S&P Global: US Consumers Wary of Stablecoins and Agentic AI

The research, drawn from S&P’s Disruptive Experiences survey series, covers US consumer behaviour across digital wallets, cryptocurrency, stablecoins, contactless payments, real-time transfers and AI-assisted spending.

Digital wallet adoption has reached a level that most payments executives will recognise. Two thirds of respondents (67%) said they had used a digital wallet online in the preceding 90 days, and 45% reported weekly usage. The numbers skew heavily by generation: 91% of Gen Z consumers and 85% of millennials are users, compared with significantly lower figures among older cohorts. PayPal holds the dominant online position at 62% of wallet users, while Apple Pay leads in-store at 43%. Debit card linkage, chosen by 64% of wallet users, remains the preferred funding rail, and ease of checkout continues to be the primary driver of adoption.

Cryptocurrency sits at the opposite end of the adoption curve. According to S&P, 68% of US consumers surveyed have never engaged with crypto in any form, and 59% see no potential use for it. Even among the younger cohorts most associated with crypto enthusiasm, engagement is modest: 41% of Gen Z and 37% of millennials report some form of interaction. Only 16% view cryptocurrency as the future of finance.

Stablecoin awareness, while edging upward, reached only 16% of respondents, and the attitude split among those who are aware is precisely even: 40% find them appealing, 40% do not, and 20% remain undecided. The most-cited barriers are concerns about fraud and scams (48%), worries about the safety of funds (46%), and a belief that stablecoins are simply unnecessary (39%).

This trust deficit is commercially significant. The US stablecoin market is entering a period of accelerated regulatory definition: the GENIUS Act, which would establish a federal licensing framework for payment stablecoins, passed the Senate in June 2026 and moved toward House consideration. Regulatory clarity has been broadly welcomed by issuers, but S&P’s data suggests that legislative progress alone will not shift consumer sentiment if issuers cannot address the underlying fraud and safety concerns. Payment networks and banks exploring stablecoin rails are largely targeting business-to-business and cross-border corridors rather than retail wallets, and these findings support the pragmatism of that positioning.

Contactless has become the default physical payment mode for a majority: 65% of consumers own a tap-to-pay card, 58% prefer a contactless form factor for in-person transactions, and 38% say contactless capability has increased their card usage overall. That said, online behaviour remains mixed, with manual card entry (31%) still narrowly outpacing digital wallet usage (29%) at checkout.

On real-time payments, most consumers report at least a moderate need for instant transfers, concentrated around bill payments, peer-to-peer transfers, merchant payments and wage disbursements. That demand profile aligns with the commercial cases that banks and payments firms have prioritised as the FedNow network scales and real-time payment volumes grow.

The AI findings are the most pointed in the release. Nearly half of respondents (47%) said they would completely prohibit AI from making purchases on their behalf. Younger consumers show only marginal openness, and those who would accept AI involvement overwhelmingly insist on approval-based or recommendation-only guardrails. For payments firms and card networks investing in agentic AI features, the data suggests that consumer consent architecture will need to be prominent and granular if autonomous spending tools are to see meaningful uptake beyond a narrow early-adopter base.