The Payment Business

The latest financial results from the global payment giants show a clear trend: modern, tech-driven players are thriving while legacy brands struggle.

Adyen, built from the ground up on a single platform, reported Q3 net revenue up 20% on €347bn volume (+7% YoY). Its global POS expansion has been a standout success, combining direct sales to international omni-channel-channel retailers with sales to SME’s through ISV partners.

Checkout.com, another single-platform build, has established itself as a credible challenger for global digital merchants. Checkout’s CEO, Guillaume Pousaz (below) confirmed that Checkout is focused on this single customer group and won’t be offering POS terminals anytime soon. Checkout processed $300 bn in 2024, reports 30% net revenue growth and values itself at $12bn. Impressive, but still only about a quarter of Adyen’s €48bn market cap. I spent a couple of rewarding days with the Checkout team at their Venice conference. Letting me loose with their clients on a gondola after a few Aperol Spritz was brave, but I came away impressed. Read my review on the Business of Payments blog.

Adyen, Checkout and Stripe are proving formidable rivals to incumbents assembled through acquisition and still running on fragmented platforms. Fiserv, built by Wall Street not by payment geeks, illustrates the problem: its share price dropped 40% after Q3 results showed just 1% revenue growth and a big earnings miss. The new CEO blamed former management for “short-term decisions to cut costs and defer investment,” temporarily boosting margins but slowing product development.

Lloyds Bank Cardnet, Fiserv’s JV with the UK’s largest retail bank, is also going through tough times. 2024 volume fell 4% to £52bn, net revenue was flat at £53m and profits down a third at £16 m despite price rises. Read more on the Business of Payments blog.

There was better news from Worldline, where payment volume rose 7% and revenue stabilised in Q3 2025. Management reassured investors on liquidity which analysts had been worried about. The stock, under pressure for the last two years, jumped 18%. Read more on the Business of Payments blog.

BBVA’s failed bid for Banco Sabadell clears the way for Nexi’s acquisition of 80% of Sabadell’s merchant services unit at an enterprise value of €350m. When the deal was first agreed in 2023, Sabadell generated c.€30m EBITDA from 380.000 merchant. Processing volume rose to €54 bn 2024. 

Although the Sabadell deal would give Nexi a strong position in Spain, it adds yet another integration challenge to an already crowded technology stack. 

Nexi has taken full control of Computop, Germany’s leading e-commerce gateway with a 38% share. This has prompted the departure of the colourful Ralf Gladis, Computop’s founder. He signed off on LinkedIn: “somebody please take over my role as bad guy at conferences and explain German banks aren’t fast enough or innovative enough.” I doubt we’ve seen the last of Ralf.

Still in Germany, Unzer (formerly HeidelPay) is back to growth after regulatory troubles and KKR’s painful exit. Under new owner Goldman Sachs, 2024 net revenue rose 7% to €220 m with EBITDA of €20 m.

The UK’s competition authority has approved Global Payments’ acquisition of Worldpay despite the combined market share of the two companies breaching normal thresholds. Cue sighs of relief in Atlanta. Meanwhile, activist investor Elliott has bought a stake in Global, added two board members, and created an “integration committee.”

Hard times in hardware. PAX Technology, one of the leading terminal vendors, saw H1 2025 revenue fall another 10% amid “global uncertainty.” Europe, its largest market, dipped just 2%, supported by solid UK, Italian and French sales. The IM30 terminal is performing well with EV-charging clients, while the MAXSTORE services line grows from a small base. More on the Business of Payments blog.

Guavapay, a London-based fintech offering merchant services and business accounts, has ceased trading following FCA intervention. Guavapay was heavily promoted by grandees in the City of Londonwho will be rather embarrassed by its abrupt closure. The founder shuttered the company and dismissed staff including the board of directors. CEO Lauren McCracken wrote on LinkedIn: “I do hope once the dust settles, I can serve as a voice and industry thought leader to drive the right governance and trust in our sector.”

