For the second successive year, I moderated a panel on modular payments at the MPE conference in Berlin. We are tracking the shift in enterprise buying behaviour for payments from taking a full stack service from a single PSP to something that increasingly looks like a mix and match set of cloud infrastructure.
Maria Parpou (EVP, Merchant Cloud, Mastercard) explained that managing payments is becoming more complex – more PSPs, more schemes, more territories, more channels and more alternative payment methods – while profit margins are declining in many retail categories. Her view was that any decision about modularity should be driven by outcomes, not architecture. For merchants, the priorities remain constant: availability, authorisation rates, and helping the business grow. Mastercard’s Merchant Cloud is one response: a composable platform offering acquiring, gateway, tokenization and fraud services under a single contract, with the flexibility to add 3rd party partners.
Chris von den Hoff (Enterprise Sales, Payrails) took this further, arguing that modular infrastructure is a prerequisite for “intelligent payments.” The real blocker today is fragmented data across multiple PSPs and legacy internal systems. Payrails positions itself as the connective layer, normalising data, enabling orchestration, and increasingly automating operational workflows like reconciliation and chargebacks. Chris explained that merchants don’t ask for modularity – they ask Payrails to help fix approval rates, reduce costs, or expand internationally.
From the merchant side, Fiennes Davy (Group Head of Payments, Kingfisher) offered a useful counterpoint. Kingfisher, despite its scale, is prioritising simplification over orchestration. With regulatory changes like PSD3 looming, the choice is often binary: take on the complexity of getting as license – especially for any merchant running a marketplace – or outsource to a smaller number of strategic partners. It’s clear that for many merchants, modularity is not an immediate priority.
The conclusion? The stack will remain mixed. Some merchants will consolidate with a single supplier that does everything. Others will opt for a set of modular services, some built in-house, others delivered from the cloud. I suspect the real battleground will be who controls the data.
At Pay360, I moderated a panel on payment data – we’re talking about the information contained within and the meta data surrounding a transaction. While, payment data is becoming central to how businesses operate, there’s a risk of overstating its role.
Steve Bisoffi of Revolut was pretty clear: “No viable, sustainable business can operate without detailed payments data.” At Revolut, payments are monitored continuously across dashboards tracking growth, fraud, disputes and performance. Without that visibility, “you don’t really understand how your business is operating.”
I agree but only up to a point.
Payment data is extremely powerful when it comes to improving payments themselves: acceptance, fraud, routing, cost and customer experience. But it is not, and cannot provide a complete view of the business.
Merchants’ real systems of record sit elsewhere – in CRM, ERP and ePOS systems. That’s where you find SKU-level detail, customer identity, promotions and margin. Payment data, by contrast, tells you where and when a transaction happened, but not what was bought or why.
Much of the discussion on the panel focused on using payment data to drive wider business outcomes. Sophie Wadsworth of BNY (Bank of New York) described how payments have shifted from cost centre to revenue driver, with use cases ranging from cashflow optimisation to reducing churn from failed payments.
But even here, the value of payment data is often indirect. It improves conversion by reducing failure rates. It improves cash visibility. It supports forecasting. It is a helpful complement to core commercial data but of limited value on its own.
Where payment data really is valuable is in fixing payments. And fixing payments can deliver quick improvements to any merchant’s bottom line.
Phil O’Hagan of Sainsbury’s gave a good example. Analysis of re-authorisation behaviour showed customers repeatedly triggering new payment requests when adding small items to their basket. By adjusting tolerance rules, Sainsbury’s reduced friction, cut contact centre calls by around 2.5 million, and saved a lot of money.
This is best practice payments optimisation: small changes, driven by data, delivering outsized operational impact.
The same applies at scale. Mastercard’s John Wheeler said the network was using data to improve acceptance rates and guide acquirers. Tokenisation, he suggested, could reach near 100% globally by 2030, another example of data driving better payment outcomes. Yes, payment data can help merchants decide where to open stores or better understand share of wallet, but these use cases remain relatively niche.
For merchants, the actual challenge is integrating payment data with their systems of record and those of their partners.
David McGuiness of FoodHub highlighted the importance of linking payments with POS data so that “they speak to each other.” Only by combining these datasets do you get a complete picture of the business. He also highlighted the challenge of getting FoodHub’s restaurant partners to take advantage of the intelligence offered.
This integration challenge has important implications for vendors.
First, data is now a core part of the product. PSPs cannot compete on price and acceptance alone. The quality, granularity and accessibility of data are becoming key selection criteria and, merchants tell me, increasingly reasons for churn. A very large merchant (not represented on this panel) told me his acquirer still provides management information via a monthly spreadsheet and invoicing on a pdf.
Second, generic dashboards are no longer enough. As Charles Aji of Collinson noted, fragmented PSP data creates internal friction and “revenue leakage” when issues are spotted too late. Many merchants are responding by building their own data layers, aggregating data across PSPs and enriching it with their own systems. With the adoption of AI coding tools, this is now much easier than it used to be. Charles had expected to buy a payment dashboard from an established vendor but his tech team has done what’s needed at a fraction of the cost.
If merchants like Collinson are building their own data capability, PSPs will find it ever harder to demonstrate the competitive differentiation needed to escape being just a pipe connecting merchants to schemes.
Finally, there is a growing expectation of real-time, actionable data across the ecosystem. Steve Bisoffi called for greater transparency from Visa and Mastercard, particularly around fees and data quality issues. Better data sharing could improve acceptance, reduce fraud and enhance customer experience.
Payment data is increasingly critical to making payments work and increasingly central to how merchants choose their partners. Vendors need to get the basics right, but not oversell the ability of payments data to do more than make payments better.
2025 results from the leading payment players show continued consolidation. The large, modern processors are taking share from incumbents and, more importantly, winning the fast-growing merchants of the future.
Stripe’s volume grew 34% in 2025 to $1.9 trillion – an astonishing $500bn of incremental volume. Even so, that is equivalent to just 2% of global Visa and Mastercard volume, so Stripe has plenty of room to grow.
The merchants onboarded last year are Stripe’s fastest-growing cohort ever, which management suggests could reflect “a larger inflection in entrepreneurship and creativity facilitated by advances in large language models.” Yes, it’s AI again already.
Stripe’s CEO took to Youtube to read his annual shareholder letter out loud. It’s twenty minutes well spent.
Simon Taylor explains why it would be a great deal for Stripe – something involving stablecoins that was beyond me but worth a read if you understand these things. A private equity bid seems more plausible: sell Venmo and Braintree and run the remaining PayPal business for cash.
