The Business of Payments

It’s almost four years since I launched Business of Payments, and we’ve just crossed the 5.000 subscriber mark. That’s much more than I was expecting for such a niche publication! Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy this month’s edition.

The payment business

Adyen announced its second acquisition in as many months. Having spent ten years marketing the advantages of having a single platform, it now has three. The latest purchase is Orb, provider of modern billing systems (or “revenue design”) to the coolest Californian start-ups. The price is $335m in cash. Unlike SaaS, which charges per seat, AI charges based on usage which means billing can get complicated, very quickly. Orb manages the complexity.

Although Adyen could have built modern billing capability in-house, the real prize is Orb’s customer base. Stripe is the go-to processor for fast-growing AI start-ups and Orb gives Adyen immediate credibility in this sector.

Worldline’s spring clean rolled into high summer with the announcement that Credit Agricole will take full control of CAWL, the two companies’ joint venture in France. CAWL was launched with a big fanfare in 2024 but had struggled to meet its targets or even launch a product. I’m told that Credit Agricole’s member banks were never fully committed to the JV, resulting in lower than expected sales to SMEs. And, Worldline wasn’t able to win the big tenders with larger merchants.

Checkout.com wants to raise its profile, possibly to support its one-click competitor to Stripe Connect and has put serious dollars behind a new above the line campaign. There’s a nice creative idea focusing on the company’s current invisibility.

Revolut’s annual review claims merchant acquiring volume tripled for the second year in a row. It didn’t publish numbers but the neo bank is serious about merchant services for small businesses and should do well. Revolut terminals are now available in 19 countries and it’s also providing online payment acceptance, like here with Pepita.com in Hungary. One of Revolut’s USPs should be the ability to process “on us” transactions from its customers using Revolut Pay.

There’s never a good time for an outage but Worldpay didn’t need the high-profilefailure it suffered during one of England’s world cup matches. In total, there were 2.5 hours of disrupted service caused as “power was momentarily lost to one of our data centres. This caused the network to restart, which intermittently impacted merchants’ transaction authorisations and tokenisation.”

Large acquiring outages remain surprisingly rare, making this one particularly embarrassing. You can read the full incident report circulated to Worldpay’s clientswho will be hoping that the takeover of Worldpay by Global Payments is not disrupting resilience planning.

Several German payment executives have been charged in connection with Operation Chargeback – an investigation in alleged handling of fraudulent transactions by PSPs including Unzer and PayOne. Prosecutors say criminals made more than €300 million by signing cardholders to fake porn, dating or other sites.

The alleged criminality ended in 2021 when, following the Wirecard scandal, the German regulator began taking an interest. The German PSPs are all under new management and have cleaned up their books but the charges are a timely reminder that PSPs need to know who their customers are and what they are doing.

Flatpay has been the recent stand-out success of European payments, having reached €30bn annualised payment volume in just four years. Distribution is old-school field sales. No partnerships. Listen to Sander Janca-Jensen, Flatpay’s founder, talk toMichele Mattei.

Fundraising

Total payments fundraising in Europe was flat in the first half of 2026 at €409maccording to Blackfintech. The analysts see “payment orchestration winding down while agentic payments emerge” citing big investments in Paymentology and Primer. Judge for yourself. Here are this month’s highlights:

BR-DGE, an Edinburgh-based payment orchestrator has raised £10m. Management says the business will be processing 100m transactions a month by year end from customers such as William Hill and First Group.

Innovorder, a French restaurant software group has raised €20m for European expansion through acquisition. Yavin provides the integrated payment proposition which includes SoftPOS. Innovorder isn’t the only business wanting to become Europe’s Toast – you may have seen Olo raise last month – but national differences remain a significant blocker to European scale.

Paymove, based in Poland, has raised a further €2m to take its QR-based unattended POS payment proposition to Spain, Portugal and Italy. Paymove has a clean, quick user experience and has built a good position with car parking in its home market.

Nepting, the Montpelier-based POS payment platform, has raised an undisclosed sum to expand outside France move and move into eCommerce. Nepting currently provides terminals, local software and transaction routing focusing on complex, multi-site retail such as SNCF and Burger King. The business made €23m revenues in 2025 from €70bn processed across 350.000 sites and connects to Fiserv, Planet and “all the French acquirers.” The fundraise is a strong vote of confidence in Nepting which (alongside Aevi, Bluefin andFreedomPay) is one of the few independent POS platforms remaining.

Paypercut, a Bulgaria-based online payment gateway founded by former SumUp execs, has raised an additional €5m, in part to support the application for an EMI licence in Ireland. Paypercut has repositioned itself from a BNPL aggregator to a more generalist orchestrator for central and eastern Europe. EU cards are 1.29% + €0.10. Paynetics provides the processing.