Flatpay, the aggressive Danish SME-focused payment facilitator says it’s hit €100m annual run-rate revenues. Shift4 is processing the transactions and seems pretty pleased with the deal.

The AWS outage caused remarkably little disruption to payments. Square explains how its multi-region sourcing of AWS helped it weather the storm but this was a good moment for Checkout.com to announce it was no longer single-sourcing cloud from AWS. Microsoft will also get some business.

In corporate news, SumUp is reportedly eyeing an IPO to raise capital for acquisitions. In the FT “one person familiar with the company’s thinking said it believed the payment processing market was ripe for consolidation, particularly in Europe.” That may be true, but buying rivals is costly, risky, and few are large enough to move the dial for a business as large as SumUp.

SIBS, the Portuguese bank-owned processor, is expanding into Central Europe with the acquisition of ITCARD, the Warsaw-based acquirer, issuer processor and ATM operator. ITCARD trades as Planet Pay and is no relation to Planet. The deal gives SIBS scale in one of Europe’s fastest-growing economies, adding 180,000 POS terminals, 1.8 million cards and 5,500 ATMs.

The Italian government seems close to selling PagoPA, a state-owned payments gateway that serves most public bodies, to Poste Italiane and the National Mint. PagoPA is doing well and processed €93bn in 2024 (up 12%) with net revenue of €118m (up 51%). The price tag is c.€500 m. PagoPA outsources most of its tech to Nexi, and local observers warn this contract could be at risk if the new owners review its suppliers. As Filippo Bergamin notes, a quick win would be fixing PagoPA’s baffling user experience which asks citizens to choose which PSP they would like to process their credit card. 

Hokodo, another London fintech, is pulling out of the EU and has put its Lithuanian EMI licence up for sale. Offers are invited, naturally, via LinkedIn.

Paystrax, a small Lithuanian high-risk acquirer, has bought UK-based Nochex, an SME eCommerce gateway. The deal gives Paystrax a growth platform although not a large one. Nochex remains tiny: after 25 years, turnover is just £1.5 m. The ever-growing compliance burden means that small acquirers need to scale. Paystrax’s CEO wrote: “In small firms, 40–50% of staff are now in governance — compliance, AML, risk, security, monitoring — versus 10–15% just a few years ago.”

In fundraising news, PikkoPay, a Paris-based mobile scan-and-pay solution for grocery built on Stripe’s APIs, raised €1.5m. Paymove, a Gdańsk-based QR payment provider for parking and “smart city” applications, raised $860K and is now live at 700 locations.

MPE 2026

If you only do one conference next year, make it MPE 2026 in Berlin, 17–19 March. I’ve been involved since 2015 and always learn something new. MPE attracts a strong mix of vendors, advisers and merchants — and it’s friendlier than most, making it a great place to meet new people in the industry.

One of the highlights, at least for me, is discovering what MPE’s graphics team has done with my face this time.

Scheming

Visa and Mastercard’s growth eased a touch in Q3. European volume reached nearly €1.4 trillion, up 9% in euros, still solid, but possibly impacted by softening consumer spending. Measured in dollars, volume rose 16%, so the Americans will still be happy.

While the US schemes prosper, European payment sovereignty remains a live political issue. What would happen if Trump orders Visa and Mastercard to turn off unfriendly merchants or markets? A former deputy governor of the Bank of England said “the question of the ‘kill switch’ which people worry about for F-35s… [also] exists in terms of payments.”

In the UK, policymakers hope open banking will reduce reliance on Visa and Mastercard. This could be a long wait (see below), while the EU is betting on Wero and the digital euro.

Wero, the European Payments Initiative’s consumer wallet, is gaining traction: reporting 100 m P2P transactions from 43 m users transferring €7.5 bn to date. French banks in Group BPCE account for nearly half the activity. Live in Belgium, Germany and now Luxembourg, Wero will expand to the Netherlands in 2026 as iDEAL migrates, initially with co-branding.