Checkout.com also reported a monster year, with volume up 64% to “over $300bn.” According to the CEO’s annual letter, the company is now EBITDA positive “with no adjustments.” Checkout remains private and offshore, so the detailed numbers are not public. Unlike Stripe, Checkout focuses exclusively on enterprise merchants, including 63 customers each processing over $1bn, up from 39 in 2024.
Like many PSPs, Checkout is leaning heavily into AI. Internally, AI now automates 100% of rejected transaction distribution and is expected to handle 50% of support volume by 2026. Customers will also be reassured to learn that a “proprietary hierarchical contextual multi-armed bandit algorithm” decides how transactions are routed for the best chance of success. Every PSP needs one of those.
Back in the real economy, Adyen continues to outperform its omni-channel competitors. Reported 2025 volume was hit by the loss of Cash App processing in the US, but the underlying business remains very strong. Revenue grew 21% to €2.4bn, with EBITDA margins still above 50%.
Adyen is generating serious cash – €1bn in free cashflow with €5bn sitting on the balance sheet – and may soon have to choose between acquisitions or paying a dividend. Fintechs hate paying dividends; it makes them feel old.
Adyen remains the go-to vendor for multi-country, multi-channel merchants. It recently rolled out terminals across 943 Starbucks stores in the UK, Austria and Switzerland in just seven weeks, impressively completing the migration during working hours. The terminals support store-and-forward, allowing transactions to process (at Starbucks’ risk) even if connectivity drops. Adyen says 45,000 sales have already been saved in the first few months of operation
In Europe, Adyen’s revenue is catching up with the two major incumbents – Worldline and Nexi – and is now slightly ahead of Global Payments.
Nexi reported solid results. Merchant solutions revenue rose 2% in H2 2025, with strong growth in Germany offset by merchant losses to Worldline in Italy and ongoing e-commerce weakness in Poland. Like Adyen, Nexi has surplus cash. Unlike Adyen, it is happy to return value to shareholders, increasing its dividend by 20% – a 9% yield at today’s share price
At Worldline, the spring clean continues. After selling its North American operations and PaymentIQ, the company has now divested its Indian business to BillDesk for €60m. This looks sensible – Worldline was unlikely to achieve scale in India and the proceeds help strengthen the balance sheet.
But the 2025 numbers are still painful. Merchant services revenue fell 1.4% to €3.2bn, while adjusted EBITDA dropped 20% to €624m. There are some early positives from the turn-around. Payment volume grew 3% in Q4, with growth returning in the Nordics, Germany and Switzerland. Worldline also announced a further €290m write-down on its Ingenico preference shares, now valued at zero.
Figure 1 Source: Reuters
Global Payments reported its final quarter before consolidating Worldpay’s operations. European revenue reached €300bn in Q4, up 6%, with strong contributions from the former EVO businesses in Poland and Greece acquired in 2023.
Global has begun integrating its European operations with Worldpay, which brings a strong enterprise e-commerce customer base but has been losing share in its UK SMB heartland to Dojo and others. Much will depend on the successful rollout of Genius – Global’s Clover competitor – across UK and European SMB channels, starting with Germany and Ireland.
Dropping down a tier, VR Payments is one incumbent gaining market share. The payments arm of the German co-operative banks reported sparkling 2024 results. Volume rose 38% to €6.1bn across 312,000 terminals. Net revenue jumped 252% to €73m, while net profit increased from €2m to €7m.
Also in Sweden, Swedbank has separated its merchant services division as – guess what – Swedbank Pay, serving 65,000 merchants across Scandinavia.
Meanwhile the story around Guavapay is becoming clearer. Mastercard was reportedly pursuing £11m millions in unpaid debts, while the UK FCA had identified that around a whopping 10% of its transactions were scams. See below. Blimey.
In corporate news, Corpay is selling PayByPhone for an undisclosed amount just two years after acquiring the business from Volkswagen for about $300m. PayByPhone operates a parking payment app across the UK, France, Switzerland, Germany and North America, generating roughly $100m in annual revenue. However, its consumer focus increasingly sat outside Corpay’s B2B payments strategy.
The team at Reward will be delighted with a $230m cash exit to Dan Wagner’s Rezolve AI. Reward is the only European company to turn card-linked offers into a profitable model and has strong relationships with banks and retailers in the UK. Even so, loyalty is notoriously difficult to scale. After twenty years in business, Reward generated £2m operating profit on £53m revenue in FY24.
That price represents a striking multiple for Reward’s shareholders. Rezolve’s long-suffering investors, whose stock has fallen from $10 at flotation to $2.70 today, may have questions. If you can make sense of Rezolve’s press release, do let me know
Turning to embedded lending, Flowpay, the Czech merchant cash advance (MCA) provider, has acquired Tapline in Germany (terms undisclosed). Tapline provides short-term lending to subscription businesses secured against recurring revenues from platforms such as Stripe, Recurly, Chargebee and QuickBooks. This complements Flowpay’s more retail-focused integrations, including Shoptet and Shopify.
Expect a blockbuster IPO in Warsaw as Blik prepares for a €2bn flotation. The mobile payment standard now has more than 20m active users in Poland and accounts for 60% of online transactions by value. Blik’s net revenue equates to roughly 0.17% of transaction value (around €0.06 per transaction). The system is owned by a consortium of Polish banks, with Mastercard also a key shareholder.
In fundraising news APEXX Global, the London-based payment orchestrator, is raising a further $10m. Growth will need to accelerate to justify the additional capital, but management points to new travel clients including Jet2, Iglu.com and Norse Atlantic. 2024 results show an operating loss of £6.9m on revenue up 21% to £5.7m. Merchants will be interested to note that 38% of APEXX revenue comes from commission payments from acquirers.
Silverflow, the Amsterdam-based provider of outsourced card processing for fintechs, PSPs and smaller acquirers, has raised $40m. The company plans to increase headcount from 85 to 120, focusing on product development and expansion in the US and Southeast Asia. Management claims almost $100bn annually processed for customers including Buckaroo, Bolt and payabl. Latest accounts show 2024 revenue tripling to €3.2m, so there is clearly still a long road ahead.
The payment world is gathering in Berlin next week for the 2026 MPE conference and the organisers are offering a small discount for readers of Business of Payments (see below).
This year’s start-up competition looks particularly interesting. I’ll be rooting for Inqyre, which uses AI to orchestrate onboarding and scheme compliance for ISOs, PSPs and acquirers. Inqyre is currently building its MVP in partnership with large PSP and expects to begin onboarding customers later this year. I’ve made a small investment. It’s my first and I’ll let you know how we get on.
America’s unexpected attack on Iran has reinforced concerns about European payment sovereignty. Politicians increasingly believe the continent is too dependent on an unreliable ally.
