For as long as I can remember the payments industry has been focused on navigating the drivers of fraud and customer experience together with rapid mass digitization and regulation. In 2019, for example, it seemed the entire European payments landscape was focused on meeting the official implementation deadlines for the European Union’s PSD2 (Revised Payment Services Directive). Compliance was for many, the primary driver.
Roll forward seven years and today feels like a completely different era. Yes, compliance remains key, but the payments landscape has transformed into an intelligent ecosystem powered by data and automation. Business drivers such as revenue, cost reduction (fraud) and customer experience are back in focus. All of this in a world which is running ever faster and more connected.
To help organizations navigate these shifting dynamics, Arcot, the Payment Security business within Broadcom, has released the Arcot 2026 Payments Report. Drawing on data from the Arcot Network – a global payment authentication platform that helps financial institutions, merchants, and payment processors reduce fraud while transforming payment security into a revenue driver – this report analyzes 2.85 billion transactions processed across 5,500 financial institutions in 2025.
The findings are clear. Siloed legacy systems can no longer support modern e-commerce. Securing approval rates, frictionless customer experiences, and robust fraud protection now requires a unified payments ecosystem built on data-exchange and cross-industry integration.
Looking Ahead: Broadcom’s 2026 Strategic Focus for Arcot
Moving forward, Broadcom’s priorities for Arcot are tightly focused on scaling technical capability and driving optimization for our partners:
- Arcot Smart Ruleset Adoption: Arcot is accelerating the deployment of the Arcot Smart Ruleset to enable customers to reduce false-positive declines, close remaining fraud gaps, and deliver greater operational efficiency to our customers.
- Supporting Transaction Growth: We are scaling our cloud infrastructure to support the surge in RCI 06 / 05 data flows, while continuing to deliver world-class SLAs.
- Closing the Loop: We are connecting the ACS directly to the authorization host for better fraud detection and higher approval rates.
- Hardening Arcot Security Infrastructure with Frontier AI models: In 2026, Arcot began integrating frontier AI models directly into our 3DS platform to continuously analyze our codebase and reinforce our authentication security infrastructure. This proactive deployment ensures our software architecture is hardened by the same tools trusted by the world's leading technology providers.
Thank you to all of our Arcot customers for your partnership. I encourage everyone to read the full Arcot 2026 Payments Report.
I invite you to join us at the annual Arcot 3-D Secure Summits in Dublin or London this October, where we will discuss the next phase of payment intelligence live.