The payments business

Forrester’s latest research report underlines the growing capability gap between the three leading global processors – Stripe, Adyen and Checkout – and the rest of the industry. Nuvei is still a contender, Worldpay gets praise for the quality of its relationship management and Paypal remains a viable option for the US. Nobody else comes close.

Figure 1 Source: Forrester Merchant Payment Providers

The analysts find that enterprise buyers are showing an increased focus on the quality of relationship with their processors and the pace at which vendors can add new capabilities. High acceptance rates, low prices and rock-solid delivery are a given. Forrester reports are normally quite expensive but Adyen has done a deal to make this one available free of charge. So has Stripe. So has Checkout. You can take your pick.

Meanwhile, in legacy land, Worldline is slowly recovering from last summer’s near-death experience. It has raised €392m from three French banks as part of a proposed €500m capital raise. This includes further investment from Crédit Agricole, giving fresh impetus to CAWL, the bank’s joint venture (JV) with Worldline which has got off to a quiet start.

12,000 miles away, ANZ Bank is looking to unwind its JV with Worldline. Worldline paid €300m for 51% of ANZ merchant services in 2022, gaining 80.000 merchants and 20% of the Australian market. ANZ Worldline lost c.€40m in 2024 and required additional capital from its parents. Managing a troubled JV with an unhappy partner is a major distraction for Worldline’s management in Paris. A deal looks likely soon.

Nexi, Europe’s largest processor by volume, has lost its CEO after a capital markets day sent the stock down 16%. The business model is, quite sensibly, shifting from M&A-led growth to cash generation but investors remain unconvinced. Nexi is offering higher dividends, with the stock now yielding a generous 9%.

Neobanks are moving into payments. Revolut’s merchant acquiring offer, based on a Newland terminal, is now live in 19 countries, ten more than last year. Volumes tripled in 2025, though no figures were disclosed. Wise has also entered acceptance, offering payment links. Europe/UK fees are 1% for domestic consumer cards and 2.9% for others.

PayPoint, the UK’s leading ISO, said its Handepay subsidary will stop selling to small business customers, citing high churn and low margins. This reflects competition from the “tap pack” – SumUp, Viva.com, myPOS, Square, Dojo, Flatpay etc – which offer modern technology and digital services. Legacy ISOs like PayPoint and takepayments (now part of Global Payments) have had to cut prices to compete.

In other tap pack news, Flatpay has launched in the Netherlands and Teya has expanded to Spain and Italy.

Flatpay will soon face competition at home market of Denmark. Unzer is launching POS acceptance via its Quickpay and Clearhaus businesses. These already serve 30,000 online merchants. Verifone will supply hardware. Unzer has also acquired AllCash’s POS operations in eastern Germany, adding 500 terminals and 2.5m transactions.

Nayax, the Israel-based unattended payment specialist, reported strong 2025 results, with revenues up 28% to $400m. European sales rose 21% to $92m and UK sales also grew 21% to $47m.

In corporate news, Vipps MobilePay is selling Vipps Checkout to Kustom, a Klarna spin-out, for NOK 490m (€44m) including 3,000 merchants in Norway and NOK 7bn (€0.6bn) in volume. This looks smart for both sides. Vipps exits a business that cannot compete with global players, while Kustom gains access to the Vipps ecosystem as a preferred partner. Despite the rather high €14,000 per merchant price, distribution is likely to be the real prize.

Standalone checkout is a tough sector. Bolt, once a unicorn, is laying off 30% of staff.

In fundraising news, SumUp is once again inviting banks to pitch to help a European IPO. The suggested valuation is $10bn – a little higher than the $8.5bn applied at its 2023 funding round but below the $10-$15bn management was guiding a few months ago.

Outpost, a London-based merchant of record vendor, has raised €15m to support cross-border commerce. Outpost takes control of tax, logistics and sales for merchants in each market.

Tipjar which offers a cashless tipping solution, has raised a further £4.5m and £11m in total. It now serves 5,000 UK sites, processing £130m of tips annually and has launched in the USA and France.