Europe’s response is threefold: the rollout of wero, the payment wallet developed by EPI, a Franco-German-Benelux consortium of banks; the digital euro, expected from the ECB around 2029; and continued investment in local debit schemes such as Girocard and Carte Bancaire.
British banks are now uneasy. “If Visa and Mastercard were turned off, it would send us back to the 1950s,” one told a newspaper. The banks see an opportunity to regain control of domestic payments and are reportedly considering launching a competitor to Vocalink. Visa and Mastercard are expected to participate, so the initiative may prove less revolutionary than it sounds.
#werowatch
Wero, the mobile payment service built on SEPA Instant, is starting to gain momentum. The scheme launched with 50m users, largely inherited from iDEAL (Netherlands), Payconiq (Belgium) and Paylib (France), although Wero has already added 8m German users of its own.
Bank support is also strengthening. Commerzbank has rejoined Wero, having walked out in 2022 when the project still planned to build an expensive new card scheme. Many banks, including the German Sparkassen, are now actively promoting wero.
According to the unofficial werotracker, 17 merchants are now live – up from six last month – with another 29 announcing plans to accept Wero. The platform’s 50m users can use wero online at Ahold Delhaize, the first Belgian retailer to support the scheme. POS payment should follow in 2027.
Dutch merchants, accustomed to some of the lowest payment fees in Europe, are less enthusiastic about wero’s ad valorem pricing as it replaces iDEAL. Wero does, however, introduce features previously unavailable with iDEAL including subscriptions, chargebacks and pre-authorisations.
Farewell Lyf Pay. Despite backing from the French establishment – BNP Paribas, Crédit Mutuel, Groupe Casino and Auchan – the QR-based payment and loyalty wallet never gained meaningful traction. After burning through at least €180m, the project is being shut down. Meanwhile, a leading Australian retailer has also given up on QR code payments saying “shifting consumer behaviour in a heavy tap and pay market to scanning a QR code is hard and real blocker of true future scale.”
The lesson is familiar. Building a beautiful payment product is easy; getting people to use it is much harder.
ISV
Software vendors have become valuable distribution partners for payment processors. ISVs typically take 30–50% of net revenue but churn is very low, keeping customer acquisition costs down for everyone.
It is probably too early to panic. The predicted “SaaS-pocalypse” has yet to arrive. Take Shopify, the world’s largest eCommerce platform for small businesses. Merchants processed $248bn through Shop Pay in 2025, up 37% year on year. Shop Pay runs on Stripe.
Retail and restaurant software vendors that supply hardware have an additional switching barrier.
One example is Epos Now, the UK-based retail and hospitality ISV. The company reported another strong year in 2024/25: revenue up 35% to £113m and operating profit up 53% to £10m. More than half of sales now come from Europe, with strong growth also reported in the US and Asia-Pacific. The company recently paid its founder a £3m dividend and is hiring 150 additional staff in Norwich to support expansion.
There is still significant room for payments growth. Around 80% of Epos Now revenue comes from software subscriptions, compared with 33% at Lightspeed Commerce and 15% at Toast. That makes Epos Now an obvious M&A target for the large processors.
Although many bundles look similar, software companies that sell payments command much higher valuations than payment companies that sell software. Andrew Dresdner highlights Toast and Shift4. Both process similar volumes and focus on restaurants, yet Toast, the native software platform, is valued at roughly three times Shift4.
New shopping
The demise of Amazon Go probably says more about Amazon’s convenience-store merchandising than about the future of the technology. Autonomous stores are thriving where they make retail sense, typically as walk-in vending machines rather than full supermarkets.
In Poland, Żabka Nano already operates around 50 such stores. No app required. Simply tap your payment card at the entrance.
In the US, VenHub has gone a step further. Customers order through an app that geo-locates them, and robots prepare the order just as they arrive at the store. VenHub says it costs about $150k to build one of these units, which sell for $275–300k. Nice business.
Agentic Commerce
No technology is moving faster than agentic commerce, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with the announcements and new acronyms. The big unanswered question for payments is who controls checkout when agents start making purchases.
Stripe has helpfully mapped five levels of agentic commerce. To stay on trend, I asked ChatGPT to turn the framework into a graphic (see below). Stripe believes we are currently somewhere between stages one and two, although it admits that “there’s no forecasting exactly where agentic commerce will be by the end of 2026.”
Adyen’s management, in typically down-to-earth Dutch style, said: “At the moment the number of agentic transactions is still immaterial on our platform… it’s not going to drive short-term revenues… and it’s not a big part of our 2026 expectations.”
Shopify reports that shoppers are experimenting with AI-powered search, but only about a dozen of its 6m merchants are actually selling through AI tools so far. Shopify says the bottleneck lies with the AI platforms themselves, which have been slow to build usable merchant tools. OpenAI, for example, currently manually onboards each Shopify merchant.
As a result, OpenAI has reportedly abandoned plans for direct checkout inside the chat interface. Instead, transactions will be routed through third-party retail apps connected to its platform.
Agentic commerce may eventually transform retail but for now it looks more like AI-powered product discovery than AI-driven purchasing.
Openbanking
Growth in UK open banking payments slowed again in January. Around 30m payments were made, up 40% year-on-year. Even so, 2026 does not yet look like the year of open banking. Pay-by-bank still struggles with low consumer awareness, lack of retail bank support and limited merchant incentives compared with cards.
Many in the industry are pinning their hopes on VRPs (variable recurring payments) — the open banking equivalent of direct debit. These should get a boost as GoCardless, the UK’s largest direct debit provider (and soon to be acquired by Mollie), recently won a contract with Octopus Energy covering 5.5m mandates totalling £12bn annually. One attraction for Octopus is that GoCardless can process its 30,000 weekly customer refunds far faster than the current provider.
In corporate news, finAPI, the German open banking platform, reported revenue up 23% to €7m in 2024, with a net profit of €129k. That makes it something of an outlier compared with the structurally unprofitable UK open banking sector. FinAPI, now owned by the acquisitive Italian fintech Fabrik, says it processes around €7bn of payments each month and charges roughly €0.14 + 0.5% per transaction.
It’s surprising that anyone still uses cheques, but Germans wrote almost 2m in 2024. That will soon end as cheques are scheduled to disappear by 2027. In France, the government will also stop accepting cheques for tax payments and close its last public processing centre.
Citrini’s arguments are open to debate, particularly its claim that AI agents will move commerce to stablecoins, destroying the card schemes’ business model. I’m not convinced. More likely they will choose Amex for the rewards.
Mastercard deserves credit for its commitment to phasing out PANs in Europe by 2030. I’m less sure the announcement required this video. I hope Peter Schmeichel was well paid.