Extending Wero from Person-to-person (P2P) to eCommerce is critical. The launch had been expected this month but has slipped to early 2026, although we saw the first major merchant announcement. LeClerc, the French grocer, plans to roll out Wero for click-and-collect in Q2 2026. 

Wero, backed by banks in Germany, France and the Benelux, won’t compete with other national wallets but will interoperate via a central hub linking it with Bizum (Spain), Bancomat (Italy), MB Way (Portugal) and Vipps (Norway). A feasibility study is due by year-end.

Arkwright Consulting research shows these new mobile-based payment brands growing around 35% (see below). In contrast, Flagship reports domestic card schemes continue to lose share to Visa and Mastercard.

Figure 1 Source: Arkwright Consulting

Ireland, lacking a national instant-payment app, has decided against joining Wero, Instead AIB and Bank of Ireland are developing their own product, called Zippay, using Nexi’s Bancomat technology. But with Revolut already dominating P2P payments in Ireland, Zippaymay struggle to attract attention.

In Italy, Bancomat, under new PE ownership, is mounting a major marketing push. Here’s its very Italian new ad:

In Germany, Giro reported flat H1 2025 volumes despite new features like Apple Pay integration, Discover co-badging and sensory POS “bleeps” few merchants have likely requested.

The digital euro project seems to be on track. The ECB has chosen Worldline, Giesecke+Devrient, Feedzai and Fabrick (amongst others) to build the infrastructure. A pilot could start by mid-2027, with full launch as early as 2029. Merchants will be required to accept the digital euro, so PSPs must start thinking about how to prepare. Eric Tak of the ECB offers an excellent explainer of why the digital euro matters and what it will and won’t do.

By contrast, the digital pound (aka Britcoin) is looking less likely. Retail banks oppose it, and officials I’ve spoken with doubt it has the political will to proceed. The Bank of England has opened a digital pound lab, but a go/no-go decision isn’t expected until 2026.

ISVs and platforms

The convergence of software and payments continues to disrupt the market. BCG forecasts the European acquiring sector will add $24bn in annual revenue by 2027, with roughly a third coming from embedded finance, primarily integrated payments sold through ISVs.

Extra revenue is great but how much will drop to the acquirer’s bottom line? North American experience shows it’s the ISVs that capture most value. This is already apparent from the surging share prices of the listed SaaS vendors such as Shopify and Toast that already incorporate integrated payments.

PSP’s need to define their strategy to secure distribution to today’s software-focused merchants. It’s a question of buying, building or partnering with ISVs.

PayPal’s recent move to boost its stake in Shopware (Germany’s leading SME e-commerce platform) from 11% to 41% will help keep a branded PayPal button on its customers’ checkout pages. Shopware hosts around 20,000 live merchants but faces growing pressure from Shopify.

Meanwhile, SAP has woken up to the payment opportunity. Europe’s largest software vendor has launched Open Payments Framework, an orchestration layer within SAP Commerce Cloud, helping enterprise clients process “hundreds of billions of dollars” in annual transactions. Adyen is first to market, working with an Australian homeware retailer.

Mirakl, the go-to vendor for the software that powers online marketplaces, describes its payment strategy to the payment.fr blog.Mirakl works with Mango Payments in Europe and Payoneer in the US.

In further examples of software and payment convergence, Italy’s Secarepay, built on Stripe’s APIs, enables used-car payments and financing through 600 dealerships. And in Poland, POSBistro, a leading restaurant software vendor, is taking advantage of new rules allowing digital fiscal receipts in hospitality to sell a bundle of hardware, software and payments. Polskie ePłatności (Nexi) is behind the scenes. 

Agentic commerce

Everyone’s talking about agentic commerce, where AI doesn’t just recommend purchases but makes them for you. 

Agentic may be coming soon, but it’s not here yet. In conversation with merchants and vendors, I’ve found no reports of non-human shoppers at checkout (though they may come and go unseen). Still, the payments industry is gearing up with a wave of product launches that could help shift value from smaller local merchants to global AI platforms and their PSP partners.