Finally, an intriguing US court case: Block is suing London-based Enigmatic Smile, a card-linked loyalty provider, for $557k in unpaid commissions. Enigmatic Smile doesn’t dispute the sum but still isn’t paying up. Block is seeking punitive damages.

Conference round-up

This year’s MPE conference in Berlin showed Europe’s payment industry in good form – record delegate numbers, buoyant sponsorships and plenty to discuss. Here’s my three-minute report.

I moderated the panel on composable (modular) payments joined by Mastercard, Payrails and Kingfisher. The conclusion: merchants with complex needs will look to build or rent their own payment stack. Those with simpler requirements – even though volume may be very large – will stick with full-stack PSPs. Read more on the Business of Payments blog.

Back in London, my take after chairing a Pay360 discussion on payment data is that payment data is great for fixing payments, but not necessarily useful for much else. Read more on the Business of Payments blog.

Sovereignty

Finance ministers of the EU’s six largest economies have called for an “EU-strategy promoting strategic autonomy and reducing EU dependencies [on American networks] in retail, wholesale and business payments.”

This was reinforced by President Macron in a video message to a Carte Bancaire conference in Paris. He backed wero as an alternative to Visa and Mastercard: “It’s about controlling the security of our trade, the continuity of our economy, our ability to decide for ourselves, and therefore our independence.”

The French financial establishment is particularly worried that 30m cards are branded solely Visa or Mastercard, without Carte Bancaire co-badging for domestic use. Carte Bancaire, which has been losing share, has begun to modernise and believes it has turned a corner with 30 issuers and acquirers joining the scheme. Macron will welcome BPCE’s decision to co-brand all cards by 2027, with the bank explicitly citing payment sovereignty.

Mastercard has felt compelled to respond. Kelly DeVine, European President, reaffirmed the network’s commitment to investing in Europe and complying with local laws, adding that Mastercard would challenge in court any unwarranted attempts to disrupt its ecosystem. The problem for Mastercard is that nobody believes this. If instructed by the US government to block an individual, merchant or country, the card schemes would have little choice but to comply. Hence the growing political momentum behind credible European alternatives.

Werowatch

Wero, the payment scheme set up by northern European banks, is benefiting from the changed political mood. Its CEO says two big merchants have cited “international resilience” as a reason for joining wero. And respect to Wero’s marketing folk, they are trying to make the new scheme (relatively) cool too as you can see in the latest commercial.

The unofficial werotracker shows 51 banks having gone live with for P2P or C2B transactions. 30 webshops can accept Wero for eCommerce transactions with a further 35 merchants announced but not yet live.

One reason for optimism is Wero’s flying start through incorporating iDEAL, the highly successful Dutch online bank transfer system. Wero operates more like a traditional scheme. This brings helpful new product features such as pre-authorisations and subscriptions but wero also includes chargebacks which iDEAL does not offer. Dutch merchants are very unhappy about having to take responsibility for credit risk.

Wero also incorporates Payconiq, a mobile payment wallet active in Belgium and Luxembourg. This has been less successful and the European Payments Initiative, parent of Wero, has written off its €79m investment. Payconiq will shut down in September.

Digital euro

In Euroland, momentum is growing behind the digital euro. The ECB is inviting PSPs to take part in a pilot during the second half of next year. This would involve central bank staff and a few selected merchants such as the ECB staff canteen. Full launch is scheduled for 2029. Although sovereignty has become the key rationale for the digital euro, merchants will be hoping fees will be cheaper than cards. The German retail federation is demanding transactions are priced at 4c maximum. French retailers have proposed 0.1% up to a maximum of 4c.

The UK is still sitting on the fence about digital currencies. The Bank of England has published videos that explain the use cases demonstrated in its recent digital pound lab while its “assessment” of whether to proceed with Britcoin will come later this year. 

Scheming

Mastercard has announced plans to spend up to $1.8bn buying BVNK, a stablecoin infrastructure provider that holds, moves and converts stablecoins into real money and back again. None of that capability is clear from the corporate video.