Where to find me
I’ll be in Berlin 17-19 March for MPE. You’ll find me chairing a roundtable of software/payment convergence and sitting on the payment infrastructure panel. Next, I’ll be moderating a discussion on the business case for payment data at Pay360 in London on 26 March.
There’s been no shortage of commentary about what’s gone wrong at PayPal. Volume growth has stalled, the CEO has been fired and the stock price collapsed following the Q4 results. A weak performance in Germany, where PayPal is the leading eCommerce payment brand, is particularly bad news. Germans normally fund PayPal from a bank transfer not a credit card. This makes Germany a very profitable market for PayPal. The CFO explained: “Our German growth has moderated due to macroeconomic softness, normalization of our long-standing market leadership position and competition from alternative payment methods.”
Worldline’s new CEO indicated he was open to selling further assets. The struggling Paris-based processor will now focus on its European core businesses. The JV with ANZ Bank in Australia would likely be high on the list for sale. He ruled out a merger with Nexi saying “I don’t see for Worldline any priority for further complementary mergers.”
Global Payments completed its acquisition of Worldpay which creates the world’s largest merchant acquirer. The combined business will process a whopping $3.7 trillion from 6m merchant locations. I’m told this is very much a takeover. Global Payments executives are in charge and the Worldpay name will likely disappear.
PagoNxt, Santander’s payment business which operates in Spain, Portugal and Latin America, is now consistently profitable, generating a record €97m operating income in Q4 2025. Payment volume was up 8.5% to €64bn.
PayPoint plc has published its Q3 update including poor results from its UK ISO business. Net revenue fell 3% and volume was down 7%. Management blames “lower than anticipated consumer spending patterns” but “stronger than anticipated competition for SME merchants” might be more accurate.
MPE 2026
If you only make one payments conference this 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.
This year, I’ll be moderating a panel discussion on payment infrastructure – build vs buy – and hosting a roundtable on software/payment convergence.
Farewell Lyf Pay. The French QR code mobile payment/loyalty wallet looked beautiful but despite blue chip backers including BNP Paribas, Crédit Mutuel, Groupe Casino and Auchan Retail, Lyf Pay never gained much traction and burned through at least €180m. Conclusion: it’s easy to build a wonderful new payment product but much harder to get people to use it.
In corporate news, Corpay is selling PaybyPhone to Lightyear Capital for an undisclosed sum just two years after buying the business from Volkswagen for c.$300m. Paybyphone, a pay-for-parking service operating in UK, France, Switzerland, Germany and North America generates c.$100m annual revenues but its consumer-proposition was looking increasingly peripheral to Corpay’s B2B focus.
Euronet has bought the merchant acquiring business of CrediaBank, the fifth largest bank in Greece. Terms were not disclosed. The sale also includes 20,000 merchants, 2,500 ATMs, issuer processing and a long-term distribution agreement for merchant services through the bank’s branch network. This looks like a very good deal for Euronet. There are clear synergies in merging Credia Bank’s portfolio with ePay, Euronet’s existing Greek business which was based on the acquisition of 200,000 merchants from Piraeus Bank in 2022.
Guavapay latest. The failed London fintech is now in liquidation with an official receiver appointed to salvage what they can for the creditors. Mastercard is owed £17m but my sympathies are with the staff who weren’t paid for September or October. Guavapay’s founder resigned citing “fatigue and health related reasons” but the London-based management has many questions to answer about this mess. To her credit, Laura McCracken – former Chair and then CEO – has answered some of them in response to my post on LinkedIn
In fundraising news, APEXX Global, the London-based payment orchestrator, has raised an additional $10m. APEXX has been winning travel clients recently including et2, Iglu.com and Norse Atlantic. The company’s most recent results show revenue rising 21% in 2024 to £5.7m with an operating loss of £6.9m. Merchants will be interested to note that 38% of sales come from commission payments from acquirers.
Mews, Czech by origin but based in Amsterdam, has raised $300m to support its hotel software suite. Mews processes $20bn annually from 15,000 merchants and the business case is very much payment-powered. In 2024, Mews made 75% of its €209m revenue from transaction-related sales, mostly from commissions on payment processing. Mews is a payment facilitator – handling onboarding and risk – but transactions end up with Adyen and Stripe as acquirers.
Klearly, an Amsterdam-based restaurant payments vendor selling through partnerships with ISVs, has raised an additional €12m. Klearly has a stellar line of up backers including PayPal, and the new money will help fund expansion to Italy.
This has put added pressure on both Wero (a mobile wallet linked to SEPA instant payments) and the digital euro as strategic programmes that will help reduce dependence on Visa, Mastercard and PayPal. The UK evidently doesn’t share these fears and has extended its contract with Mastercard to run Faster Payments, the domestic inter-bank payment network.
Werowatch
Wero, commercialised by the European Payment Initiative (EPI), is certainly making good progress. The helpful werotracker website shows 50 banks in France, Belgium and Germany now supporting live transactions. New banks and PSP announcements are coming thick and fast, most recently Deutsche Bank, Postbank and Mollie. And iDEAL, the ubiquitous Dutch online payment scheme, is already rebranding as wero as you can see in this glossy commercial.
How much has wero cost so far? The FZ blog estimates that EPI’s (a consortium of European banks plus Nexi and Worldline) have put up €670m of capital. EPI made an operating loss of €55m in 2024 and wrote down a further €41m, thought to be related to its investment in Payconiq. There is plenty of money left in the bank.
Wero has signed an agreement with four national schemes – Bancomat (Italy), Bizum (Spain), MB Way (Portugal) and Vipps (Nordics) – to accelerate inter-operability. If successful, this could give Europe a credible cross-border merchant payment capability for the first time. Plans are moving quickly. Co-operation will be based on the creation of an “interoperability hub” operated by a new entity established by this summer. P2P payments are schedule to be available by Christmas with merchant payments coming in 2027.
The digital euro is currently stuck in political ping-pong between the European Parliament and Council. Centre-right and centre-left MEPs can’t agree whether it should only work offline or whether there should be online functionality too. The European Central Bank is planning to pilot the digital euro in 2027 with a full launch in 2029. The ECB estimates it will cost €1.3bn to develop the new currency and will incur c.€320m in annual running costs. The first of its expected 100 staff are being recruited now.
Scheming
Combined Mastercard and Visa volume in Europe (measured in euros not in depreciating dollars) is growing at c.8% compared with a consistent low-teens rate over the last three years.
The slowdown is clear but why? Here’s what Business of Payments readers think.
After the UK left the EU, the card schemes took back control of Interchange paid by British merchants on eCommerce transactions to EU cardholders and increased it from 0.3% to 1.50%. This is now costing British merchants an extra £150-£200m annually. The regulator wants to reintroduce an Interchange cap and just won a court case brought by Mastercard, Visa and Revolut who were trying to keep Interchange high.