OpenAI has announced Instant Checkout, a shopping feature inside ChatGPT. Etsy is the first merchant, with Shopify’s million sellers and Walmart’s website next in line. Stripe is processing payments, while PayPal is coming soon. 

We don’t know the commercials. It’s early days but between OpenAI, Stripe, Etsy and its sub-merchants somebody has to pay for this. It would be good to know who and how much.

Strictly speaking, ChatGPT’s product isn’t full agentic commerce. Shoppers still tap “confirm” before paying. But it seems only a matter of time before bots get payment credentials. Julie Ferguson, CEO of the Merchant Risk Council, is testing these services so you don’t have to and she expects agentic commerce to spread quickly via screen scraping. She says that consumers may be more willing than we think to give entrust ChatGPT and other agents with their Amazon passwords or banking credentials.

As with any new technology, opinion is split. Richard Crone predicts agentic commerce could disintermediate 8–14% of eCommerce sales within 2–3 years. That’s a lot of transactions flowing to Stripe. Crone’s case is supported by Similarweb data (below) showing ChatGPT drives “high-intent” traffic that converts twice as well as organic search. Andrew Dresdner, meanwhile, argues truly autonomous payments are still at least two years away.

Orchestration

Payment orchestration remains a hot topic – four sponsors of last month’s ePAY Summit were orchestrators – though one sometimes hard to define. The term spans everything from simple multi-acquirer gateways to AI-driven systems that route transactions dynamically to maximise acceptance at minimal cost.

Payment.fr offers a clear explainer, including a case study from Maisons du Monde, the French retailer with €1 bn in annual sales. Initially using a full-stack setup from Payplug, it switched to Primer’s orchestration platform to take control of its European expansion.

Auchan, the French supermarket chain, lifted acceptance by five percentage points after deploying an in-house orchestration platform called Purse, originally built for sister company Decathlon. Transactions now flow via Adyen or Worldline, and the platform has been spun out as a new business unit. 

Worldline told the Payment Culture newsletter that rules-basd routing can add three points to acceptance while AI-based routing adds a further two points. Not everyone is convinced. A consultant at Edgar Dunn wrote: “Despite the marketing claims, I’ve yet to see orchestration with genuine ML or AI routing — the data simply isn’t there yet.”

A recent ACI survey found 62% of enterprise retailers use some kind of orchestration layer to connect systems to PSPs. Their main motive isn’t cost-cutting but enabling global expansion. Orchestration allows them to choose local partners that better support local payment methods. 

Figure 2 Source: ACI Worldwide

SoftPOS

Originally designed for micro-merchants, SoftPOS is proving far more valuable in the enterprise market. A good example is Grupo Pascual in Spain, working with Getnet to turn delivery drivers’ handheld devices into payment terminals.

In the UK, Sainsbury’s now lets supermarket shoppers pay directly on Zebra Smartshop handsets running Worldline’s SoftPOSapp, removing the need to dock at self-checkout kiosks. Checkout.com handles the processing.

Will SoftPOS kill terminals? Quite possibly. Look at this from Sunmi who have Softpay’s products running on its Cpad Android tablet. It’s increasingly hard to justify why retailers will need a separate payment terminal.

JCC, the Cyprus based acquirer, has a published a case study with Ingenico (the former Phos software) that headlines €2m payment volume/month. Nobody is getting rich on micro-merchants but the proof of concept is here.

Among vendors, Rubean of Munich reports solid financial progress and has repaid a €3.5 m loan early. It’s also in litigation with SoftPOS.eu (now owned by Worldline) over who actually owns the SoftPOS name.

Does SoftPOS scale? Absolutely. Just look at the size of this one built by Global Payments for the 200^thanniversary of SLSP Bank in Slovakia. It’s so big, you could probably tap-in from Vienna.

Figure 3 Photo from Global Payments

Open banking

UK open banking transactions continue to grow at around 50% annually. That’s positive but tiny compared to the c.2.6bn debit transactions made each month. But if the pace of growth continues the market could finally reach meaningful scale. When?  Around 2030 according to Jeremy Light,who’s run the numbers. The question is whether today’s open banking vendors can stay solvent long enough to see the profits arrive.