Yamsoft, from Lithuania, has raised €2.35m to commercialise its suite of AI-payment infrastructure for PSPs. Modules include dynamic payment routing, PSP integration and smart reconciliation.

In Dublin, Trustap has raised $10m to launch a solution to make marketplace listings fully transactable by AI agents.

It’s rare to see technology companies raise bank financing but EPOS Now has secured up to £90m from HSBC. The money will go on product investment and international expansion. For payments, EPOS Now works mainly with Adyen.

Meet the substackers

I’m co-hosting some Fintech drinks in London on 16 July alongside the capital’s leading substackers. Join me Matt Jones, Jas Shah, Mike Chambers and Andrew Marshall for independent commentary, conversations and unparalleled networking. 

Open banking

Britain welcomed the first new payment scheme in a generation. The UK Payments Initiative has been founded to kick-start open banking payments with 23 businesses investing, including 13 banks.

UKPI delivers two critical things which were previously missing for open banking payments – a rule book and a commercial model. For the snappily named “commercial variable recurring payments (cVRPs)”, banks will get 5.5p per transaction. The UKPI receives 2.5p per transaction as “scheme fees”, funded equally by the processors and banks.

UKPI’s launch is restricted to low risk transactions to government, financial services and charities. General retail eCommerce will come in the next phase and will include a third critical success factor – consumer protection.

The only thing missing from UKPI is a brand or acceptance mark. Without this, every vendor will continue calling open banking payments something different and shoppers will remain confused. I’m told that some players remain hopeful of establishing their own consumer payment brand and have blocked UKPI from establishing its own acceptance mark. This isn’t just a UK problem. Stefan Holscher makes a strong case for pan-European “pay by bank” brand.

One final point. Speaking to merchants that have already included open banking at checkout, I’m told there’s a wildly divergent acceptance rate depending on the shopper’s bank. Starling, Monzo and Revolut convert very well. Nationwide and other long established UK banks impose more difficult customer journeys, and their shoppers are discouraged. Result: merchants may be unwilling to turn on open banking payments for all banks which could slow adoption of open banking, despite UKPI’s best efforts.

There’s a long way to go. Open banking payments remain very small compared to debit although transactions picked up in May for the first acceleration in growth in almost a year.

Scheming

The USA may be out of the World Cup but Ted Lasso is still very much in the game. This is a great commercial from Visa.

While wero is still in heavy investment mode, one local scheme is making money. Blik, the wildly popular Polish payment standard, reported revenue up 18% at €115m. That’s equivalent to a take rate of €0.05 or 0.14%. Operating profit fell 10% as the business invested heavily in marketing and international expansion. 16% of revenue is now generated outside Poland, notably Slovakia and Romania.

Blik is jointly owned by Mastercard and six Polish banks. An IPO is thought likely soon.

Giro, under pressure from the rapid growth in Visa and Mastercard debit in Germany, announced new features including pre-authorisation (vital for hotels and car hire) and in-app payments. SumUp, which has recently started accepting Giro, says it accounts for 60% of POS transactions where offered.

In Denmark, the competition authority ruled that Dankort (the local debit scheme) was unlawfully issuing business cards. Result: 90% of business cards are now issued on Visa or Mastercard. This is more expensive for merchants and driving renewed interest in surcharging at POS.

Bizum, Spain’s successful mobile payment scheme, has launched at POS but the experience is complicated. Merchants can only choose two PSPs. at launch. Paycomet, Sabadell’s merchant services arm or Monei, which both offer QR or pay-by-link. 

Werowatch

Along with the digital euro, wero – the mobile wallet managed by the European Payments Initiative – is the continent’s response to the growing need for payment sovereignty. The urgency was underlined by US action to terminate Visa and Mastercard transactions in Cuba.

Wero is making steady progress. Two Austrian banks will join EPI as shareholdersadding another country to wero’s reach. And we’ve seen a steady flow of PSPs joining the EPI including ACI and Nopan; the latter an interesting Dutch GoCardless-clone founded by former Netflix execs.

The unofficial werotracker website shows a steady increase in the number of merchants accepting Europe’s new payment wallet, although it remains far from a mass-market proposition.

German tourists arriving in Spain were greeted by this large billboard suggesting they send money to friends via wero. The headline reads “what happens in Malaga gets settled in Malaga.” The locals were outraged that wero appeared to be condoning bad behaviour by German tourists. The German savings banks, who were behind the creative, apologised.

Software and payments converge

I spoke with Tomas Debnar, founder of Papaya POS, a restaurant-focused ISV based in Bratislava for MPE. Papaya already offers embedded consumer payments (via Global Payments and Tatra Banka) and is extending its offer into B2B payments via a procurement marketplace. You can watch the webinar below or read the summary on the Business of Payments blog.