Across Europe, the newer, mobile-centric local schemes are certainly performing well as shown by Marcin Mazurek in this report. Poland’s Blik, in which Mastercard has invested, is the star.
Ireland has been lacking a domestic mobile payment scheme but now welcomes Zippay. Built byNexi and based on Pago Bancomat, Zippy will go live on St Patrick’s Day, 17 March. The local banks supporting Zippay hope it can help them fight off Revolut which is particularly strong in Ireland.
Payments and software are now inextricably linked. Evidence of the shift is mounting. Tidemark’s 2025 Vertical and SMB SaaS Benchmark Reportfinds that 87% of vertical software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors now offer payments, up from previous years, with 31% forcing merchants to take their preferred processor. The median attachment rate has jumped from 23% to 40%.
Lightspeed, the Canadian restaurant software vendor moved quickly to incorporate payments in its standard product. Lightspeed Pay (Adyen behind the scenes) offers integrated payments to customers in UK, France and Germany. Total European revenue (software plus payments) was up 21% in Q4 following the recruitment of 150 sales reps “going city by city.” Lightspeed targets the more complex restaurants and says it consistently makes 40bps net revenue from payment processing.
One reason that Adyen wins software distribution partnerships is the depth of its financial services proposition. Fresha, an ISV serving salons and spas, has chosen Adyen to provide embedded lending to its 140,000 customers worldwide, including UK, Netherlands, Finland and Sweden. This is merchant cash advance. Repayments are taken from the daily card settlement.
There could be trouble ahead. Investors have started worrying that AI will kill the market for vertical software such as retail and restaurant point of sale. Why would merchants rent expensive packaged software from an ISV when AI can write them customised code that does exactly what they need?
A collapse in packaged vertical software would close off this distribution channel for payments. What would replace ISVs? Maybe there’s space for an AI friendly marketplace of payment integrations.
Most people think that new shopping is about speed. Maybe’s it’s the opposite. A Dutch supermarket is having success with “chat lanes” at which shoppers are encouraged to slow down and talk with staff and each other.
Amazon has also given up on palm payments in “response to limited customer adoption.”This isn’t suprising. There are a few use cases for biometric payments – saunas, swimming pools etc – but only where people don’t have their phones with them. Palm payments will never be a mass-market thing.
Agentic Commerce
Agentic commerce is moving faster than a monthly newsletter can cover. The pace of adoption of this new technology has been stunning.
Merchants are faced with some difficult questions. Agentic commerce could drive profitable new business as Adobe shows in its very helpful quarterly AI traffic report. AI initiated shopping converts at higher rates and delivers 30% larger basket size.
But in agentic commerce, retailers no longer compete on who has the best brand and website; they compete on who is most legible, trusted, and valuable to AI agents. This requires them to expose their product catalogue, pricing file and promotions logic which could mean giving away all competitive differentiation and advantage.
This is why Amazon won’t allow agents to access its data. Nor will eBay, which has updated its user agreement to ban “buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review”.
The AI companies and their platform partners understand the value they bring and smaller merchants may not be allowed a choice. For example, Shopify has begun asking 4% extra commission on sales made via OpenAI powered checkouts. It’s not yet clear how this would be shared between Shopify and OpenAI.
Product round-up
Stripe has won payments processing at Currys, a British electrical chain with 300 stores, marking its first major omni-channel retail client in Europe. Freedom Pay is providing terminals and transaction routing. The Stripe/Freedom Pay partnership could be the first credible challenger to Adyen’s multi-market omni-channel dominance in Europe.
Polcard (Fiserv’s Polish unit) has equipped 400 reverse vending machines. Tap your card and get instant payment for recycling.
Age verification is always a challenge for self-checkout. Voltox, a Swiss-German start-up, has a slick integration with Android terminals that proves you are old enough to buy alcohol. Here you can see it working on a Castles device.
The European landscape is littered with failed card-linked loyalty vendors such as Bink (UK) and Izicap (France). It’s a business model that promises easy collaboration between merchants and potential customers but has proven almost impossible to make money from.
London-based Krowd may be the first card-linking vendor to reach a sustainable business model. Krowd, which came through the Techstars accelerator, has a restaurant-focused loyalty proposition and powers rewards platforms for American Express and Revolut. Krowd uses the payment account reference (PAR) as the unique identifier that recognises consumers across channels.
SoftPOS
SoftPOS is the technology that allows any Android or iOS device to take card payments. Originally conceived as a way of enabling a long tail of micro-merchants, SoftPOS is proving more exciting for large enterprises. Here are two examples:
Worldline is supplying SoftPOS to Poland’s intercity rail network. The train guards will no longer need to carry a separate payment terminal and can take payments on their existing Zebra handheld computers instead. 1,367 integrated devices are already in use, making 315,000 transactions in the first month of operation.
California-HQ’d Magic Cube, a SoftPOS vendor, has raised $10m for its continued expansion. Verifone is one of the investors. Magic Cube powers Dojo’s SoftPOS product which is claimed to be one of Europe’s largest SoftPOS implementations.
Open banking
UK residents typically make 2.3bn card transactions and 400m direct debits each month. In December 2025, they made just 35m open banking payments. Open banking has a long way to go.
Industry players are pinning their hopes on commercial variable recurring payments(cVRPs) which could replace card-on-file and direct debits. If they did, this would deliver significant volumes. But today, banks cannot charge for open banking payments and so have no incentive to promote them. UK Finance, a trade body, has published its proposals for a pricing structure which, it says, should be ad valorem and include consumer protection.
The report is careful not to recommend an actual number. That would be a red flag for the competition authorities. But reading between the lines, here’s my take:
It appears that the industry wants the regulator to land on a fee of around 20bps for cVRPs. This would be cheaper than debit which has a base cost of c.30 bps including scheme fees. I’d also expect a cap of £1 or £2 per transaction and the ability for large merchants to negotiate bilateral deals with banks. The question now passes to a series of backroom discussion between the UK’s overly complex landscape of regulators and industry bodies.
There’s no indication yet of stablecoins becoming mainstream for merchant payments, either for consumers to make eCommerce purchases or for merchants to be settled transactions.
Visa, which has invested heavily in stablecoin acceptance and settlement, sees applications for treasury management in developing markets but “we don’t see a lot of product market fit in developed digital payment markets like the United States or like the U.K. or Europe for stablecoin payments.” This is backed up by news that Shopify has processed just $600K in USDC (the leading stable coin) since launching in June 2025.
Stablecoin advocates throw out some very big numbers but it’s worth remembering that most of the activity supports trading in and out of crypto currencies. Jeremy Light calculates that just 7% of reported stablecoin volume is used to facilitate transactions. In December 2025, there were 376m transactions at an ATV of $751.