At the Open Banking Expo conference in London, I found an industry still looking inward – debating, again, what regulators, industry bodies and lobby groups should do. No argument: open banking needs scheme rules, an acceptance mark, and commercial incentives for the retail banks. But merchants are starting to deploy open banking payments and the industry would be wise to involve them in shaping the future infrastructure.

A good example is Papa Johns, a pizza chain that added open banking via TrueLayer for home delivery orders. An exec told the ePay Summit that adoption grew quickly to 4.5% of transactions, mostly taking share from PayPal. Growth has stabilised but it’s certainly a good start.

Ryanair is also keen. The advantages for a budget airline are clear. Open banking payments are cheap, there’s no consumer protection and so no need for rolling reserves. Matt Jones looks at the acceptance case for Ryanair in detail. 

Elsewhere, the Bank of Italy  examined why open banking barely registers domestically, accounting for just 0.13% of online transfers, mainly B2B ERP-linked payments. The Bank concluded that cards and wallets “work well,” while open banking suffers from poor technical performance and “no clear value proposition for end users.”

Turning to the vendors: GoCardless reported its first EBITDA-positive quarter on “an adjusted basis.” Good news but there’s a long way to go. GoCardless posted a £35m operating loss on £127m revenue in 2024. Sifted says the investors are pushing for an exit with Mollie the most likely buyer. GoCardless’ CFO concedes “shareholders are pressing for liquidity in a difficult market.”

With too many vendors chasing too few transactions, consolidation is inevitable. TrueLayer, well financed but still loss-making, has acquired Stockholm-based Zimpler. The price wasn’t disclosed but TrueLayer likely picked up a bargain: Zimpler lost €11m in 2024, with revenue down 40% to €12m, modest for a processor but meaningful for TrueLayer, which made generated just £20m sales last year.

With barriers low, new entrants keep coming. Kashimi, a Lithuanian start-up founded by refugees from Kevin, raised $1.36m. Unlike its bankrupt predecessor, Kashimi is targeting fintechs, not supermarkets. FLIZpay, based in Berlin, raised $1 m for its open-banking payment app, pitching merchants on sharing processing-fee savings with consumers. We’ve heard this story before and we know European merchant fees aren’t big enough to fund a loyalty play.

Crypto

Stablecoins are not (yet) relevant for merchant payments. Since the summer, I’ve asked numerous merchants and PSPs, including during the cross-border panel I chaired at ePay Summit, and none are accepting stablecoins at checkout. Visa confirmed in Q3 that stablecoins accounted for just 0.02% of global volume. Consumer demand simply isn’t there. Not yet, anyway.

Figure 4: Talking Stablecoins at ePay Summit in London

We may, however, be seeing divergence between developed and emerging markets. A report from Artemis shows crypto-linked card volumes reaching $1.5bn in August, with demand driven by Argentina, Nigeria and other countries with volatile currencies and/or exchange controls. Consumer to business stablecoin transactions are a tiny number next to traditional debit and credit, but worth watching if you trade with these parts of the world.

Figure 5 Source: Artemis – Stablecoin Payments from the Ground Up

Adding to the confusion, we learn that not all stablecoins are alike. FXC notes, one stablecoin brand can be issued across multiple blockchains, each with its own programming environment, language, financial logic and consensus mechanism, not to mention differing settlement times and compliance models.

It’s enough to make your head spin. Simon Taylor says money needs product managers and it’s not hard to see why. It’s also not hard to see why many merchants and PSP’s are putting stablecoins into the “let’s come back to this when the standards have been resolved” box.

In other news

Trust Pay, the Bratislava-based e-commerce acquirer, is tired of being confused with Trust Payments. It’s secured a licence in Malta and rebranded as Finby. I’d have gone with Trusty McTrustface.

