The National Association for Business Economics predicts consumer spending will leak to 2.9 percent, from 2005’s 3.5 percent: lower payments-related fee income will doubtless accompany that slowdown.

Much, of course, depends on whether the housing bubble pops, or deflates slowly. The latter is unusual, to say the least. Since much of the run-up of housing prices has been in the nation’s urban areas on either coast, where consumer spending is predominantly concentrated, a slowdown of that spending, and concomitant decrease in fee income, may in fact be overstated. The presumed slowdown may not be minimized by what many predict will be a halt to the Fed’s raising of short-term rates, especially since energy prices are unlikely to fall dramatically.

Pension fund investors behind private equity groups recognize, though, that ongoing, fundamental shifts in the payments industry promise them long-term opportunity, whatever the short-term picture. Look forward to the likely sale of: First Data Corp.’s card issuing unit; Computer Science Corp.s’ Hogan core bank processing division, following CSC’s likely sale to private investors; Mellon Financial’s treasury management operations; and, possibly, Fifth Third Bank and its growing payments operation. Considering plenty of institutional money will chase a finite number of payments-related companies, unexpected—and unexpectedly rich—deals are bound to pop from the woodwork: That always happens when a business sector strolls into the pension funds’ sights.

Now that many consider payments the future of much of banking, watch for some big companies who've not previously been considered payments players to sidestep into that arena. Oracle Corp.’s mid-December acquisition of CitiGroup’s 43 percent interest in highly regarded i-Flex Solutions, for instance, combined with Oracle’s dominant position in the database-solutions market, almost guarantees that Oracle will be bearing down on the payments space. Since many of the world’s core banking systems will be up for grabs in the next few years, and those systems will be wedded to data warehouses (if only to help the world’s big banks qualify for the lower Basle II capital-adequacy standards), we would be surprised if it turns out that Oracle bought i-Flex on a whim.

Such headline-grabbing events, though, will be only part of the real story of 2006, from the payments perspective. The really important events in any field usually escape general notice until they suddenly seem to appear out of nowhere; the payments industry is unlikely to prove an exception to this phenomenon.