Merchant Payment Providers

The newest edition of this Wave opens by retiring the market's oldest boast: "Mercifully, the days when 'uptime' was a differentiating feature of payment gateway or processor capabilities are behind us." The Forrester Wave: Merchant Payment Providers, Q1 2026, scores nine vendors on twenty four criteria, and capability is no longer the question. Pace, performance, and partnership are.

The report under the name: The Forrester Wave: Merchant Payment Providers, Q1 2026

Principal analyst Lily Varon announced the evaluation on March 5, 2026, and her three insights read like a risk register for merchants holding renewals.

First, ownership churn. Four of the nine evaluated vendors recently went through leadership or ownership changes, and Varon's warning is direct: card acquiring is "a famously razor-thin margin business," new owners chase profit, and merchants may see shifts in pricing, packaging, account management, and strategic direction.

Second, pace. Vendors vary dramatically in how quickly they adopt industry innovation and regulatory changes. "Some providers move fast and experiment aggressively." Others take the deliberate, risk-managed path.

Third, the conclusion: since most vendors clear the baseline, payment methods, countries, use cases, settlement options, the differentiators that remain are innovation speed, payment performance optimization, and the quality of the connection between merchant teams and provider product teams.

Three Leaders, three versions of the same race

Stripe announced a Leader placement with the highest possible scores in more criteria than any other provider, and one fact that spans two scorecards: it is the only company named a Leader in both the Recurring Billing Solutions Wave, Q1 2025, and this one.

The performance receipts are the strongest part of the citation: a 2.5 percentage point acceptance increase for Gatwick Airport, a one point authorization rate increase for FICO, and for the telehealth company Ro, a two percent authorization rate gain with three percent fewer disputes. In a razor-thin margin business, those decimal points are the product.

Adyen took a Leader placement with the highest possible scores in fourteen criteria, including Innovation, Roadmap, and Data, Analytics, and Insights. Forrester's line on its architecture: Adyen's "single platform, one integration" model "triggered a lasting industry shift," and its build-over-buy ethos does not slow it, it is "still often first to market with new features."

Checkout.com completed the announced Leaders, the only vendor with the highest possible score in the Merchant Experience criterion, cited for "getting maximum performance from the payment methods it supports," its US expansion, and its merchant acquirer limited purpose bank charter.

Three Leaders, one race, three strategies. Stripe bets on breadth and cross-category compounding. Adyen bets on the integrated platform and first-to-market pace. Checkout.com bets on merchant intimacy and performance within the methods it runs.

The churn warning the report issued

The four-of-nine ownership change statistic deserves to be the article's center, because it is the scorecard's most actionable sentence. Payment providers are being bought, merged, and restructured while the evaluation is live, and a tier earned under one owner is a contract inherited by the next.

The report's own framing gives the buyer the script: ask every shortlisted vendor what changed in its ownership, its leadership, and its margin targets since the evaluation, because the answer changes the renewal math even when the tier does not.

The prior editions tell the same story at different tempos. In Q1 2024 the field ran thirteen vendors, including the legacy acquirers and processors, JPMorgan Chase, Nuvei, Global Payments, Worldpay, Fiserv, PayPal, ACI Worldwide, and Visa, which sat as a Contender on its Cybersource and Authorize.net offerings, global footprint, and acquirer agnosticism. In Q2 2022, eleven vendors, Adyen led with the highest Current Offering score and top marks in fifteen sub-criteria.

The field's arithmetic is the market's arithmetic. Thirteen vendors in 2024, nine in 2026, and the departed names are mostly the legacy processors whose capabilities cleared the baseline but whose pace did not. The consolidation Varon describes is not just ownership churn. It is the baseline capability bar absorbing vendors that were once full competitors, and the scorecard shrinking to the firms that differentiate after capability stopped mattering.

The honest limits of a performance scorecard

Performance optimization is the edition's differentiator, and performance numbers are the hardest claims to verify. Authorization rate gains of one or two points are real money, and they are also the vendor's chosen numbers. The scorecard grades the capability; the proof must come from your own processing patterns.

There is also the cross-category note. Stripe's dual Leader status across recurring billing and merchant payments is a signal that the payment stack is collapsing into fewer vendors, which is convenient for procurement and concentrating for risk. The scorecard cannot tell you which of those you are buying.

One more nuance the report implies but does not settle: the three Leaders compete on different definitions of performance. Stripe's case studies are acceptance and authorization gains. Adyen's are platform breadth and first-to-market features. Checkout.com's is merchant experience and performance inside the methods it supports. A merchant optimizing for authorization rates on its specific mix is not comparing three equals, and the tier column, useful as it is, flattens exactly the difference the report says matters most.

Three questions for the renewal season

What changed in the vendor's ownership since the scorecard? Four of nine changed hands recently. Ask directly, and price the answer: new owners change packaging, pricing, and account teams.

What are the performance numbers on your payment mix, not the vendor's case studies? Ask for an authorization rate and dispute baseline on your own transaction patterns before signing, with the improvement target in the contract.

Which pace is right for your risk posture: experiment-first or risk-managed? The report says both camps exist and both clear the baseline. Match the vendor's pace to your compliance environment, because the fastest mover is not always the safest partner in regulated markets.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.

Worth reading alongside Recurring Billing Solutions: the same analyst who runs Forrester's merchant payments evaluation also runs this one, and the two scorecards are increasingly describing the same collapsing market: one vendor is now a confirmed Leader in both.