Agentic Commerce

Conferences and seminars are buzzing with speculation about if or when AI agents will start buying products on their own initiative. I moderated a panel at ACI’s Payments Unleashed event, featuring execs from Nvidia and PayPal as well as from our hosts. Credit to the organisers for inviting Lord Holmes, a UK Conservative politician who speaks on technology. I’ve posted a summary of the debate on the Business of Payments blog.

While many payment businesses are using AI today to help with fraud screening and transaction routing (Checkout published an admirably clear explanation of its use of AI to optimise payment acceptance for its customers), we’re some distance from true agentic commerce. There are considerable technical, cultural and regulatory hurdles to jump first.

Adyen’s head of agentic commerce gave a revealing interview. “Infrastructure is a much bigger block than folks thought about,” he said.

Matt Jones says consumers just aren’t ready. Even when they are ready, agentic commerce doesn’t really work today. Read what happened when Andrew Dresner asked AI to buy him a pair of boots.

Much vendor activity is probably best characterised as innovation theatre; good for a press release and slide in a corporate sales deck but not a mass-market product. This month’s highlights include the first agentic transaction in France which involved Worldline, Credit Agricole and Mastercard.

My view is that we’re likely to see agents making purchases first within walled gardens, such as Amazon’s new Rufus product but also that the industry focus on retail is wrong-headed. I wouldn’t ask ChatGPT to buy me a shirt, but I would be very happy to have AI switch my electricity supplier whenever a better tariff was available.

Longer term, there are growing fears that neither consumers nor businesses will be willing to pay the true cost of using AI once investors stop subsidising the technology. The numbers are quite frightening.

Fraud

Payment fraud is well researched and we’re seeing a consistent theme: real people are becoming a problem. Good customers are becoming fraudsters.

Visa’s 2026 Global eCommerce Payments & Fraud research shows friendly fraud (merchants being scammed by their own customers) is a major trend. Adyen’s “Fraud’s identity crisis” says good customers “have learned to game the system,” citing growing worries about returns abuse. Ravelin takes the argument further and highlights what it calls “the democratisation of deception.” 65% of consumers say AI has made it easier to falsely claim refunds.

Understanding consumer intent will become ever more important which requires sharing information between the various parts of the payment ecosystem – issuer, network, PSP and merchant.

Visa has tried to clamp down on fraud with its VAMP programme. This penalises acquirers whose merchants generate high levels of fraudulent or disputed transactions. Visa’s product team tells me that the VAMP ratio (fraud + disputes) has fallen by 10% quarter-on-quarter and that one half of acquirers enrolled in the programme have already hit their targets. “Remediation,” as Visa calls it, can usually be achieved with simple best practice – CVV checks, network tokens, refusing PAN key entry and stronger velocity controls. Interestingly, remediated acquirers have grown payment volume twice the rate of non-remediated ones. This indicates that issuers had been declining good transactions from acquirers with a bad record on fraud and disputes.

Merchant cash advance

Merchant cash advance (AKA embedded finance) is growing fast but a small number of providers are securing partnerships with the main PSPs. YouLend is powering Buckaroo Capital, making financing available to its 54,000 merchants in the Benelux. YouLend has also announced recent deals with JustEat and Paypoint.

Liberis, the second player in the European market, has been bought by Qred, a Swedish bank. We can expect to see Liberis widening its embedded finance offer to include more conventional banking products which will be attractive to PSPs looking to offer more conventional loans or invoice financing.

Meanwhile, in Czechia, Flowpay – one of the rare MCA vendors not based in London – is providing financing through a partnership with Teya.

SoftPOS

Lloyds Bank in the UK is embedding Stripe’s SoftPOS within its business banking app. Called Lloyds Connect, transactions are 1.5% + 20p. In this video, a plumber explains that taking card payments on the spot beats chasing clients for invoices. “It makes a very uncomfortable situation, very comfortable,” he says. Standard Stripe POS terminals are also available. 

The plumber is in a more comfortable position than Fiserv. With the Stripe partnership, Lloyds has split its payment acceptance proposition. Below £100K card turnover, customers are directed to Stripe product. Above the threshold, it’s still Lloyds Cardnet, the bank’s JV with Fiserv. Customers can’t apply for Lloyds Connect if they are already clients of Lloyds Cardnet, the bank’s JV with Fiserv, presumably due to non-compete agreements between the partners.

Cash

Public policy sometimes moves contradictory directions regarding cash. On the one hand, central bankers praise its role in financial resilience and politicians understand its role in financial inclusion. On the other, everyone knows that cash goes hand in glove with tax avoidance and money laundering.

