In today’s technology landscape, an unusual amount of infrastructure is connecting current-generation systems to what comes next. These integrative bridges offer a practical step toward a future where ACH can operate alongside stablecoin settlement, or where companies can run quantum and classical computing workloads in parallel.
They also present investment opportunities, as Christopher Miller, Lead Analyst of Emerging Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, explains in his new report, Building the Bridge to Payments: 3 Investment Trends for 2026 and Beyond. Fintech investment is consolidating around infrastructure rather than interfaces, with capital flowing toward revenue-generating, enterprise-focused platforms that connect legacy systems to emerging technologies. Miller identifies three areas where this bridging framework could drive durable use cases and profitability: agentic AI, quantum computing, and stablecoins.
“If there were no uses for the technologies, then connecting to them would be unimportant,” Miller said. “We’re at the point in time where there are some uses, and so the forward-looking view is that bridging to those is getting ahead of the game. It is where the puck is going.”
The Rise of Agentic AI
Agentic commerce is emerging as a foundational architectural shift, redefining how payments are executed and increasing demand for platforms that support multi‑rail transactions, agent‑specific protocols, and autonomous operations. Early traction has been strongest in enterprise and B2B environments.
At scale, agentic systems require clearly defined parameters—and businesses are generally better positioned than consumers to define them. Companies know what they want to optimize for.
“They have processes in place to understand how many bathrooms they have, so they know how much toilet paper they need and on what cadence,” Miller said. “Businesses are best able to create the parameters that would lead to successful delegation. Agents rely on data. You have to feed them data so that they can do the things you want them to do. Businesses have spent trillions of dollars gathering that data, cataloging that data, cleansing that data, and organizing that data.”
By contrast, a profitable consumer-facing agent model has yet to emerge. Even the most optimistic forecasts from consumer AI companies do not suggest that monthly subscription fees will generate attractive near-term returns. Enterprise applications, however, are already monetizing effectively.
Quantum Computing Comes of Age
The same infrastructure-first logic is shaping the trajectory of quantum computing. Quantum computing has reached a useful stage of maturity as the number of stable, operable qubits continues to increase. Progress is gradual rather than sudden, but steady gains have brought certain use cases into the realm of plausibility that once seemed remote.
“There’s not going to be even a small shift towards quantum computing loads in 2026,” Miller said. “But it is not crazy to think that some things will be quantum computable at scale in enterprises in the relatively near-term future. The ways that quantum computers work and the types of data and skill it takes to program those quantum computers—they all have to be developed for those use cases to be realized. This is forward-looking, but it is no longer, well, that’ll be fun someday. It’s more like, well, that might be fun in in two or three years.”
One near-term implication, somewhat counterintuitively, involves criminal activity. A longstanding concern is quantum’s potential ability to break current encryption standards, exposing sensitive data. In response, some threat actors are stockpiling encrypted data today in anticipation of future decryption capabilities.
“The forward-looking crime going on that suggests that the time is right,” Miller said. “That play only makes sense if later means sometime pretty soon, and not 2350. If you steal a database today and you can’t encrypt it for 100 years, the economic value of that is minimal. This suggests that we are reaching the point in time where there will be those actual use cases. This is not speculative anymore. It is a matter of when and not if.”
Making Use of Stablecoins
Just as quantum security is gradually shaping future risk management, stablecoin rails are quietly reshaping payments. Rising acceptance has effectively stripped stablecoins of their standalone “crypto” label.
The ecosystem has moved beyond stand-alone crypto apps and wallets that can’t communicate with each other, reaching a point where stablecoins are embedded within the payments landscape. End users no longer have to choose stablecoins in B2B transactions; in many cases, the decision is made automatically.
“Businesses still have to be aware that they’re making a choice, but it is just another choice,” said Miller. “You might select between a Swift transfer and a wire transfer, but it’s just another line on the menu. Nobody talks about how we actually send the information for an ACH—it’s just a rail. That’s the point that we’re reaching here.”
Stablecoins have become one rail among many. Sometimes users actively select them; other times, the choice is made upstream through payment orchestration platforms that automatically route transactions based on cost, speed, or liquidity considerations.
“That probably is already happening, and you’re not aware of it because you’re buying on one platform and the merchant is listing on a different platform,” said Miller. “The platform has constructed a stablecoin value transfer between you and the merchant behind the scenes for whatever reasons. That’s happening.”
Like quantum security and agentic commerce, stablecoin rails reflect a broader bridging era—an ongoing shift away from surface-level user experiences and toward deep, integrative capabilities. The common thread is making next-generation technologies operationally invisible while rendering them strategically and financially transformative.
“These are things that have been out there for a while, and people are building things to connect them,” said Miller. “Now you might have to monitor not how good are stablecoins, but rather how I’m going to connect to them. It’s not how good is quantum computing, it’s how will it be integrated into my tech stack. We’re getting closer.”
