40% Of Merchants Are Ready To Leave Their Bank

What Capgemini's World Payments Report 2026 reveals about why merchants are switching, and what would make them stay

40% of merchants worldwide are actively considering leaving their bank for a payment technology provider, according to Capgemini's World Payments Report 2026. The reasons behind that number are less about eroding trust and more about a widening service gap.

Onboarding Is The First Breaking Point

Bank onboarding can take up to seven days and cost as much as $496. PayTechs, by comparison, can get merchants live and processing in under 60 minutes for as little as $214. That gap alone is enough to push merchants toward alternatives before they've processed a single transaction, let alone experienced ongoing service.

 

Satisfaction Drops The Smaller The Merchant

Only 15 percent of small merchants and 22 percent of mid-sized merchants report being satisfied with their bank's merchant services. Banks have largely deprioritized this segment, citing margin compression and increasingly complex infrastructure, in favor of resourcing larger accounts, creating an opening that PayTechs have moved quickly to fill.

Unreliability Has A Quantifiable Cost

Merchants report up to nine hours of payment system downtime annually. Every one of those hours represents revenue that simply doesn't get captured, a cost that compounds silently and rarely shows up as a single line item anyone notices.

Most Merchants Wouldn't Leave If Given A Reason To Stay

Despite the dissatisfaction, 66 percent of merchants still prefer a traditional provider over a PayTech, and 8 in 10 say they would switch back to a bank if it matched PayTech-level service at the same cost. This is the most important nuance in the data: it isn't that merchants have lost trust in banks as institutions. It's that the service gap between the two options has become too large to ignore.

The Takeaway

Is your current provider actually earning your business, or just holding onto it by default? The data suggests most merchants haven't asked themselves this question directly, and a meaningful share of them would answer it differently if they actually compared their current onboarding experience, uptime, and support against what's genuinely available elsewhere.