Crypto – stable and unstable – can’t shake off its association with crime, money laundering and tax evasion.
A crypto-exchange based in Caracas called Kontigo has been helping locals evade sanctions. I know. You’re shocked such as thing could happen. You’ll be more shocked at the US fintech establishment folks – Y Combinator, JP Morgan and Stripe – who were up to their eyeballs in this mess. Great reporting from Jason Mikula and Fintech Business Weekly.
Happy New Year and welcome to the first Business of Payments for 2026.
The payment business
We ended 2025 with news that Mollie, the well-funded Dutch payment facilitator, is buying GoCardless, the London-based A2A specialist. The price is €1.1bn in stock, a rather generous 7x multiple of GoCardless’s 2024 revenues. The combined group is valued at €4.1bn and will serve 350,000 customers, mainly in Benelux and the UK.
GoCardless is growing quickly – sales were up 41% to £132m in 2024 – but is losing money and in need of capital despite having raised a total of $600m. Swapping GoCardless equity for Mollie’s stock looks sensible for GoCardless shareholders. It is less obvious why Mollie’s investors should be enthusiastic. Mollie is also growing fast, but with a clearer path to profitability and a stronger balance sheet. Building A2A capability internally would almost certainly have been cheaper than paying the equivalent of €11,000 per GoCardless merchant.
Worldline’s dismal 2025 ended with some welcome good news. New management is making progress in tidying the portfolio and bolstering the French processor’s shaky balance sheet. Worldline has sold PaymentIQ, a gaming-focused multi-acquirer gateway, is the latest sale demerged for €160m much needed capital. Worldline will miss the cashflow. PaymentIQ is remarkably profitable, generating €40m of adjusted EBITDA on €50m of revenue.
Worldline’s asset sales now total over €500m. Combined with the €500m equity injection announced in November, the company’s finances look far healthier than at the start of the year. The new chief executive has promised no further acquisitions, saying the priority is to restore cash generation.
Nexi doesn’t need yet more platforms to consolidate. Sabadell, however, faces a dilemma. Paycomet is a great business, processing €54bn of volume for 380,000 merchants but needs investment to compete with Dojo and other modern PSPs. Yet options for banks to find acquiring partners are dwindling as other options – Fiserv, Global Payments and Worldline – remain distracted by their own problems.
MPE 2026
If you only do one payments 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.
Car commerce looks appealing on strategy slides but disappoints in practice. JP Morgan bought Volkswagen’s payments business for a “low to middle double-digit million” sum in 2021 but has now shut it down, cutting 33 jobs in Luxembourg. Drivers want to dock their phones and pay with familiar methods, not turn their cars into payment platforms.
Barclaycard Payments, the UK’s second-largest acquirer has surprised the market by terminating its e-commerce gateway customers.
Merchants have been told that ePDQ, Barclays’ version of Worldline’s ancient Ogone gateway, will be switched off at the end of March. Barclays is also cancelling the associated merchant accounts which means customers moving to alternative gateways must apply for new MIDs, inviting churn at a time when retention matters.
For non-UK readers, PDQ is an acronym meaning “process data quickly” or “pretty damned quick”. Barclays’ new management, hired by Brookfield, the private equity giant, will need to do just that to contain the fallout.
Ingenico’s debt was downgraded again following a 9% fall in first half 2025 revenues. S&P warns that sharp declines in sales of Tetra products have not been offset by growth in Android devices, raising the risk of covenant breaches in 2026.
Since being taken private by Advent in 2024, myPOS, the SME-focused mPOS vendor, has been acquisitive. It’s been on a spree, buying ISOs and ISVs across Europe. Deals include Toporder, a French retail-software vendor and UTP, a UK ISO bought for €76m, the latter a steep price for a business earning £2.2m of operating profit on £11m of revenue. MyPOS’s latest purchase is Germany’s Lavego. Terms were not disclosed, but the deal looks strategically sound for myPOS – adding 70,000 terminals, multiple POS protocols including fuel, an Android payments app and Girocard acceptance.https://youtu.be/EL56zp2nAbc
Sunday Payments, the QR-based pay-at-table provider, has raised a further $21m, following a $100m round in 2021. The company says profitability is “very near”. Having relocated from Paris to Atlanta, Sunday now processes $4bn a year across 3,000 restaurant locations in France, the UK and the United States. While it competes with firms such as Toast for payments, Sunday positions itself as a front-of-house product, with growth focused on CRM and loyalty.
Flatpay, Europe’s latest fintech unicorn, has raised $170m to support its rapid expansion. Investors now include Paolo Maldini, the former Italian footballer. Based in Denmark, the company has since expanded into Germany, Finland, France, Italy and the UK, and claims 60,000 merchants for its a simple POS payments bundle combining transparent pricing, digital-led distribution and hands-on onboarding. Annualised revenues have reached €140m. Management boldly forecasts $500m ARR sales by the end of 2026 which would make Flatpay bigger than Mollie and GoCardless combined.
SumUp reports it is preparing for an IPO. The numbers are impressive: 4m merchants served in 37 markets, 1.5m active business account users and €1bn customer deposits.
2026 will be a pivotal year for Wero, the wallet being developed by a consortium of banks under the European Payments Initiative. Central to Europe’s ambitions for payment sovereignty, Wero ends 2025 having made solid progress in recruiting banks and building an acceptance network.
PSPs will distribute the product as “acquirers”. Recent additions include Airwallex, Unzer, PPRO and Raiffeisen, the latter extending Wero’s reach into Austria. On the issuing side, Postbank, Deutsche Bank, ING Germany and Revolut are set to join the German savings banks in integrating Wero’s e-commerce functionality “in the coming weeks and months”. A dozen large merchants in France and Germany have signed up, including Decathlon, Lidl and Eventim.
Scheming
Visa has run into resistance in Norway over plans to force consumers to make a choice at point of sale whether they want transactions from their co-badged debit cards to be routed via Visa or via BankAxept, the domestic scheme. In a win for local merchants, retailers will be allowed to set a default, typically the cheaper BankAxept route, although shoppers retain the option to override this by following on-screen prompts.
Also in Norway, Vipps MobilePay, the dominant local mobile-payments app, has added Klarna as a payment option. Local retailers are unhappy. They see Klarna as a direct competitor and argue that merchants be the ones deciding which buy-now-pay-later are offered. Klarna’s chief executive calls this bullshit, but both Norwegian disputes highlight a broader question: who should control customer choice at checkout. Merchants or PSPs?