Germany is a case in point. The government of Berlin wants to make card acceptance mandatory. “I can’t think of any other reason why someone insists on cash payment than wanting to work past the tax,” said the Christian Democrat leader. But when the sole ATM failed at a German seaside resort, the Mayor pleaded with visitors to bring their own cash.

But Europeans are voting with their feet. LINK, the UK’s ATM network, maintains detailed research of cash usage which shows a recent quite rapid decline. More people and merchants are going wholly cash free. 10% of people say they never use cash and 23% of retailers only accept digital money.

The % of UK adult population that have used cash to pay for something in the past two weeks 2022-2026 Source: LINK

Crypto

140 banks, card schemes, PSPs and technology providers have formed Open Standardto launch a stablecoin called OUSD. This is a big move and one that should both legitimise and simplify this rather complicated new form of money. Among the founders are Adyen, Checkout, Fiserv, Nuvei, Shopify and Worldline. Open Standard’s USP will be its positioning as neutral infrastructure, not a profit machine. You won’t be surprised to learn that Simon Taylor is very excited about this.

No matter who issues the coins, their primary use case is financial plumbing not retail customer experience. Visa’s President said recently: “Stablecoins are unlikely to become widely used for paying for goods and services in stores in the foreseeable future.”

This confirms data from the US Fed which shows little or no use of crypto currencies – stable or unstable – by consumers.

In other news

This is not an April fool. Block – the parent of Square – has launched Cash App Wand. For $25 you can embed your card credentials in a piece of cheap moulded plastic. Tap to pay at any contactless terminal and feel like Harry Potter.

Cashapp Wand from Block

Paris has finally agreed to a €140m investment to implement contactless ticketing and payments on public transport. There’s no rush. It will take until 2030 to roll out the whole network. It’s a different model to London. Paris will still encourage you to use the closed-loop Navigo cards. Bank cards (Visa, Mastercard or Carte Bancaire) will be more expensive. Worldline will be processing the transactions.

A timely report from KAE shows that, if you want to keep your customers, service and pricing is more important than product. Where merchants do need new capability, they are happy to pay. There’s no need to bundle the latest features with today’s standard price plan.

The average restaurant tip in the US is almost 20% according to data from Toast. This American habit is coming to Europe fast, thanks to the proliferation of US hospitality software.

In Italy, banks have voluntarily agreed to reduce processing fees for sub €30 transactions for small merchants with turnover less than €400,000.

FXC has listed all the payment sponsorships at the World Cup. There are more than you’d think.

PayPal has axed PayPal ventures. I’ve never been convinced by corporate VCs. If a business has spare cash, give to the shareholders and let them decide what to invest in.

And finally

The original stablecoin is a Scottish pound. These are backed 1:1 with English banknotes but can sometimes be difficult to spend south of the border. But I’ve never seen them discounted before. This FX bureau will give you 20% less for a Scottish pound than an English one.

Photo credit: Ron Delvano

My investments

I’ve made small investments in three exciting payment start-ups. I’ve included these for full disclosure but let me know if you’d like an introduction.

• 1-CP – based in Frankfurt, 1-CP is the “Corporate PayPal” that brings B2B functions into merchants’ B2C checkouts.
• Equali – reconciliation and accounting automation for payments
• Inqyre – AI orchestration for merchant onboarding in payments

Where to find me

I’ll be at the Fintech Drinks in London on 16 July and at the EPSM event in Athens on 22 October.

Get in touch

If you’re looking for a board advisor, non-executive director or speaker/moderator at a company event or conference, get in touch. 

Book an online meeting or reach me the old-fashioned way: geoff@barracloughandco.com, +44 7808 142102.

If you’re wondering the secret behind Flatpay’s phenomenal growth, I’d recommend 30mins listening to this podcast with Sander Janca-Jensen, the company’s founder.

Key points:

The founding team are not payments people. They came from the alarm industry and realised that the same field sales model could be adapted to distribute merchant services to small businesses.

Growth is remarkable. Flatpay was founded just four years ago in Denmark but is now live in seven markets, has 100.000 merchants, 2000 staff and has hit €20bn run-rate of annual processing volume. Sander says Flatpay is taking an incremental 10% pts of the Danish market each year and 5% of the (much larger) Italian market. The fast entry into Italy is bad news for Nexi (the incumbent) and Worldline (up until now, main challenger).

Flatpay targets 1m merchants by the end of 2029 which would get it close to SumUp’s scale. Flatpay will continue opening new markets where GDP per capita is sufficient for its acquisition model to work. This means the USA will likely come before Poland.  

The product set is very simple. Flatpay avoids a “long tail” of product features used by few customers. One terminal, one distribution model (field sales) and no partners to pay commission to. Field sales reps need to generate 20 deals/month and are exited swiftly if they don’t get near to this very quickly.