BVNK, which competes with Bridge (owned by Stripe) and Zerohash, brings Mastercard useful capability if/when merchants want settlement in stablecoins. FXC is very excited about the cross-border potential though Andrew Dresdner questions whether Mastercard can apply scheme rules, and scheme margins, to stablecoins. And Visa, which invested in BVNK last year and uses it for Visa Direct pay-outs products, won’t be happy about its competitor’s move. 

Mastercard’s acquisition record is mixed. The network is reportedly selling the Nordic bill payment businesses it bought from Nets. Today’s value is likely much lower than the $2.9bn Mastercard paid in 2021 even though the two businesses – Betalingsservice in Denmark and AvtaleGiro in Denmark – are highly profitable, generating $100m EBITDA from $370m revenues.

Mastercard has also sold SessionM, a loss-making loyalty vendor for $20m, having paid $215m in 2019. Despite a stellar client list including McDonalds, revenues are declining and synergies limited.

Germany’s Girocard reported flat payment volume in 2025 at €308bn although transactions grew 5%. Giro is accepted at 1.3m POS terminals in Germany but Visa claims 1.9m, helping Visa grow its volume 17% in 2025.

Giro is fighting back with new business model in which network operators will pay a “scheme fee” of c.2 bps for the first time. In return, the acceptance side of the payment industry is promised new product features and a formal role in the governance of Giro. The scheme is also emphasising payment sovereignty: “Bezahalen. Made in Germany.”

Irish banks have finally launched Zippay, an instant payment service allowing users to send money to other domestic bank accounts from their mobile banking app. While marketed as P2P, experience elsewhere suggests that small businesses quickly start using this kind of product to accept money from the public.

Nexi is supplying the technology although it’s not clear why the Irish banks have built their own service rather than joining Wero.

What’s on your terminal?

Designed well, a payment terminal’s screen will speed transactions, keep merchants happy and reinforce the supplier’s brand values. Done badly, both shopper and retailer can be easily confused.

Teddy Graphics, based in Warsaw, is the European leader in designing payment screens for acquirers and PSPs. There’s a remarkable amount of science behind the colours and where the buttons are placed as you can read on its website.

Software and payment convergence

Research presented by Flagship Advisory at MPE suggests software vendors (ISVs) are now the main distribution channel for SME payments in both the USA and UK. The bank channel, almost extinct in the UK, still accounts for 48% of POS distribution in Europe but ISVs are becoming an increasingly important sales channel for processors everywhere. 

Agentic commerce

It seems 2026 will not, after all, be the year in which AI agents start making meaningful inroads into eCommerce. Apologies for the confusion but this technology is moving through the hype cycle at record speed and we’re already entering the trough of disillusionment. Andrew Dresdner has a good explanation of why we’re hitting some speed bumps.

OpenAI has dropped plans to embed checkout within ChatGPT. While people love AI for search and product discovery, they still prefer to complete purchases on the merchant’s site. At least for now. To be fair, the OpenAI product was very early but Walmart confirmed that conversion was very low.

This matches feedback from merchants at MPE. Everyone agrees agentic commerce will be big but it’s clear that the technology is not quite ready. The industry needs to be making adoption much easier. The alphabet soup of protocols (sometimes outnumbering transactions) is not helping.

Adyen has a issued a good report which outlines the infrastructure challenges ahead including merchant product data and checkouts designed for humans and fraud models set up to stop bots, not encourage them.

Vendors sense an opportunity. Shopify is opening its product catalogue to third-party retailers, exposing them to AI agents through Shopify’s multi-protocol integrations. Transactions go through ShopPay at 2.9% + 30c. Result: yet more volume for Stripe.

Venture capitalists at A16z believe this “headless” commerce as the future; one in which merchants exist as product, pricing and promotion files without the need for a website or brand marketing. Interestingly, A16z no longer sees stablecoins as the likely payment solution for agentic commerce. Mastercard and Visa have got their act together and “the rails are no longer the bottleneck.”

Agents will most likely pay with a virtual card and there are a growing number of start-ups looking to supply this need. AgentCard will give your agent a debit card with spending limits. There are many others.

Most focus has been on agents buying but the AI will likely be selling too. Pawel Jozefiak has set up a marketplace where robots can sell to other robots. Inevitably, it uses Stripe for payments.

