In early January, my colleague Jared Rockman and I made the annual pilgrimage to the National Retail Federation’s Big Show — NRF 2025 — in New York City. Three days of ideas, innovation, and industry-defining conversations across a show floor the size of fifteen football fields.
NRF has a way of sneaking up on you quickly after the holiday break. Even with early planning, you have to stay surgically focused on your objectives to cut through the noise. This year was my first time back since before the pandemic — and it did not disappoint.
If your company operates at the intersection of SaaS, payment technology, and multi-channel commerce, NRF 2025 delivered on all three themes in a big way.
Top 10 Retail Payments Trends from NRF 2025
Here are my top ten takeaway themes from this year’s event:
- Agentic commerce
- Artificial intelligence
- The intersection of agentic commerce and AI
- Payments innovation
- Robotics
- Omnichannel ubiquity and support
- Visual displays and digital signage
- Identity management
- Physical hardware, terminals, and POS
- Security and fraud prevention
At KORT Payments, our technology, product, and commercial roadmaps have active initiatives or discovery projects in at least seven of these categories — all in service of our embedded payments vision for ISVs and software platforms, across the core business drivers of monetization, automation, and optionality.
The Session That Stood Out: Redefining Retail Payments
Across dozens of breakout sessions and panels, one stood out from a payments perspective: “Redefining Retail Payments: Seamless, Secure Omnichannel Commerce.” Several of the key retail payments trends above — critical to ISVs, merchants, and payment companies alike — were addressed head-on. Four key takeaways:
- The F&B sector is catching up — fast. Restaurants and the food and beverage industry are typically five years behind traditional retail in terms of payment method optionality and innovation. The exponential adoption of agentic commerce and AI will significantly compress that gap.
- Digital wallets are winning. As agentic commerce and AI become embedded in retail, credit and debit card transaction penetration will decline — and digital wallet adoption will accelerate.
- AI doesn’t discriminate. It will become ubiquitous across every retail vertical. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling a burger, a shirt, or a concert ticket — the impact is universal.
- Omnichannel is table stakes. In retail, seamless cross-channel payments are no longer a differentiator. They’re the baseline expectation.
What This Means for ISVs and Software Platforms
The retail payments trends coming out of NRF 2025 reinforce what we’ve been building toward at KORT: embedded payments and embedded finance are not optional add-ons for software platforms — they are central to long-term differentiation, retention, and revenue growth.
KORT has an ambitious conference schedule planned for 2026 across multiple industry verticals. I’ll continue sharing key trends in payments, software, and technology as I encounter them throughout the year.
About KORT:
KORT empowers ISVs, software platforms, merchants and fintech’s to transact, scale, and thrive effortlessly.
Our enterprise-grade, global orchestration platform, KORTex, is the foundation of this transformation.
As we expand our geographical footprint, I invite you to join us and be a valued member of our early, strategic partner program; unlocking business, operational and revenue opportunities to help fuel your exponential growth aspirations. You can contact me here.