Sander doesn’t mention Flatpay’s innovative, although controversial, policy of offering free processing on business and international cards funded through a consumer surcharge. Competitors think this is the key factor behind its growth and one that could be replicated by others in the market. 

Flatpay never places a job advert for management. All senior hires are from their network or recommended by existing staff. Sander likes BCG/McKinsey people which means we’re talking smart, hard-working people with good people skills. Sander gives them staff roles sitting next to a co-founder for 6-12 months and then moves them to a commercial director job in a new market. Every country MD has been promoted internally. 

New markets are opened with a team of 10 people expatriated from Denmark. These are gradually replaced with local hires.

There are lots of big ideas in Business of Payments this month: sovereignty, AI agents, open banking and more. Meanwhile, the industry quietly gets on with consolidation, integration and the usual power struggles. 

Read on for all the latest news.

The Payments Business

This month’s big news is a major strategic pivot from Adyen. After twenty years of focus on building a single-platform processor from scratch, the company has surprised the market with its first acquisition. And it’s a big one. The Amsterdam-listed payments giant is paying €750m in cash for Talon.One, a Berlin-based start-up that helps enterprises run personalised loyalty and incentive campaigns.

Adyen has long avoided M&A, citing the benefits of a unified technology platform and well known difficulty of integrating payments businesses. This deal marks a clear change in approach.

Talon claims 300 customers including Adidas, Ikea and Kingfisher but Adyen’s move is primarily about capability rather than scale. Talon’s 2024 accounts show a still-small business, with sales up 13% to €11m although it hopes to hit €60m annual run rate by the end of this year. Talon’s investors, including those who joined a $135m fundraise in 2025, will be well pleased.

Adyen believes the addition of Talon’s loyalty engine will help widen its proposition from simply optimising payments to optimising pricing: enabling merchants to tailor offers and prices to individual customers based on demographics, behaviour and spend. It may also strengthen Adyen’s position in grocery, a vertical still dominated by domestic incumbent acquirers.

Cynics might argue that Adyen is generating more cash than it can deploy internally, and that acquisitions are more appealing than returning capital via dividends or buybacks. For now, investors seem relaxed: the share price is up 12% since the announcement.

Two notes of caution. First, loyalty is notoriously difficult to execute. It’s a high-touch product and hard to integrate cleanly with payments. Mastercard tried a similar approach, acquiring SessionM for $215m in 2019 before selling it at a loss for $20m. Second, dynamic pricing risks alienating customers. Retail shoppers tend to dislike paying different prices for the same product, and the reputational jeopardy for merchants could be real.

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Nexi Group is closer than ever to being taken private again. CVC is reportedly nearing agreement with shareholders of the Milan-listed payments processor, which was originally assembled through a series of acquisitions across Italy, Germany and the Nordics. CVC’s plan needs first to spin out Nexi’s digital banking unit, which operates Italy’s interbank payments network and is considered too politically sensitive to remain under private equity ownership.

Nexi was floated at €9 per share. Despite stable, cash-generative recent results which have boosted the stock in recent weeks, the share price still trades at less than half that level.

ANZ Bank is terminating its joint venture with Worldline in Australia and bringing merchant services back in-house after failing to find a private equity buyer. Although the move was widely trailed, the value destruction is larger than expected: Worldline paid €300m for a 51% stake in 2022; ANZ is buying it back for just €54m.

Staying in the Pacific, Worldline has also sold its New Zealand business for around €16m, a fraction of the €115m Ingenico paid for the country’s original EFTPOS network in 2018. Worldline inherited the business through its 2020 acquisition of Ingenico. One day, someone will write a book on what a mess Ingenico made of its expansion from hardware into services.

This marks the end of Worldline’s retreat from non-European markets, having now exited Australia, New Zealand, India and the US. The result is a more focused and better-capitalised business. And a more predictable one. After years of earnings misses, 2026 looks set to deliver in line with management expectations.

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In France, Advent is reportedly considering a sale of its majority stake in Mangopayat an enterprise valuation of €500m–€1bn. Advent acquired control from Crédit Mutuel Arkéa in 2022 (terms undisclosed) and injected a further €75m.

Mangopay specialises in marketplace payments, processing around €10bn annually. It benefits from a deep partnership with Mirakl, the French software provider behind many leading global marketplaces. Mangopay is a rare payments asset: independent and well positioned in a fast-growing, high-margin niche. Potential buyers? Adyen and Stripe already have strong marketplace capabilities but Global Payments and JPMorgan could certainly be interested.