POS orchestration

Symphopay, based in Bucharest, has a rare capability to dynamically route card payments at point of sale. Romanian acquirers offer generous on-us pricing which means that merchants have an incentive to take a terminal from each domestic acquiring bank. Symphopay collapses this chaos into a single device and supplies 3000 terminals to 22 local retail chains including a recently completed 1750 store roll-out for Profi. Symphopay has built a full service with modest capital raise of just €1.4m and reportedly made a small profit in 2024 on turnover of €1m.

Open banking

British consumers made 33m open banking payments in February. While that’s 39% up on the previous year, it’s well below the growth rate needed to sustain the industry’s business model. The public don’t yet seem interested. A new survey from Yaspa, an open banking vendor, shows only 38% of UK adults familiar with the term “Pay by Bank.”

The industry’s hopes are pinned on commercial variable recurring payments (cVRPs) – open banking’s initiative to improve direct debits. Yapily has a good explainer. The first wave of cVRPs – for utilities and charities – should go live in May. To help consumers understand the new product, vendors such as Truelayer are beginning to rename cVRPs as “bank on file.”

Farewell Vibe Pay, a high-profile London-based open banking start-up. Despite its celebrity backers, including the Reform UK party treasurer, investors concluded that free payments is a challenging business model. The business will be liquidated and the ten remaining staff lose their jobs. A deal to sell Vibe Pay to Banked, a very well-funded open banking player, was announced last year but failed at the due diligence stage. 

SoftPOS

2026 looks like the year when SoftPOS goes mainstream.

Munich-listed Rubean AG reports revenues doubling in 2025 to €3.8m, mainly from one-off licence sales to a growing rosta of enterprise merchants in Spain, UK and Eastern Europe. Delivery services have been early customers but Rubean also announced a good win with the RAC’s roadside assistance patrols in UK and Ireland.Fiserv is the acquirer. The momentum continues: Rubean’s sales are expected to grow “high double digits” this year.

Worldline says Tap on Mobile (its SoftPOS product) is now deployed in 23 markets, processing €760m volume in 2025 – still relatively small but three times 2024’s number.

Softpay.eu, based in Copenhagen, has implemented its product on 200 OnniBuses across Finland, working with NETS. Bus drivers can now take money on cards without needing a separate payment terminal.

Global Payments will be rebranding Yazara, the softPOS vendor it bought in 2024, as Genius. This implies it will be folded into Global’s standard product offer.

Industry sources suggest that Dojo is looking to standardise its SME terminal proposition on SoftPOS using using MyPinpad’s software application. If true, this would be a major boost for Licentia Group, based in Cardiff and the parent of MyPinPad. Licentia lost £2.7m in the year to June 2025 on turnover of £4.6m.

SoftPOS can also enable any mobile banking application to accept card payments which gives neo banks a great opportunity to compete in the micro-business segment. Monzo is working with Stripe’s SoftPOS to offer merchant transactions at 20p + 1.5%.mBank is the first in Poland to offer something similar. It’s using Worldline’s SoftPOS application.

Cash

Policymakers are grappling with the future of cash. As digital money becomes more prevalent, there are growing concerns around financial inclusion and economic resilience.

Ireland has passed an “access to cash” law that requires an ATM no further than 10km from the any population centre. In New York state, it’s now mandatory for retailers to accept cash for in-person transactions. Sweden now requires grocery stores and pharmacies to take cash and Swiss citizens voted to have the right to use Swiss francs enshrined in the country’s constitution.

Germany has been one of the last developed economies to embrace digital money but even Germans now use cards more than cash in restaurants and cafes. Some sectors are holding out. One Christmas market stall in Munich still takes Deutschmarks. And here’s a long LinkedIn thread where Germans complain about cash-only car parks. Many operators helpfully put an ATM next to the ticket machine.

But this is only heading one way. As cash usage declines, the cost of cash handling becomes expensive and fixed costs are spread across fewer transactions. This pushes up the cost of operating ATM networks or accepting cash in shops. In Poland, Euronet has started limiting withdrawals using Blik in protest against the low fees it receives from the customer’s bank.