Giro, Germany’s domestic debit network, has introduced a scheme fee for the first time, now charging an extra 2bp on top of 0.2% interchange. The new money will go to support Giro’s long-term viability amid rising competition from Mastercard Debit. Giro continues to attract new network service providers; the latest is Zahlungswerk, the payments arm of Edekabank, owned by one of Germany’s largest supermarket groups.
In Greece, all merchants are now required to accept A2A payments via IRIS, a domestic instant-payments scheme. Around 1.2m POS terminals have been upgraded, with merchants enrolled automatically. Shoppers select “Pay with IRIS”, scan a QR code and pay from their mobile-banking app. Merchant fees are only slightly lower than cards, typically 0.6–0.8% for SMEs and as low as 0.4% for large retailers.
Software eats payments
Leading software platforms once offered merchants a choice of payment processors but increasingly steer them towards an in-house option supplied by a preferred provider in return for generous sales commissions. The processor gets “free” distribution to SME merchants but often pays as much as 50% of net revenues for the privilege. Among leading small-business e-commerce platforms, the current landscape looks like this:
Shopify Payments – Stripe (and PayPal in the US)
Wix Payments – Stripe, Adyen or PayPal
WooCommerce Payments – Stripe
Prestashop Checkout – PayPal
BigCommerce Payments – processor-agnostic for now, with PayPal expected in 2026
Prestashop, based in Paris, is the only European vendor in the group and has been acquired by Cyberfolks, based in Warsaw and owner of Shoper, Poland’s leading e-commerce platform. Cyberfolks will now process €35bn of sales for more than 200,000 merchants and should be a prime partner for any ambitious European acquirer. Today, Shoper offers domestic acceptance via Autopay or Przelewy24, with Stripe handling international payments.
The deal is another reminder of the strength of Polish technology businesses. Europe’s commercial momentum increasingly runs east to west.
NCR Voyix, supplier of POS software to some of the world’s largest retailers and restaurants, also sees a large prize. Its systems initiate around $2trn of payment volume, $600bn of it outside the US but NCR currently earns no commission income from those transactions. That is set to change. “Now it’s going to be monetized,” says Jim Kelly, NCR’s new CEO. NCR’s customers won’t pay higher prices. “Somebody else is going to lose the revenue he explained in this interview. I think he means that merchant acquirers may soon be asked to pay to access to NCR’s merchants.
New shopping
Amazon has closed its Fresh grocery stores in the UK. The stores’ distinguishing feature – a checkout-free experience in which shoppers scanned their phones on entry and then “just walked out” – proved insufficient to offset limited product ranges and uncompetitive prices.
Selling the technology itself is going better. Amazon’s Just Walk Out systems now supports more than 300 third-party installations worldwide, including in the UK and France. Management says the proposition has matured, with lower installation costs and easier integration into existing POS systems.
Smart carts may offer a pragmatic middle ground between fully autonomous stores -expensive and complex to maintain – and traditional self-checkout, which often delivers poor customer experience and high shrinkage. Instacart has rolled out its Caper Carts, each equipped with a payment terminal, in 100 cities across the United States and has announced a pilot with Morrisons in the UK.
These carts use AI to identify items placed in the basket, sparing shoppers the need to scan barcodes and merchants the cost of those who “forget” to do so.
Agentic Commerce
2026 could well be the year agentic commerce goes mainstream, a trend that will only reinforce the industry’s consolidation. Ever more payment transactions will flow through ever fewer processors. Agentic commerce is likely to favour a small number of global players with the scale to build relationships with the emerging AI giants.
The payment industry appears to be coalescing around the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) as the interface between agents, retailer websites and payments. If widely adopted, ACP would mark the first standardised API for eCommerce checkout, a significant step towards genuinely frictionless purchasing. Here’s a good primer that explains the implications.
Important questions remain unresolved, particularly around liability when things go wrong. Who bears the loss if an AI agent buys the wrong product or is scammed by a more sophisticated AI? Stripe’s recent update to its terms and conditions (below) suggests the burden sits with the merchant. Many will be unhappy with that answer.
SoftPOS
The year ahead looks promising for SoftPOS vendors. The technology, which allows ordinary consumer devices to accept card payments, can now be considered mainstream.
Softpay.io, based in Copenhagen, is one of Europe’s leading providers. Connected to 14 acquirer/processors, Softpay’s case studies include an Italian restaurant chain that uses SoftPOS for pay-at-table. Every server can now take payments. The client said “When someone asks for the bill, instead of saying ‘Wait, I’ll bring the terminal,’ we wanted to deal with it immediately.”
The London-headquartered open-banking vendors have all now published their 2024 financials. In positive news, combined revenues at the four largest players – TrueLayer, Yapily, Volt and Banked – rose by 50% to £46m and losses narrowed a little, to £83m. But the central question remains whether the industry can stay solvent long enough to enjoy the rewards once open banking reaches scale.
The UK market continues to grow steadily at around 50% a year, reaching an annualised run rate of roughly 400m transactions. That compares with more than 30bn card transactions. There’s a long way to go.
Many hope that agreement on standards for Variable Recurring Payments (VRPs) will help close the gap. VRPs promise an open-banking alternative to both direct debits and recurring card payments. Mike North explains.
For open-banking payments to break through, three things are needed: a common rulebook, an acceptance mark and a commercial model that properly incentivises participants, particularly the retail banks.
If the industry cannot deliver these, the card schemes will. Visa has already offered to apply its consumer-protection framework, brand and pricing model to open banking and has demonstrated its first A2A transaction. Payment initiation is provided by Tink, a Visa company. Visa has not disclosed pricing, but debit-like fees would be a reasonable expectation.
Cash
Despite the proliferation of digital payment options, cash will still be with us at the end of 2026 and beyond. There is even evidence that its decline is slowing as we get to a hard core of people who can’t or won’t use electronic money. Although more than half of Britons no longer leave home with a wallet in their pocket, cash still accounts for around 20% of retail transactions, representing roughly 10% of sales by value.
Crypto corner
Stablecoins are gaining traction in cross-border treasury use cases, particularly for transfers between subsidiaries, but mass acceptance at e-commerce checkouts seems remote. There’s little consumer demand in Europe to pay with these new currencies and many merchants are deterred by the bewildering array of chains and coins.
In MAGA-adjacent news, Jared Isaacman, founder of Shift4, has finally been confirmed as head of NASA, after delays linked to his friendship with Elon Musk. Another payments executive, Frank Bisignano of Fiserv, has also landed a senior role, now overseeing both the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service. Following Fiserv’s weak third-quarter results, Senate Democrats are unimpressed.
Yavin, a French PSP, has turned a payment terminal into a polaroid camera so your staff can take pictures of dogs. You didn’t know you needed this feature, but you do.