In other corporate news, Kustom, the online checkout business spun out of Klarna last year, is spending €44m to buy Vipps MobilePay’s checkout product. Vipps Checkout serves 3,000 Norwegian merchants and processes €0.6bn in volume. Vipps runs a highly successful domestic wallet and has sensibly concluded it lacks the scale to compete with Stripe and other global players in the highly competitive market for checkout.

Euronet has bought PaynoPain, a fast-growing Spanish PSP with strong omnichannel capabilities, 3,000 merchants and €1bn in volume. Euronet, listed on NASDAQ but often overlooked by investors, already has a strong merchant services presence in Germany, Poland and Greece. The deal also brings Euronet an annual payment party.

Tab, a Swedish company that uses card-linking to send digital receipts to shoppers’ banking apps, has been acquired by Kivra, a consumer-focused bill payment service. This reinforces the view that digital receipts are a product feature, not a standalone business.

Turning to investment, it’s been a quiet month, but a few smaller raises point to where the market is heading:

• London-based Ralio has raised €2.5m to help developers enable AI agents to buy goods and services.
• Stockholm’s Solvapay has raised €2.4m to help AI agents discover and purchase digital services. I’ll let the CEO explain how it works.https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/CNQr9kNy-0M?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
• Prague-based SoftPOS start-up Tapaya has raised €1m in a pre-seed round. Rising memory chip costs are pushing up terminal prices, giving SoftPOS a boost.

Looking ahead, SumUp is edging closer to an IPO on the London Stock Exchange, with a valuation of around $10bn, a modest increase from the $8.5bn achieved in its 2023 funding round.

Werowatch

Wero, the new wallet from the European Payments Initiative (EPI), is one of two flagship efforts to reduce Europe’s reliance on American payment networks. The initiative has widespread political support. As the Bundesbank President put it: “It is not wise to outsource our sovereignty.”

So how is wero doing? The unofficial werotracker now lists almost 50 online merchants accepting wero, including Decathlon and Eventim. German merchants are starting to come on board, with several Otto Group brands live and Nexi acting as acquirer. École du Ski Français has processed the first wero e-commerce transaction, in France with BPCE as acquirer and Payplug as PSP.

This is good progress although eCommerce is the channel with the most domestic options already available. True sovereignty requires wero to work at POS but this won’t be available until next year.

Embarrassingly, wero might not be as sovereign as advertised. We learned that EPI relies on Amazon Web Services. The EPI defends itself by saying that all data is encrypted but for me, the real issue is not the risk of Trump peeking at wero transactions, it’s the risk of AWS being ordered to turn off the EPI if one or more European countries annoys the White House. Nonetheless, EPI has now woken up to the problem and says it’s “working to reduce its dependency on non-European suppliers.”

Digital Euro

The second plank of European sovereignty is the digital euro, which continues to move steadily towards a pilot launch in 2027. A key milestone this month was the decision to adopt existing European standards from ECPC, Nexo and the Berlin Group. EMVCo’s absence is no surprise, given the desire to keep US influence at arm’s length.

The agreement is good news for merchants. It suggests that accepting the digital euro will not require new hardware as existing POS terminals and webshops should only need a software upgrade. Merchants will also be happy that the Socialist Group in the European Parliament has backed calls for fees to be kept well below those of other payment methods, proposing a cap of 4 cents per digital euro transaction.

Scheming

Carte Bancaire (CB) has seen its market share fall from 90% to 75% in just five years, as newer entrants such as Revolut expand in France without supporting the domestic scheme. CB is now on the offensive, claiming that 30 issuers are preparing to co-badge their Visa or Mastercard with CB. The Gaullist sovereignty argument is always a strong one in France.

In Spain, Bizum, the fast-growing bank-backed wallet, is preparing to challenge international card dominance at the point of sale. It’s launching a contactless payment option this month, allowing shoppers to pay either via the standalone Bizum Pay app or through their bank’s mobile app. Redsys is providing the technology. Merchants are promised lower fees than with Visa or Mastercard, but there will need to be a strong consumer proposition to persuade shoppers to abandon their habits of using Apple/Google Pay.

Blik, Poland’s wildly successful mobile payment scheme, processed €104bn in 2025, up 29%. eCommerce accounted for €52bn (also up 29%), while POS volume, where Blik often operates via a virtual Mastercard, rose 30% to €10bn. Interestingly, Blik recorded 600,000 contactless transactions in Germany during 2025. Poles are beginning to use Blik outside their home country.

ISV

As software and payments converge, software vendors (ISVs) have realised they can capture a decent share of payments economics. That’s why they are increasingly pushing customers towards in-house processing. Merchants can still use third-party providers but often at a cost.