In Germany, even card disposal comes with bureaucracy: cut it into four, scratch off the CVV, then hand it in at your bank.

Gdańsk has once again been crowned Poland’s Most Cash-Free City, beating 25 rivals. 

Payments people love to talk tech and regulation, but never forget the power of brand. This new Teya ad with Olympic cyclist Sir Mark Cavendish proves it.

Having started in consumer marketing, I’ve always believed the highest compliment is when customers own your brand, like this example from Satispay, the Italian mobile wallet – “the patron saint, protecting artisans from banks.”

Figure 6 Photo credit, Alberto Dalmasso, CEO Satispay

Wirecard latest: fugitive COO Jan Marsalek has reportedly been spotted in Moscow. If you want to meet him, try the gym at the Swissôtel. Meanwhile, two former Wirecard execs have been convicted of fraud in Singapore.

PayPal accidentally “minted” $300 trillion of its PYUSD stablecoin, more than all US dollars in circulation. The company blamed a supplier for the glitch and swiftly cancelled the coins.

Visa has startled merchants by insisting on genuine data with Level 2 and 3 transactions. Many, it seems, had been submitting random tax and SKU information.

PayPal says 5 million Germans now use its POS payment app, which creates virtual Mastercard transactions debited from PayPal accounts. With an average transaction value of €28, it’s a genuine success. Less happily, PayPal is paying out €10 each to 1.5 million German customers after its August outage, a €15m apology.

And finally

Payment professionals start young in Poland. eService, the country’s largest acquirer, has been teaching kids from the local kindergarten how to use a payment terminal.

Where to find me

I’ll be at the the PSE Merchant Acquiring Conference in London on 4 November and MPE in Berlin 17-19 March 2026.

Last week, I spent two days in Venice at Checkout.com’s customer conference. It was a rare opportunity to see inside their strategy, hear real merchant feedback from 300 global, digital brands and ride a gondola. I came away rather impressed.

1. Checkout is scaling fast (but quietly)

Over the past five years, volumes have grown 8×, and the company is projecting $300 billion in processed volume in 2025, rising to $450 billion in 2026. This is well behind Stripe and Adyen (c.$1.3-1.4 trillion in 2024) but enough to position Checkout as a credible challenger to this emerging duopoly.

In 2024, 40 of Checkout’s merchants processed over $1 billion – roughly the same as Adyen – but in 2025, that number is expected to hit 60. Checkout’s net revenue was said to be up ~30% (though no deeper financials were shared) and the business has implied a $12 billion valuation via an employee share buyback. By comparison, Adyen is worth $55bn today.

Although Checkout competes most closely with Adyen, Stripe and, less frequently, Nuvei, I suspect that most of its volume growth comes from the legacy players. As a stark illustration of the gulf in performance in the payment market, Worldline processed $495bn in 2024 and has a market capitalisation of under €1bn. The fintechs are sweeping the board.

2. The payments landscape is getting more complex, providing more opportunity for Checkout. 

Global, digital merchants have an increasing number of alternative payment methods (APMs) to support – each with its own systems, rule and refund processes – more fraud vectors to defend against, and more pressure to optimise acceptance. Where there is complexity, there is margin and Checkout is clearly positioning itself as the toolkit for enterprise merchants to manage the often baffling trade-off between higher acceptance, lower fraud and reducing costs. 

3. From crypto roots to mainstream enterprise digital commerce

It was striking to hear how far Checkout has come. Its early life was built on crypto volume (notably via Binance), but Guillame Pousaz – founder and CEO – has wisely recognised that the volatility and reputational risk were harming Checkout’s long-term prospects. Today, Checkout has moved into the mainstream with clients including eBay, Delivery Hero, Sony and Sainsbury’s. Unusually for a payment business, Checkout remains 100% focused on enterprise and digital. Pousaz (below) still rules out offering POS or SME products. His strategy is global, high value – deep rather than broad – which still offers plenty of runway and keeps the product teams focused.

