Business of Payments – September 2026
It’s been a busy summer in the payment business as the major players gave their first half updates. They are telling a consistent story. Modern PSPs with developer-friendly technology are attracting the best, fastest-growing customers. The incumbents are left servicing the old economy and growing slowly, if at all.
Opportunities
I’ve been approached by investors looking to make acquisitions in the UK and Europe. Get in touch if you’re looking to sell either:
- Payment gateway, ISO or small merchant acquirer with >€200m monthly volume
- Retail or restaurant POS software with established merchant base
For a confidential introductory conversation, drop me an email: geoff@barracloughandco.com
The payment business
Stripe has continued it stunning success story. According to its August shareholder letter, it grew net revenue 41% in H1 2026. Stripe now processes for every single one of the 25 fastest growing software vendors and 44 of the Forbes AI 50. Blimey.
Payments remains the product anchor but Stripe is positioning itself as the infrastructure of the new economy. Stripe paid $8bn for OpenRouter, a platform which connects developers with AI models and which is growing at 9% per month. OpenRouter charges 5% commission and already processes on Stripe which, as Simon Taylor explains, gives Stripe a 7.5% take rate on the AI economy. Blimey again.
Stripe has been hiring to support this growth including job titles such as “Forward Deployed AI Accelerator.” I think this means “sales engineer.” Let me know if I’m wrong.
Figure 1 Credit: PCN Insights
The AI market is at a very early stage and it’s hard to see these economics holding as companies grow and competitors sense an opportunity to take share from Stripe. For example, OpenAI is now dual-sourcing its processing with a new agreement with Adyen which covers ChatGPT’s subscription sales. The more complex metered token billing stays with Stripe.
That deal was announced as part of another very positive set of results for Adyen in H1with volume up 24% to €804bn and net revenue up 19% to €1.3bn. Adyen reports all segments and all geographies are growing nicely. EMEA, up 15%, was the slowest growing region, possibly reflecting weak consumer spending in Germany and elsewhere.
Adyen’s management has surprised the market this year with two acquisitions – Orb (complex billing for AI companies) and Talon.One (loyalty) – at a combined cost of €1bn. Although the deals will add just €25-50m revenue in 2027, these capabilities help position Adyen for two large new merchant segments – grocery and AI. Orb gives Adyen the right to play with the AI natives which, today, are typically associated with Stripe.
In general, payment companies have reported little impact from the ongoing conflict in the Middle East but Shift4 – new owner of the Global Blue tax-free shopping business – said reduced international travel was hitting sales by c.$20m a quarter. And Global Payments took a $31m Q2 net revenue hit from regional airline clients inherited from Worldpay.
Global Payments has given some insight into the combined Worldpay/Global business. An analysis of its H1 results shows that legacy Global is mainly SMB and highly profitable. In contrast, legacy Worldpay is stronger in enterprise but less profitable in all segments and losing money in SMB. There’s clearly a big margin improvement play available for Global’s management. More on the Business of Payments blog.
Also on the Business of Payments blog this month:
- Mollie, the Amsterdam-based eCommerce PSP reports net revenue rose 23% to €156m while costs remain under control.
- Santander Payment Solutions reported excellent Q2 numbers.
- Nexi’s merchant solutions revenues were flat in Q2 although volume was up 5%
Flatpay, the fast-growing POS-focused SME vendor, reported revenues tripling to €39m in 2025 as expansion into Germany began to deliver. Flatpay’s prodigious hiring (2,000 staff by June 2026) contributed to an operating loss of €70m. With merchant numbers now exceeding 100,000, management is forecasting 2026 revenues growing to €100-105m while losses widen to €140-150m. Investors are buying the story. Flatpay raised €146m last year at a €1.5bn valuation. More on the Business of Payments blog.
Flatpay is a high-profile member of the “tap pack” – a well-financed group of SME-focused POS payment PSPs expanding across Europe. In other “tap pack” news, Dojo has reached €1bn volume in Italy and SumUp is sponsoring Newcastle United this season. Its marketing team have done a lovely job with this video linking small business, community, football and card payments.
Payment hardware is a tough market. Ingenico revenues were down 11% in 2025, hitting free cashflow and leading to a default on interest payments to bondholders. Apollo, the giant US PE house that was behind the €2.3bn demerger of Ingenico fromWorldline in 2022, has walked away with losses of €600m or more. Now, Ingenico has bought itself some breathing space. Lenders agreed a €150m “capital restructure” that should reduce interest payments to manageable levels. PIMCO and other bondholders have converted €400m of the €1.1bn outstanding debt to equity and injected more cash. Much now depends on the success of Ingenico’s Axium range of Android terminals.
It’s been a quiet summer for corporate activity but Monext, a French PSP owned by Credit Mutuel, has bought Alcineo, a softPOS vendor with 30 employees and €5-10m revenues which supplies 48 clients including myPOS. Monext claims 2,000 clients, €7bn volume and will now have good in-house capability for embedded payments.