In e-commerce, Shopify has done this for years but BigCommerce was one of the last major platforms to champion processor choice. No longer. Under pressure from a hostile takeover from Dan Wagner’s Rezolve AI the web shop vendor will begin surcharging all but a few favoured providers. Worldpay, Stripe, Adyen and BigCommerce Payments (via PayPal) are on the whitelist.

The trend is now reaching the point of sale. In the UK, EPOS Now, one of the largest SME ePOS vendors, has given merchants as little as one week’s notice that its integration with Dojo will end. Merchants aren’t happy as you can see from a typical Trustpilot review.

EPOS Now customers face three choices. Either continue using Dojo terminals in standalone mode but pay a penalty of up to £89 per month to EPOS Now; switch to EPOS Now Payments (powered by Adyen); or move to a new ePOS provider. Dojo is actively soliciting merchants to move to competitive products. Whether it’s EPOS Now or Dojo that wins this tug-of-war will tell us something about the new balance between software and payments

A US survey of ISVs commissioned by Adyen found that two-thirds are looking to consolidate payment suppliers. Triggers typically include expansion into new geographies or verticals, or a desire to become the primary financial system for customers, starting with payments. ISVs are likely to favour PSPs with global reach and broader embedded finance capabilities.

One consequence of the shift from ISOs to ISVs is that fewer merchant portfolios are coming up for sale. TSG, a US consultancy, notes that software vendors tend to hold onto their portfolios, unlike ISOs, where an exit has traditionally always been part of the business plan. Where assets do come to market, buyers are paying a premium for businesses with full control over pricing, churn and onboarding.

Investors sense an opportunity to roll-up small vertical software businesses, with the business case driven by monetising payments onto an in-house stack. Look at Access Group, ClearCourse, Everfield, team.blue, Vesta Software and Valsoft. This market is moving rapidly.

New shopping

Rising labour and input costs are pushing retail and hospitality businesses towards order kiosks and self-checkout machines. Recent research suggests quick-service restaurants can cut a full minute from order-to-fulfilment times. That’s impressive but customers are less convinced. Service may be faster, but it feels slower, and satisfaction has dropped across the industry.

Starbucks is trialling small-format ordering tablets in the UK. Early results show one in four customers using them, with average transaction values 12% higher than orders placed with a barista. Adyen is providing the payment processing.

Autonomous stores continue to produce mixed results. Aldi has abandoned its pilots in the US and UK. Customers were required to register via an app which proved too much work for many customers. By contrast, Rewe has opened its seventh “scanless” store in Hanover, using Trigo’s technology. There’s no app. Customers pay on exit at a self-checkout terminal, with cards or cash.

Smart carts may offer a more pragmatic middle ground. Cameras, scanners and weighing scales sit in the trolley rather than on the shelves. In Belgium, Colruyt seems happy with its pilot. In one store, 10% of shoppers choose a smart cart and many like them so much they will queue at peak times for one to become available. 

Smartcarts are expensive – I’ve been told €1,000-€2,000 each depending on individual retailer requirements – but are expected to pay back the investment with advertising income. This could be as much as $210/month each, according to analysts following Cust2Mate, an Israeli business listed on NASDAQ Agentic Commerce

Agentic commerce

Agentic commerce – where an AI buys goods or services without a “human in the loop” – is attracting a lot of attention. But consumers are not yet ready to hand over control. Research shows they are comfortable with AI making recommendations, but reluctant to let it complete transactions. The perceived risk of mistakes remains too high.

Merchants, by contrast, are moving ahead. Ravelin finds that 75% of large merchants are already integrating one or more agentic commerce protocols. Interestingly, they trust AI customers (marginally) more than human shoppers. Their concerns are less about mistakes and more about fraud – specifically, how to authenticate and monitor non-human actors.

Some merchants may not be real people. An AI opened a store, bought the stock, hired the staff and did the PR. In San Francisco obviously.

The industry is beginning to respond. American Express has launched an Agent Purchase Protection programme, under which cardholders are indemnified against charges resulting from AI agent errors, provided both the agent and the merchant are approved by Amex. This is an early attempt to build trust on the consumer side.

Further down the stack, acquirers appear largely unconcerned to the point of complacency. Research from Visa suggests that “nearly all acquirers are confident that agentic commerce can be supported through enhancements to existing infrastructure.”

Fraud

Worldpay has lost its appeal at the French Supreme Court, following a 2022 judgment. The company had been held liable for failing in its duty of vigilance when it processed transactions for an intermediary linked to a series of fraudulent forex trading sites.

This is a civil case, not a criminal one, and the damages are relatively modest (around €50,000), reduced by the court due to the victim’s own contributory negligence. That said, the principle is important, and the judgment may have wider implications. Payment processors are not neutral pipes. If you enable payment flows linked to clearly problematic activity, you may be held responsible – not just for your direct customers, but for their customers too.