Here’s a possible solution. Diebold Nixdorf and Gisecke + Devrient have launched a very clever new ATM which simply prints cash whenever needed. This removes the need ship money around the country to replenish ATMs with banknotes. IT Finanzmagzin ran the exclusive in its 1 April edition.

Crypto

FXC has published a well-researched buyers guide to cross-border stablecoin products. I’ve come to two conclusions. Firstly, the sector is still very immature and the value chain is bafflingly complicated (see below). Secondly, the consumer to business (ie, merchant payment) opportunity is limited. Bottom line: Europeans are unlikely to be using stablecoins to buy from European retailers in the foreseeable future.

Figure 2 Stablecoin value chain – source: FXC

For the moment, stable coins will be primarily used to support global treasury flows to and from countries with either high inflation or limited access to dollar bank accounts such as Nigeria or Argentina. BVNK’s recent consumer research backs this up.

One problem with these markets is that KYC is difficult, meaning that most of the cost lies in compliance rather than the rails themselves. Stablecoins don’t make KYC any easier and screw-ups can be expensive. Bridge, owned by Stripe, has some explaining to do after shipping 12 Mitsubishi trucks to sanctioned Chavez family members in Venezuela.

The vast majority of stablecoins are issued in dollars. In response, European banks have set up a consortium, called Qivalis, based in the Netherlands, to commercialise a euro stablecoin. Germany and Italy have proposed an EU “kill switch” for stablecoins that don’t meet European governance standards.

In other news

One of the reasons for SoftPOS growth is that standard payment terminals are becoming more expensive. Memory chips are up 500% since 2025 according to the CEO of Ingenico.

Block, parent of Square, says AI makes middle management redundant and will axe 4,000 staff.

The UK Government has removed the £100 limit for contactless payments. There’s no consumer enthusiasm for this and merchants are worried that different issuers will now fix different limits.

CEN, the European standards body, has published a standard for QR payments. This might help fight the growing wave of QR-based payment fraud.

How big is the cross-border consumer to business payment volume? $4.9 trillion says FXC Intelligence.

The divergence between new and legacy acquirers is explained by Dwane Gefferie. If you are not offering routing, smart retries, signal enrichment and network tokenisation, you’re not in the game.

Iranian hackers claim to have stolen data from Verifone’s Israeli operations. Verifone denies this.

And finally

Who said payment data has no value? Tab, an e-receipts vendor, has shown that Swedes eat 10x more Semla cakes on Fettisdag.

Get in touch

Geoffrey Barraclough

geoff@barracloughandco.com

www.businessofpayments.com

The payments business

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.

Stripe is now valued at $159bn, roughly four times PayPal’s market cap. Bloomberg reports rumours that Stripe could even consider acquiring PayPal, bringing an additional $1.7 trillion of payment volume, 30m merchants and 400m wallets.

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.

Westpay, a Swedish POS gateway, reported sales up 9% in 2025 to SEK 74m (€7m) and a strong return to profitability, driven by a shift from hardware sales to SaaS fees for its payment application. Westpay is listed on Nasdaq First North Growth Market and its shares rose 25% following the results.

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.

Many PSPs and platforms offer MCA but prefer not to risk their own balance sheets, partnering instead with specialist lenders. Mollie, the Dutch payment facilitator, reports over €250m lent to merchants, funded by YouLend, the UK-based embedded finance provider. YouLend reported revenue up 45% to £172m in the year to March 2025, with pre-tax profit doubling to £7m, and access to 3.2m SMEs through partners such as Mollie.

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.

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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.

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Sovereignty

Visa and Mastercard processed 47% of eurozone card payment value in 2025, with 13 of the 19 eurozone countries relying on them for 96% of card transactions.

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.

With so many transactions now digital, this gives Washington considerable leverage as one judge at the International Criminal Court in The Hague discovered. The issue was also highlighted by Visa’s payment monopoly during the recent Winter Olympics. 

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.

