What Gen Alpha Is Teaching Us About the Future of Payments

In the article, Azimkhon Askarov, Co-CEO & Partner at CONCRYT, highlights how, by understanding and embracing the payment preferences of Gen Alpha now, merchants can position themselves to engage this generation as they become key consumers.

They may not have bank accounts yet, but Gen Alpha is already influencing how financial tools are being designed, used and talked about. There are an estimated 2.5 billion members of Gen Alpha worldwide. Born from 2010 onwards, this generation is the first to grow up entirely online, surrounded by smart devices, app ecosystem and platform-based experiences from the start.

From their earliest years, they’ve interacted with money through gaming platforms, peer-to-peer apps, contactless cards and QR codes. Their expectations are being formed by platforms like Roblox, TikTok and YouTube – not by banks.

As Gen Alpha moves towards financial independence, their instincts around payment, trust and digital experiences will push fintech to evolve. For startups and scaleups across payments, neobanking and embedded finance, now is the time to build for this next generation, not when they arrive in the market, but while their habits are still forming.

A generation shaped by real-time everything

What defines Gen Alpha isn’t just digital fluency, it’s their experience of immediacy. They’re growing up with one-click shopping, same-day delivery and 24/7 entertainment. Waiting for anything feels unnecessary. That has huge implications for how they’ll think about transacting.

In payments, this expectation translates to mobile-first design, instant authorisation and app-native experiences. Cards may still be relevant, but wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay already feel more natural to younger users. Any service that takes too long, redirects too often, or breaks flow will be abandoned.

For fintech firms building checkout tools, APIs or issuing solutions, speed is now assumed: without it, users will quickly look elsewhere. And that standard will only rise.

Payments that disappear into the background

For Gen Alpha, good payments will feel invisible. They’re accustomed to experiences where the act of paying is folded into the interaction itself: whether it’s buying a skin in a game, tipping a creator or ordering food from a livestream.

This creates new pressure on fintech to design payments that are not just seamless, but silent. Context-aware authorisation, embedded wallets, biometric confirmation, and one-tap recurring payments will become default. As will alternative checkout environments – voice, chat, video – that remove traditional friction points.

More than 60 per cent of Gen Alpha already report using a voice assistant at least monthly, according to a Statista report. The future of checkout could just as easily involve a smart speaker or AR interface as it does a browser.

The trust equation: AI, biometrics and control

Security will still matter, but how Gen Alpha defines it is changing. They’re more comfortable with biometrics and expect systems to work without repeated logins or card entry. Authorising a payment with a thumbprint, face scan or voice prompt will feel normal, not futuristic.

At the same time, this is a generation growing up amid online privacy debates and rising concern over algorithmic transparency. Over-personalised offers, intrusive prompts, or vague data policies could drive rejection.

This creates a challenge for fintech. AI will power fraud detection, recommendations and dynamic pricing, but only if users trust the system. That means being transparent about data use, offering clear opt-outs, and explaining outcomes in plain language.

Financial literacy is going social

Many Gen Alpha kids are learning about money from TikTok, not textbooks. Hashtags like #finTok and #moneyTok attract millions of views, blending entertainment and advice in ways that often outpace formal education.

Fintechs that succeed with this generation won’t just simplify payments, they’ll embed financial learning into their platforms. This could mean goal-based saving features, spend notifications with context, or tools that reward responsible behaviour. The more interactive and game-like, the better.

Products aimed at younger users must be co-designed with them, not just marketed to them. The value proposition won’t be interest rates. It will be ease, relevance and a sense of agency.

Crypto, digital assets and token fluency

Gen Alpha is growing up surrounded by digital assets, even if they’re not using them in the traditional financial sense. In-game currencies, NFTs, creator tokens and digital collectibles have already shaped their understanding of value exchange. A Deloitte report found that 47 per cent of Gen Alpha aged 10 to 13 were aware of cryptocurrency, and more than a quarter had engaged with virtual currencies in gaming environments.

This doesn’t mean every fintech needs a crypto roadmap. But it does suggest that tokenised value, digital identity and interoperable wallets will become increasingly relevant over the next decade. Fintechs should be designing systems that are blockchain-ready, even if blockchain isn’t the primary rail today.

Embedded, contextual and cross-platform

For Gen Alpha, payment doesn’t start on a homepage. It starts in a chat, a stream, or a shared link. Commerce is social, ambient and often accidental: triggered by moments, not marketing.

That has major implications for how payments infrastructure is designed. It must be portable, interoperable, and ready to integrate across gaming, social and content platforms. Fintechs will need to support smart links, invisible authorisation layers, and commerce flows triggered by creators or AI agents, not just users.

This also places renewed importance on partnerships. To serve Gen Alpha, fintech providers will need to work across ecosystems, plugging into education platforms, gaming engines, social apps and digital identity services.

What this means for fintech infrastructure

Designing with Gen Alpha in mind isn’t about trendspotting, it’s about responding to long-term shifts in user behaviour and digital norms that are already taking root.

Batch processing, fragmented APIs and card-only logic will feel dated in a world where consumers expect real-time, context-aware, multi-rail payments. The fintech firms that lead will be those investing now in flexible, modular infrastructure – capable of supporting open finance, digital ID, biometric onboarding and alternative payment rails.

That also includes resilience. Gen Alpha won’t tolerate outages, delayed settlements or apps that crash at checkout. For them, reliability will signal credibility. Providers must be prepared to scale as fast as Gen Alpha demands.

Why now matters

By the time Gen Alpha reaches full spending power, the battle for relevance will already be decided. Platforms that feel intuitive, invisible and responsive will win. Those that feel slow, cluttered or extractive will be ignored.

Fintech has a window of opportunity: not to predict Gen Alpha’s future behaviour, but to shape the conditions they’ll grow into. That means building now with flexibility, responsibility and long-term value in mind.

Gen Alpha isn’t going to adapt to legacy systems. Instead, they’ll look for tools that already fit the way they live, play and pay.