The Pains of the Cloud: Deprecated Services and why Lambdas are King

New rails. New wallets. New payout types. New regulations. New fraud tactics. It’s all on the table for 2026. For teams handling rewards, incentives, and disbursements, that means the old model of “send one payout type via one channel and call it a day” is at its breaking point. Recipients now expect instant, flexible, mobile-native payouts that fit their lives. At the same time, tighter controls, strict compliance, and lower risk exposure are the top priorities for senders. 

From our experience building global payout infrastructure at Runa, we’re seeing this tension play out in real time. Billions in value are now flowing through gift cards, prepaid cards, and pay-to-card payouts. And as that volume grows, so does the opportunity: the companies that modernize their payout models first will set the bar for everyone else.

As we look ahead to 2026, we’ve been analyzing patterns across customer use cases, talking with product, payment, and partnership leaders, and tracking rising signals in fraud, AI, and wallet ecosystems. Three predictions are emerging, and together, they point towards a different future for payouts, rewards, and incentives.

Prediction 1: Prepare for Universal Payout Links

When you send a payout today, you’re already balancing numerous factors: the use case, the recipient, the region, and the economics behind each option. In some moments, a gift card is exactly what the recipient wants to treat themselves. In others, especially for loyalty, benefits, or cashback, a prepaid card that covers everyday essentials is a better fit. And there are plenty of cases where money directly to a bank card is the fastest and most appropriate option. 

Many programs already support multiple payout methods and offer rails such as gift cards, prepaid cards, and pay-to-card through platforms like Runa. But even with that sophistication, payouts are still typically sent one option at a time, which makes it hard to manage at scale and consistently deliver the “right” choice for each individual recipient.

Recipients, meanwhile, are being trained by consumer apps to expect flexibility and control. They choose how to pay, where to pay, and which wallet to use, so it’s only natural they expect the same from how they get paid. 41% of U.S. consumers say they use instant methods to receive disbursements most often, up from 11% in 2018.

That’s where universal payout links come in: they enable a shift from “we decide” to “you choose” without requiring your ops team to maintain multiple flows per use case. With a universal payout link, you send one link that unlocks all the options you support, and recipients choose what works best for them, in their country, on their device, at that moment:

• Gift cards
• Prepaid cards
• Pay-to-card

Universal payout links give you granular control over fees, boosts, and discounts so you’re not only offering choice to recipients, you’re also optimizing the economics behind every option.

How Universal Payout Links Work In Practice
1.  You send a $100 payout link
2. The recipient lands on a clear, branded experience offering:

• $100 to their bank card
• $100 prepaid card
• $105 as a merchant gift card (with a slight boost as an incentive)

3. Behind the scenes, you can:

• Incentivize specific payout types with boosts
• Choose how fees are handled for pay-to-card
• Track behavior over time to determine which payout types perform best

What This Means For Your Business
Done right, universal payout links unlock four big wins:

• Higher satisfaction: Recipients feel in control. Instead of “here’s how we decided to pay you,” the experience becomes “pick what works best for you.” That alone makes payouts feel like a perk.
• Stronger loyalty and engagement: You can design your program with “boosts” that nudge recipients toward options that keep them engaged with your brand or ecosystem, like higher-value gift cards or specific merchant categories.
• Better cost control: Because you can steer volume toward your best-margin payout types, you’re no longer stuck with a one-size-fits-all rail that’s either too expensive or too restrictive.
• Simplified operations: Instead of managing separate payout flows, vendors, and integrations for each payout type, you consolidate into a single link, integration, and reporting layer.

What To Do in 2026
You don’t need to rebuild your payout strategy from scratch to move in this direction. Start by:

• Audit your use cases: See where you’re sending one-size-fits-all payouts, whether it’s commissions, rebates, loyalty redemptions, or incentives.
• Identify where choice would move the needle: Think about segments that are particularly sensitive to payout experience, such as gig workers, top-tier loyalty members, and influencers.
• Talk to your payout provider: Ask whether they can support a payout link that includes multiple options and configurable fees.

At Runa, this is where we’re headed: one universal payout link that gives recipients real choice while giving businesses greater control over satisfaction, loyalty, and cost, all without increasing operational overhead.

Prediction #2: Prepaid Cards Move From Side Perk to Primary Payout Rail

For a long time, prepaid cards have lived in the margins of payout strategy. They were the thing you stood up for a promo, a rebate, or a one-off reward. Useful, but rarely seen as a core rail. That’s changing fast. As payouts become more global, more frequent, and more digital, prepaid cards are quietly moving from supporting actor to lead. The global prepaid card market was estimated at US$2.2 trillion in 2024 and is projected to reach US$4.1 trillion by 2030, demonstrating the clear upward trajectory of this payment method.

Instead of slow-to-launch, plastic-heavy programs, you can now issue Visa-powered, open-loop prepaid cards that are digital-first, fast to deploy, and usable in everyday life. Prepaid cards can be spun up via a secure link, loaded instantly, and easily added to mobile wallets. They can be configured as reloadable for ongoing disbursements, such as wages or benefits, or as single-use for rewards, promotions, and one-off payouts—all managed from the same platform that already powers your gift cards and pay-to-card flows.