The UK has none of these options, having forced its banks to sell the national payments operator Vocalink to Mastercard for £700m in 2016. The government said the move would increase competition, although how giving Mastercard control of BACS, Faster Payments and the LINK ATM network would achieve that was never entirely clear.

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.

Scheming

Payment volume on Giro, Germany’s domestic debit scheme, was flat in 2025 at €308bn, despite increases in both transaction numbers and active terminals. Is Giro in trouble? Not necessarily. Where Giro is top-of-wallet, for example with the German Savings Banks, which have integrated Girocard with the Payback loyalty programme – volumes are still growing.

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.

That dynamic may be changing. Rapid advances in AI-assisted coding make it easier for merchants to build their own software or migrate data to a new provider. Software investors certainly noticed: SaaS stocks recently lost $285bn of market capitalisation in a single day.

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.”

Salesforce agrees. It reported that AI agents influenced almost 20% of sales on Black Friday although they made very few purchases themselves.

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.

That makes sense. People are happy to ask ChatGPT for product recommendations but still prefer completing purchases in familiar retail environments, where they already have accounts, saved payment methods and order histories.

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.

Ever the optimist, TrueLayer’s CEO says: “We are at the starting line when it comes to large retailers adopting pay by bank.” And TrueLayer is certainly winning large merchants, announcing deals with Amazon and eBay. eBay will also take an equity stake in TrueLayer, something it has done before with suppliers, notably making a tidy profit from its Adyen warrants.

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.

In other news

Poland’s Cashless Foundation, an industry body created by the government to promote digital payments, subsidised 50,000 payment terminals and 3,000 e-commerce stores in 2025. Since the programme began eight years ago, 713,000 devices have been installed.

Elavon has a new logo. Management says it “better aligns with the modern customer journey” than the old one. You be the judge.

PKO BP, Poland’s largest bank, is now letting customers block dynamic currency conversion (DCC) on their cards. This could save money for anyone who isn’t paying close attention when withdrawing foreign currency from ATMs across Europe.

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.

Two AI articles went viral this month. If you missed them, Matt Shumer explains just how quickly the technology is advancing. Citrini Research, meanwhile, frightened financial professionals with a prediction that AI will wipe out large numbers of middle-class jobs.

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.

Matt Jones has also written a fascinating piece on how Ukraine’s fintech ecosystem has survived four years of war. The answer: remarkably well.

And finally

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.

The Payments Business

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. 

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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.

Payment sovereignty

There is growing political momentum behind the need for European payment sovereignty. As Aurore Lalucq, French MEP and Chair of the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee put it: “almost all of our payment systems are now American. Donald Trump can cut them off overnight.”

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.

Flagship Consulting look at the opportunities for local schemes and alternative payment methods to make POS payments through the newly opened Apple NFC chip. PayPal is doing this in Germany, Blik in Poland and Vipps in Norway. Conclusion: the difficulty of breaking ingrained user habits means access to iOS NFC isn’t the game changer many had hoped. It’s really hard to get people to change the default wallet on their phone. 

Payment/software convergence

Payments and software are now inextricably linked. Evidence of the shift is mounting. Tidemark’s 2025 Vertical and SMB SaaS Benchmark Report finds 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%.

Software vendors are continually surprised by the benefits of providing integrated payments. One said “we thought we were building a company to help make sports happen in communities… and what we’ve built is a vertical SaaS payments-enabled platform – turns out that’s a good way to scale.”

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.

New shopping

Amazon has confused just about everyone by closing its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores while opening a new, large format supermarket in Chicago. Although Amazon’s autonomous convenience stores failed to make money, this is thought to be more about its lack of retailing skills than a fundamental flaw in the technology. European retailers, notably Żabka Nanos in Poland and Lekkerland in Germany, seem more enthusiastic about cashier-free shopping. Retail Optimiser has good summary of the current position and vendor landscape.

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.

Nick Lansley, formerly Tesco’s innovation chief, has a video showing how he uses Perplexity to shop on the store’s Irish website. The site’s structure, optimised for the visually impaired, is great for AI agents too.

