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.
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.
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.
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.