It’s not just e-commerce fraud that PSPs should be worried about. An excellent BBC investigation shows the extent of criminality on Britain’s high streets. Convenience stores are openly selling drugs over the counter and accepting card payments. Payment providers need to be all over this, or regulators will act.

Meanwhile, Visa’s tougher fraud monitoring regime, the VAMP programme, has finally gone live but many merchants are still not ready. Coinflow has a helpful explainer. The outcome is likely to be stricter enforcement of strong customer authentication in Europe while merchants will have a stronger incentive to steer riskier traffic away from cards and onto A2A rails.

Open banking

There were 31.3m open banking payments in the UK during March. The rate of increase continues to decline and the number of transactions was just 37% higher than a year ago. This is far from the explosive growth predicted for A2A payments.

Many in the industry are pinning their hopes on variable recurring payments (VRPs), the open banking equivalent of direct debits. These should gain broader adoption later this year as standards are established, initially for charity donations and utility bill payments.

Some research from GoCardless shows that merchants believe VRPs can certainly fix some of the problems the experience managing recurring card payments. But the issue for PSPs and their investors is that there’s very little money to be made in processing direct debits, even feature-heavy ones like VRPs. This is clear from GoCardless and its 2025 results.

GoCardless bought Nuapay, a direct debit and open banking vendor, in 2024 for £28m. In 2025, Nuapay generated just £7.7m of revenue from £27bn of volume. Direct debit processing is a technical service: the provider doesn’t take risk and normally can’t charge an ad valorem fee. The result is stable, low-margin revenue, but little excitement as seen in the impact of Nuapay on GoCardless’s overall take rate.

Overall, GoCardless made an operating loss of £25m on revenues up 18% to £155m. Mollie, the well-capitalised Dutch PSP, has agreed to buy GoCardless for €1.1bn – a very generous deal for GoCardless shareholders.

Cash

Germany, one of the most cash-friendly developed economies, has moved closer to making digital payment acceptance mandatory for merchants. The main reason for the new law is the estimated €10–15bn in annual tax losses from shops and restaurants failing to declare cash sales.

Business lobby groups oppose the move but as the public uses cash less often, the cost of handling it is rising. Even so, estimates still suggest cash remains marginally cheaper than debit cards. Germany’s Bundesbank puts the cost of accepting cash at 43 cents per retail transaction. In Britain, the BRC has a similar estimate of 0.15% of value, that’s around 45p on a £30 purchase.

In Holland, a new initiative will allow shoppers to withdraw €100 notes from ATMs in supermarkets. This could be helpful, but since using such high-value notes is unusual, one commentator observed: “You are considered a criminal if you want to pay with it, right?”

Crypto

While Fintech commentators fizz with excitement about stablecoins, there’s little evidence of these new currencies being used for retail payments. New research from the Kansas City Federal Reserve (below) shows stablecoins remain primarily a tool for moving into and out of cryptocurrencies. Less than 1% of stablecoins are used for payments. This is backed up by a new paper from Visa’s Economic Empowerment Institute, which concludes that “stablecoin activity represents a small share of everyday economic transactions”. As Andrew Dresner puts it, “everyone should just calm down.”

Figure 1 Source: Kansas City Federal Reserve

Some in the US administration hope that explosive growth in dollar stablecoins – essentially tokenised US Treasuries — will allow it to continue running large fiscal deficits. European governments are worried and have proposed that the EBA should have a “kill switch” that bans dollar stablecoins if an issuer is found to be acting against EU token holders’ interests. This could get messy.

Turning to traditional crypto – you could call them unstable coins – former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has declared that Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme. This is no surprise. Bitcoin ATM fraud is at record levels, such as this case where an 80-year-old man was scammed out of his life savings.

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In other news

If you need help deciding between ISO and PF, Dwayne Gefferie has published a great guide on how to start a payment processor.

The .pay domain has gone live. You’ll need to move fast if you want to register pay.pay but I’m having paymentMcpaymentface.pay.

Hat tip to L’arrondi – helping French shoppers round up purchases to the nearest euro with the balance given to charity. It has raised a total of €100m since launch in 2013 – €81m of this at POS.

Mastercard has cut emissions by 44% since 2016, mainly through moving data centres to renewable energy. It’s good to see Mastercard still caring about the planet when many others seem to have given up.

And finally

Apple’s Eddy Cue explains how he sold millions of songs at 99c without losing all the margin to credit card processing fees.

Where to find me

I’ll be at Money 20/20 Europe in Amsterdam on 2/3 June and at ACI’s Payments Unleashed in London on 29/30 June.

I work with a small number of companies on speaking, moderation and advisory roles when my diary allows. Feel free to get in touch.

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.io, 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.