collaboration with EMVCo Associates, Subscribers and industry partners, whose collective input and expertise provides invaluable insight into the strategic considerations and technical advances shaping the EMV Specifications.
Key priorities include:
- Promoting Agentic Payments Innovation
Agentic commerce is rapidly reshaping the shopping experience by enabling Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents to act on the consumer’s behalf. This has the potential to increase convenience and personalisation, but presents unique considerations for how transactions are initiated, authenticated and secured. As industry adoption and innovation accelerate, a globally interoperable and scalable approach may be beneficial in realising trusted agentic payments for consumers, merchants and issuers.
This is why EMVCo will continue to work on how EMV Specifications – including EMV 3-D Secure (3DS), EMV Payment Tokenisation and EMV Secure Remote Commerce (SRC) – can be developed and enhanced to support card-based agentic payments.
- Addressing the Use of Digital Identity Credentials in Payments
EMVCo’s Digital Identity and Payments Task Force will continue its work to guide the development of EMV Specifications and engage with industry partners to explore topics including agentic payments, digital wallets, and authentication credentials such as passkeys and verifiable credentials.
Initial priorities and activities in 2026 include the development of a schema for Digital Payment Credentials to promote interoperability and enable standardised processes for credential provisioning, request and verification.
- Towards the Next Evolution of EMV 3DS
EMVCo will engage extensively with the industry as it progresses its ongoing initiative to enhance the EMV 3DS Specifications by moving towards a specification structure and delivery process that helps to simplify solution development and deployment, while optimising testing.
EMVCo also aims to build on recent resources such as the interactive EMV 3DS White Paper, which demonstrate how 3DS technical features support key business cases. This work reflects a wider ambition to make all EMV Specifications and related documentation more accessible and easier to use.
- Promoting Simple and Convenient EV Charging Payments
Following review from EMVCo Associates and Subscribers, and two rounds of public feedback, EMVCo will publish Version 1.0 of the EV Open Payments Use Case document. The document outlines how EMV SRC technology – which simplifies the digital payment process – can be used to integrate open payments at EV charging stations supporting Plug and Charge. Publication will be followed by a detailed requirements document to enable the potential development of a supporting testing infrastructure.
- Enabling New Digital Payment Experiences with EMV SRC
As the EMV SRC Specifications have matured and industry adoption has built, new use cases such as EV charging have emerged that broaden the applications beyond e-commerce. This trend is set to continue in 2026, with EMVCo investigating the potential for EMV SRC to support interoperable, open payments for road tolling. Agentic payments are another area of interest.
To foster continued innovation as more use cases arise, EMVCo is also examining the opportunity to streamline the EMV SRC Specifications to simplify their use and aid industry understanding.
- Enhancing EMV Payment Tokenisation
Based on industry feedback, EMVCo is working to enhance the Payment Account Reference (PAR) data element within the EMV Payment Tokenisation – Technical Framework. PAR is a way to link transactions that use EMV Payment Tokens with the Primary Account Number (PAN). The updates will help to address considerations posed by scenarios such as the use of co-badged cards online, as well as supporting increased adoption of PAR across the ecosystem.
- Advancing EMV Chip Technology to Improve In-Person Payment Experiences
EMVCo will continue to advance the EMV Contact and Contactless Chip Specifications and related testing processes to support emerging payment experiences, such as the increasing popularity of biometric payment cards and TapToMobile acceptance. The phased approach to sunsetting certain EMV Contact Chip Specification features will also help to improve security and increase usability.
- Assessing the Impact of Quantum Computing
Over the past decade, EMVCo has been engaging with leading academics, independent consultants, and government bodies to chart developments in quantum computing and determine their potential impact.
While EMVCo does not expect quantum computing to pose a practical threat to the EMV infrastructure before 2040 – maybe never – it continues to monitor developments carefully and will be engaging closely with the industry in 2026 to address feedback and questions on quantum computing and post quantum cryptography.
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