4. The customers are happy

As the Aperol Spritz flowed, I was able to speak to many of Checkout’s merchants. The praise was consistent: “Checkout has caught up with Stripe and Adyen on optimisation, but often offers better commercial terms and superior service.” Merchants told me that they had strong personal relationships with Checkout’s senior leaders and that their account teams took real responsibility for outcomes. Customers contrasted this with Stripe and Adyen whose one-size fits all approach can grate with the fast-changing needs of enterprise merchants. Checkout’s relational depth is rare at scale and it will need to work had to maintain this as it continues its fast paced growth into new geographies..

5. Acquiring is still the core

The bulk of Checkout’s revenue still comes via acquiring. The business has launched local acquiring in Japan and Canada, and is moving through regulatory milestones in the US. In particular, passing the preliminary regulatory review in Georgia (USA) was flagged as paving the way for an acquiring banking charter, enabling Checkout to compete as a full-stack PSP domestically. This would be a big win. Although the Checkout’s balance sheet and P&L remain private, clearance by the Atlanta Fed suggests no obvious red flags.

6. The product stack is now enterprise ready

Checkout is operating at a scale where its data lake is processing 2.3 petabytes, with 1 million new transaction data points per second. That enables AI-driven optimization at a serious scale. Some highlights:

• Flow (hosted checkout) is live in 190 countries, and is adopted by ~70% of new merchants, embedding 35 APs. It claims a 22% reduction in authentication friction over API-based alternatives.
• Remember Me is Checkout’s one-click solution (analogous to Stripe’s Link) which has tokenised 630 million cards in the past year. In merchant trials, it is delivering ~+7 ppt in conversion. Committed to a fully modular product set,  Checkout plans to allow merchants to use these token when processing third parties.
• Boost (the payment optimization engine) is processing ~10 million transactions daily. It reportedly increases acceptance by ~3 ppts via intelligent retries and, increasingly, with issuer partnerships. In tests, directly passing good transaction signals to issuers has reduced declines by ~2.5× (c.0.5 ppt net acceptance uplift).
• New merchant dashboards look very cool and support natural language querying (e.g. “how do I reduce declines on Mastercard business debit in Germany?”). We were told that guardrails are in place to prevent hallucinations although there is potential for disaster in the hands of junior employees. Despite the new dashboard, merchants told me they still spent most of their time sifting through the API / report-based workflows working on reconciliations. The first vendor that can automate reconciliations at scale will win the hearts of a tens of thousand heads of payments across the world.

7. Stablecoins not ready for prime time merchant payments

Despite strong buzz across fintech, there was consensus from merchants I spoke to that stablecoins are not yet ready for merchant acceptance in Europe. One large digital merchant told me it ran an extensive study and found no clear use case. The conclusion: stablecoin UX is clunky, regulation uneven, and dispute management unclear. With no strong consumer demand, this is one to put aside for next year. 

8. Agentic commerce is promising but very confusing

It’s no surprise that agentic commerce (enabling AI to act on behalf of shoppers) was much discussed. Checkout announced a pilot with a major UK retailer to place orders via Microsoft Co-Pilot but I suspect the bigger question isn’t technology, it’s business: who pays whom, and how value is shared between merchant, agent (Microsoft), and Checkout. Guillaume Pousaz was clear: Checkout’s interest is not in charging higher fees, but in enabling increased volume.

Merchants are cautious. With vendor announcements coming thick and fast, one very large global marketplace said: “If we have to integrate to 20 different platforms, adoption will stall.” But with 500M+ ChatGPT users globally, the pressure is mounting: AI recommendations (and how product feeds are exposed) may become as critical as SEO. 

9. Even payments veterans bond over hating PayPal

In quiet moments, heads of payments swap war stories. The subject that lit up the room? PayPal. As a consumer, I love PayPal and used it a number of times while I was in Venice but merchants feel otherwise. It remains deeply loathed: expensive, rigid, high operational burden; yet impossible to fully replace. While vendors normally focus on the latest technology trends, merchants spend most of their time dealing legacy friction in payments.