What This Means For Your Business

• Gain control: Because modern prepaid is fully digital and brandable, you can design the card, activation flow, and messaging to match your product journey.
• Simplify operations: Prepaid sits in the same platform as your gift cards and pay-to-card, with unified funding, reporting, and controls.
• Unlock new use cases: Programs such as stipends, allowances, or small cross-border disbursements that were previously too complex with bank rails become viable.

What To Do In 2026:
If you’re planning your payout roadmap, decide what role you want prepaid to play.

• Map where bank rails are causing payouts to be slow, manual, hard to scale, or inaccessible for your recipients.
• Decide which jobs prepaid should own, like recurring stipends, gig payouts, small claims, promotions, or cross-border disbursements.
• Treat prepaid as a platform decision, not a one-off program. You need it to be issued and funded instantly, work wherever the network is accepted, support both reloadable and single-use configurations, and plug into your existing payout stack via portal or API.
• Pilot with a clear definition of success, whether it’s faster time to payout, happier recipients, or lower operational effort.

The most innovative businesses aren’t choosing between prepaid cards, gift cards, or pay-to-card. They’re choosing a single platform that allows them to use all three interchangeably and intelligently. With Runa, you don’t have to pick a lane. You get:

• Prepaid cards that are brandable, reloadable, and instantly issued
• Gift cards from the world’s leading merchants
• Pay-to-card for direct-to-bank payouts—all in one system
• And one platform that ties it all together: global, API-first, and built for scale

Prediction #3: AI-Enabled Fraud Forces a New Era of Payout Security

AI isn’t just accelerating legitimate experiences like instant pay and personalization. It’s also upgrading the attacker’s toolkit. Now, it’s easier than ever for fraudsters to generate emails and chats that sound exactly like your brand or your VIP customers, spin up convincing fake identities to pass KYC, and use deepfakes to apply pressure for “urgent” payout changes.

In Sift’s Q2 2025 findings, GenAI-enabled scams rose 456% between May 2024 and April 2025. 61% of consumers say they’re very/extremely concerned about AI being used to scam them, and one in three (33%) believe someone has attempted to scam them using AI, with 27% saying they were successfully defrauded. 

And all of this is colliding with instant payouts, where the window to spot and stop fraud shrinks from days to seconds. Fragmented payout programs weren’t built for this kind of arms race. Rewards might run through one vendor. Pay-to-card through another. Commissions on something homegrown. Fraud rules sprinkled across systems, with none of them providing a  complete picture of who’s getting paid, from where, and how often.

That fragmentation is precisely what modern fraud exploits. If no one has a complete view, it’s easier for a bad actor to look “normal” in each individual system while quietly draining value overall. As instant payment schemes become the norm, regulators, partners, and customers are raising the bar, and you need to prove you took reasonable steps to prevent abuse.

A third of consumers (33%) are interested in AI tools for fraud detection, indicating that security is a major priority. For payout-heavy businesses, it’s a question of program viability. Can you offer instant, flexible payouts without becoming a fraud target? Can you still say “yes” to new use cases—like universal payout links—without your risk team slamming on the brakes?

The answer increasingly depends on whether your payout stack has modern, AI-aware defenses baked in, not bolted on:

• Network-level detection: Instead of building isolated fraud engines, payout networks will look across merchants, devices, regions, and rails to spot anomalies sooner and shut them down faster.
• Shared intelligence: A device or identity behaving suspiciously in one program becomes a red flag everywhere else, not just in that one silo.
• Smarter friction: AI will help distinguish genuine edge cases from truly risky behavior, so you can protect your program without overwhelming legitimate recipients with extra steps and manual reviews.

How To Respond In 2026

• Map your payout risk surface: Identify where you’re still relying on manual reviews or simple, static rules.
• Evaluate your payout partners: Determine how they use AI/ML in fraud detection today and what happens when a payout is flagged.
• Consolidate for safety: The more of your high-value flows you can run through rails with strong, built-in fraud controls and clear processes for holds, reviews, and reversals, the easier it is to offer fast, flexible payouts with confidence.

At Runa, we see fraud and security as part of the payout experience, not an afterthought. The goal is simple: give you the confidence to move money instantly and globally, knowing there’s a modern, network-level defense system watching your back.

Looking Ahead

Together, these predictions point to one clear reality: how money leaves your business will soon matter as much as how it comes in.

Universal payout links, prepaid stepping into the spotlight, and AI-enabled fraud defenses all push you toward the same destination—a payout stack that’s flexible for recipients, controlled for finance and risk, and unified enough that you can actually move at the speed of your market.

If you want a partner with the rails, links, and safeguards already in place, talk to Runa. We can help you turn this vision into a live pilot, a 2026 roadmap, and ultimately a payout experience your competitors will struggle to match.