I’ll be at MPE in Berlin 17-19 March 2026. I’ll be moderating a session looking at modular vs composable payments which I promise will be more fun than it sounds.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Does SoftPOS scale? Absolutely. Just look at the size of this one built by Global Payments for the 200thanniversary 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 TrueLayerfor 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.
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. FXCnotes, 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.
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
Worldline reassured investors yesterday with its Q3 results and the stock, which has been under pressure for several years, jumped 18%.
The new management team is tidying up the business: disposing of non-core assets, simplifying the organisation (all go-to-market activities now report directly to the CEO) and, crucially, calming nerves around liquidity management. Analysts had been worried about the group’s cash-pooling structure and whether the holding company had access to liquidity trapped in subsidiaries.
Q3 revenue fell by 1% to €1.15 billion, but management could finally point to some stabilisation after several quarters of grim news. Merchant-service volume rose 7% to €145 billion – positive, if still below Visa and Mastercard’s 12–13% growth.
The sale of the Mobility division to Magellan remains on track, and Shift4 will acquire Worldline North America (the former Bambora USA business, originally Beanstream/IP Payments, acquired by Ingenico in 2017 and folded into Worldline in 2020) for €70 million.
Worldline USA is a gateway business generating around €60 million revenue from 140 000 merchants via 500 ISVs, delivering about €8 million EBITDA. Both sides will be happy: a price of roughly €500 per merchant is fair for a gateway business lacking a growth story but leaves plenty of upside for Shift4’s usual cross-sell playbook.
Elsewhere, Worldline’s Italian operations are gaining share through new bank partnerships; the Australian JV with ANZ Bank is back on track after price increases; while Germany remains more challenging. Bank partnerships there are performing, but third-party channels are lagging and in both Germany and the Benelux, SMB sales were hampered by a lack of Android terminals. That issue is now resolved, but it feels like an avoidable own-goal.
Overall, a quarter that finally gives investors reasons for cautious optimism.
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.
Times remain tough for terminal vendors. PAX Global (Bermuda-registered, Hong Kong-listed, with main operations in China) reported H1 2025 revenue of US$348 million, down 10% year-on-year and continuing a decline that began in 2022.
Management once again blamed “global economic uncertainty” for the slump.
Europe remains PAX’s strongest region, generating US$139 million (–2%). Italy, the UK, and France performed well, with good demand for the A920Pro and A35 terminals, while the IM30 unattended unit is reportedly doing well with EV charging providers.
North America delivered the best positive performance, possibly buoyed by distributors front-loading orders ahead of looming import tariffs, but sales were down in Latin America and APAC.
Services revenue rose 8% to US$22 million, driven by SaaS fees from MAXSTORE, which now connects 15 million terminals to a marketplace of up to 16,000 applications. The idea is that banks and PSP’s white-label the MAXSTORE and encourage their merchants to download apps. Yet with services revenues amounting to less than US$3 per terminal per year, these recurring fees are welcome but far from transformational.
Hardware sales fell 4% although management is keen to highlight that 65% of terminal revenue came from the newer Android-based machines.
Overall, gross profit declined 10% to US$163 million, and operating profit slipped 12% to US$60 million. Weaker top-line growth is squeezing margins despite good cost control.
Encouragingly PAX isn’t cutting corners on R&D, which held steady at US$39 million, and headcount remained flat at around 1,500 employees. Management highlighted two key certifications: the A920Pro achieved EMVCo C-8, and the A77 Mini became the world’s first terminal certified under PCI v7.0.
Despite continued tough market conditions, PAX remains financially strong and will pay a dividend yielding around 8.3% at current share price.
The story remains familiar: terminal sales in their third year of decline, services inching forward, and Android dominance intact. PAX remains profitable, cash generative and dividend-friendly, but its core challenge stays the same – how to turn a shrinking hardware business into sustainable, services-led growth.
2024 was another difficult year for Lloyds Cardnet, the merchant services joint venture between Fiserv and one of Britain’s largest business banks. Lloyds owns 51% of Cardnet and has embedded merchant services firmly within the overall business banking proposition. Most customers are also customers of Lloyds Bank.
According to documents posted at UK Companies House, higher prices kept Cardnet’s revenue stable in 2024 but the business looks to be caught in a squeeze between Adyen/Stripe/Checkout taking enterprise customers and the “tap pack” of Dojo and others hoovering up small merchants on the high street.
Cardnet has been going backwards since 2021. In 2024, volume fell a further 4% to £52bn and transaction numbers were down a further 10%. ATV rose 7% to £57.57.
Cardnet sells Fiserv products such as Clover. At times, this gives early access to innovation but Cardnet’s ability to grow can sometimes be hampered by its partner’s multiplicity of platforms – a dependence on Fiserv technology that management itself flags as a key risk.
By contrast, Dojo – Cardnet’s most direct challenger at the SME end – saw volumes rise 8% last year to £46bn while also running at significantly higher take rates. Dojo’s model is based on slick onboarding, premium service and bundled terminals, a sharp contrast to Cardnet’s reliance on Fiserv’s legacy platforms.
After deducting interchange, scheme fees and Fiserv’s costs, Cardnet’s net fee and commission income (net revenue) was flat at £53m as management mitigated the impact of share losses by increasing its prices. Net revenue per transaction rose 12% to 5.8p. This is equivalent to a take rate of just 10bps, suggesting that Lloyds gets most of its volume from the bank’s largest (and lowest margin) customers.
Operating expenses rose 13% to £40m. Cardnet spent a further £15.7m in 2024 on its “strategic investment programme,” bringing the total to £38m over the past three years. This initiative is intended to improve onboarding, bring the product portfolio up to today’s market needs and develop new distribution partnerships.
The investment has begun to deliver results. Paypoint, probably Britain’s largest ISO, has selected Lloyds Cardnet as its exclusive acquiring partner. Paypoint chose Cardnet because of the wider banking product set which it brings, but the volume boost will be welcome..
Cardnet has also made some progress with enterprise merchants, cementing its partnership with Ryanair and winning a new supermarket customer. However, fraud losses grew by £3m, suggesting Cardnet is taking on more risk.
Cardnet has no staff of its own. All employees are managed by Lloyds or Fiserv and recharged to Cardnet. Salary costs rose 6% to £15.7m.
Pre-tax profit fell 32% to £15.7m, There was no dividend for 2024, after £87.5m had been paid out in the previous two years. This would seem to suggest the shareholders are committing to return Cardnet to growth.
Management remains optimistic about the future, saying “growth is expected in 2025… aligned with client acquisitions in key growth sectors such as food & drink and travel.” But Cardnet remains in a strategic squeeze: dependent on Fiserv for technology, losing SME share to Dojo, Square and the “tap pack”, and enterprise share to Stripe and Adyen.