Before Christmas, the industry was focused on agentic commerce protocol (ACP) as the standard to manage agent-initiated payments. In the New Year, focus turned to universal commerce protocol (UCP) which Google has included in the latest Chrome release. Some think UCP could be a game-changer for banks and PSPs as it would allow them to understand and monetise shopper intent for the first time. Nekuda explains the UCP/ACP standards war.

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.

In other contract news, Shift4 has won contactless payments for inter-city buses in Greece.

If you pay for a taxi in Stockholm with an Airplus corporate credit card, the digital receipt is automatically sent to your phone and your company’s accounting system.Tab is behind the scenes. 

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.

Worldpay has launched a product that allows merchants to show the carbon footprint of a shopping basket at checkout and prompt the shopper to pay a carbon offset. Ekko, a London-based start-up is behind the scenes. This would have been very exciting in 2022 but probably less in tune with consumer trends in 2026.

Card-linked loyalty

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:

• Viva has secured a good win with a SoftPOS deployment at Decathlon, the French sporting-goods retailer, including acceptance of Carte Bancaire. Orisha Commerce supplies the in-store POS software.
• 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.

Despite the bumpy road, UK open banking still seems to be leading Europe. Finanz-szene reports that usage in Germany is declining from an already low base. The blame is put on retail banks jealously guarding their API interfaces.

Finally, while not strictly open banking, keep an eye on Revolut in 2026. The fast-growing neobank is rolling out Revolut Pay. The experience falls short of Apple Pay – shoppers must scan a QR code on the merchant checkout page – but Revolut’s loyal fan base will love the chance to spend and earn Revolut Points. Booking.com is the latest merchant to accept Revolut Pay.

Crypto corner

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.

Similarly, total spend on all Visa branded crypto cards looks to be growing quickly but amounted to just $673m in 2025 according to Dune.

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.

Meanwhile, in Australia, a 77 year old widow fed $AUD 433.000 into a crypto ATM as part of a romance scam.

In other news

Sweden is mandating that all payment terminals selling food, medicines or fuel must work in offline mode. This is sensible move to promote economic resilience which other countries will likely follow.

President Trump has scrapped the one-cent coin while Democrats are attempting to block plans to put Trump’s face on a dollar coin.

The Atlanta Fed tries to understand why American businesses still write cheques.

SCA has been very effective. The latest research from the ECB shows card payment fraud in the EEA remaining steady at c.3bps. 

Trump’s move to downgrade marijuana to a Class 3 controlled substance is not likely to be sufficient to reverse Visa and Mastercard’s ban on processing payments from people buying weed, even where it is legally sold. Expect vendors to continue mis-classifying drug purchases as cash withdrawals.

The Polish Police collected €73m in fines during 2025 with card terminals provided by eService (Global Payments).

Checkout.com has written a song to celebrate winning Spotify’s processing businessand it’s not anything like as bad as you’d expect. Don’t let the party end/when it comes to the payments we got you/make them smooth for you/working round the clock/keeping things moving. 

And finally

In Poland, the authorities have refused to allow a baby to be named Blik. Its parents wanted to name their child after a King Blikosław, a character created by the wildly successful mobile payment scheme.

Where to find me

I’ll be in Berlin 17-19 March for MPE and in London 26 March for Pay360.

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.

Shareholders in Nexi, Europe’s other major legacy processor, have blocked the €300m sale of its banking systems division to TPG. This business includes Italy’s inter-bank payment network, and the prospect of foreign ownership raised security concerns.

More positively, Nexi has extricated itself from a commitment to buy 80% of Paycomet, Banco Sabadell’s merchant-services arm. First announced in 2023, the deal was paused while Sabadell fought off a hostile bid from BBVA. Nexi now says market conditions have changed, and terms must be renegotiated.

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.

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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. 

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Austria’s fiskaly is quietly consolidating Europe’s fiscal-receipt market. After acquiring DF Deutsche Fiskal from GK Software, its services now cover more than 1m POS terminals across Germany, Austria and Spain. Last month, it bought Infrasec Sweden from Yabie to extend coverage to Sweden. Fiscal receipts are mandatory for in-person payments in a growing number of countries – fiskaly produces a helpful guide.

