Purpose of this paper is to understand how cashless payments look today and familiarize the reader with the forces that are shaping the acceptance of cashless payments. In banking and financial services, change is a recurrent theme. Every decade sees the introduction of new products, services, and methods of conducting business. Waves of expansion characterize the financial sector in response to both short- and long-term structural causes. While the financial industry is constantly changing, the past decade has witnessed extraordinary breadth and depth of transformation. These changes are the result of a number of structural drivers that are affecting the sector, including more regulation, technology disruption, and shifting demography. These pressures are decreasing entrance barriers and raising competition within the industry. The paper goes on to describe the general organisation of a card payment eco-system and the relationships between the parties within it. The paper continues exploring digitalisation and its effect on both how merchants accept payments and how consumers pay for goods and services. Digital challengers that are forcing and spearheading the industry’s transformation, are seen as welcomed players. They are seen as partners that offer current big enterprises possibilities to capture more market share, drive non-cash payments. Current enterprises understand the need for digital transformation and accept to change as card payments is only a recent industry and has been changing dramatically since its beginnings. When looking at the macroeconomic view of the industry, we can understand that the market for card payments is still not saturated and the newly emerged fintechs can help speed up the adoption of card payments.