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

Mastercard has issued a winding-up notice against GuavaPay, the failed London-based payments firm. The company collapsed after regulatory intervention in October, leaving 500 staff unpaid in London and Baku. Merchants have been unable to access their funds.

Fundraising news

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.

Warsaw-based Juo has raised €4m to scale its agentic-commerce toolkit for handling subscription payments in physical goods . Juo works with Adyen, Mollie, Stripe, PayU and Tpay.

Werowatch

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.

The same convergence is playing out among large enterprises. Oracle now counts more than 2,500 merchants across 16,000 locations using Oracle Payments in the United States and the UK, primarily in hospitality and restaurants. The service is provided by Adyen.

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.

Nekuda offers a great roundup of the current landscape. Agents such as ChatGPT have already become mainstream tools for product discovery, as shown by recent Bain research.

Conversion rates, at least in the United States, look remarkably good. That makes this traffic attractive to retailers, particularly as, left to its own devices, ChatGPT tends to refer shoppers to larger merchants. PSPs will need to work hard to ensure their SME clients get noticed by shoppers using AI chat interfaces.

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.

Etsy was the first to enable instant checkout via ChatGPT. In Europe, Allegro, the Polish marketplace, has followed suit. Sales volumes across the board are still modest but the potential is clear.

Among the PSPs, Stripe is showing clear product leadership in agentic commerce but competition is intensifying. PayPal and Adyen are both investing heavily and others will need to move quickly in 2026 if they are not to be left behind.

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.”

Rubean rolled out SoftPOS to 2,300 breakdown mechanics working for Britain’s Royal Automobile Club in just two days. Fiserv, now an indirect investor in Rubean via its acquisition of CCV last year, helped secure the contract. Rubean, listed on the Munich stock exchange, reported €3.5m of revenue in the first nine months of 2025, up from €1.3m a year earlier.

Openbanking

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.

TrueLayer is the largest of the group and remains upbeat. Speaking to Sifted, its chief executive said: “We’re certainly on the path to profitability. Revenue acceleration is playing into that.”

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.

Shift4, for example, recently announced it can settle merchants in four different stablecoins across seven blockchains. That creates 28 permutations – far more choice than most corporate payments teams want or need.

Talking stablecoins at ePay Summit in London

For stablecoins to gain broader adoption, products will need to be simple, well-designed and clearly priced. Once again, Stripe is furthest along in assembling a coherent offering although one only available in the USA today. Klarna is its first significant customer and plans to launch KlarnaUSD on Tempo, Stripe’s in-house blockchain.

There’s a clear risk that if issuing stablecoins becomes too easy, every large merchant will launch one, turning them into a confusing set of retail loyalty schemes.

The IMF has warned that dollar-denominated stablecoins could undermine monetary sovereignty outside the USA. Supporters of America’s proposed Genius Act might argue that this is precisely the point but European banks are responding with Qivalis, a euro-denominated stablecoin, while Bancomat, Italy’s domestic payments network, has unveiled one of its own – good for sovereignty but adding yet more potential complexity for merchants.

In other news

Ravelin’s annual e-commerce report remains essential reading. Globally, the 3DS success rate is just 79%.

Research from Pagos suggests that Stripe Link, Stripe’s one-click checkout product, is gaining traction in travel and leisure.

Checkout.com was recently targeted in a criminal extortion attempt. The firm apologised to customers, refused to pay the ransom and donated the demanded sum to cybercrime research. An exemplary response, according to industry observers.

Six years after the Wirecard scandal broke, Markus Braun, its former chief executive, remains in prison awaiting a verdict on fraud charges. Only one other person in Europe has ever been held longer in pre-trial detention. The whole thing is getting silly.

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. 

Aer Lingus has at last removed Laser as a payment option – 11 years after the debit card was withdrawn from the Irish market. Good spot from Rónán Gallagher.

Visa Europe is relocating within London, taking 28,000 square metres of office space in Canary Wharf, 10,000 more than its current base in Paddington.

And if you read only one deck on AI this year, make it Ben Evans’s AI Eats the World.

And finally

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.

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Where to find me

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 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.