In fundraising news, Nopan (geddit?) raised €7.23m to bring card-style payment optimisation tools to A2A and wallets. Nopan is based in Amsterdam, founded by former Netflix payments execs and already has a payment institution licence. Adriaan Mol (founder of Mollie) posted about Nopan on LinkedIn, saying that he thinks it sounds like a stupid investment. I think this is a little harsh.
ePOS Now, a fast-growing UK-based retail and café software unicorn, has secured £90m bank finance to accelerate its international expansion. Adyen supplies the payments.
Staying in the UK, Kord, a start-up looking to make onboarding easier for regulated businesses including payments, has raised a total of £9m.
AI innovation in merchant acquiring
I’m helping Datos find case studies for a new report. If you’re doing anything innovative with AI and merchant acquiring, please get in touch.
Software and payments converge
Small merchants across Europe are less and less likely to take payments from their bank. Instead, they are increasingly likely to buy a bundle of payments and software, fronted by their software vendor (ISV). The choice of software drives the choice of payments vendor, not the other way around.
Shopify is the best example. The Canadian commerce platform which hosts webshops for over 3m merchants is now processing c.$75bn a quarter through its Shopify Payments product. This volume primarily goes through Stripe although analysts at UBS report that Shopify has started processing with Adyen for some Shopify Payments transactions in Europe, initially in France and the UK. Margins are thin. UBS estimates Adyen will be getting just 5bps on these transactions.
Following Shopify’s example, most retail or hospitality ISVs have now launched their own payment service. It’s a fast-growing market but we’ve lacked benchmarking data until now. An excellent new research report from Rainforest, which provides a white-label service allowing ISVs to bundle payments with their core product, shows attachment rates varying from 33% to 93%. The data is from the US but increasingly relevant for Europe too. Rainforest concludes that ISVs prize ease of integration above commercial terms and that the successful ones have hired a payment expert in senior management.
Figure 2 Source: Vertical SaaS Embedded Payments, Rainforest
ISVs tend to start their payments journey by simply reselling a product from one of the large processors. Adyen tends to dominate multi-channel uses in Europe but there is space for smaller payment processors with a clear focus on a particular market segment. For example, Unipaas – a London-based PF-as-a-service vendor founded by ex SafeCharge execs – has won three childcare platforms.
But more mature software vendors are increasingly unafraid of moving into financial services themselves. Mews, the fast-growing Amsterdam-based hotel software vendor, has got an EMI licence from the Dutch National Bank.
Beyond payments, many ISVs are looking to provide capital to their merchants. Direct-to-SME lending has been a very difficult category for years but a number of businesses are specialising in providing loans to merchants via software platforms. In Europe, Youlend, Liberis, 365 Finance and Flowpay are among the leaders. Distribution costs are low and the vertical platforms have sufficient data to avoid obviously bad risks.
For more on embedded finance (including payments), I recommend the Embedded Finance Review.
Scheming
Despite political talk of the need for payment sovereignty, Visa and Mastercard continue to grow volume in Europe – up 9% in euros in Q2 according to latest filings. That’s twice the pace of retail sales growth and indicates the Americans are still taking market share from cash and domestic schemes. More on the Business of Payments blog.
Mastercard is reportedly looking to sell Vocalink, the organisation which runs the UK’s core payment infrastructure including instant payments. There have also been rumours that Mastercard will sell Nets Group, which plays a similar role in Denmark. Mastercard’s retreat from A2A is likely to be as much about economics as geopolitics. Vocalink’s sales of £212m grew just 2% in 2025 – equivalent to just 1.5p per transaction or a take rate of 0.2bps. It’s very hard to get rich from direct debits.
Staying in the UK, the Payment Systems Regulator found that Visa and Mastercard “increased their core scheme and processing fees to acquirers by at least 25% since 2017, costing businesses at least £170 million extra per year.” Now, the PSR will force the schemes to publish “auditable records of all new pricing decisions.” Acquirers and merchants often feel that many of the fees are slightly random so this will make an interesting read.
#werowatch
Wero, the European Payment Initiative’s wallet based on SEPA Instant, is making steady progress. The werotracker website shows banks now live in four countries – Bunq in the Netherlands being the latest – and over 120 eCommerce merchants now accepting wero.
For wero to succeed, it’s not sufficient to be listed by retailers. New use cases such as this implementation on parking meters by VR Payments in Germany will help. But wero also will need to be promoted to consumers. The EPI won’t be happy with its placement at the foot of Lidl’s checkout page.
In the early stages, most of wero’s volume will come from the takeover of iDEAL, the very popular bank transfer system in the Netherlands. The migration is going ahead from October. A key consumer benefit is purchasing protection which will be phased in by 2028.
This all indicates positive momentum but we’re still awaiting volume or transaction numbers to demonstrate wero is meeting a real consumer need.
Turning to more established domestic schemes, latest numbers show a very mixed performance. In Poland, Blik is still growing strongly; volume was up 18% to €29bn in H1 2026. It’s striking that Blik’s spectacular growth has not come at the expense of cards. eCommerce card volume has almost tripled since 2020.
Bancomat, the Italian scheme taken into private equity ownership in 2024, looks to be prospering. According to its annual report, sales were up 63% in 2025 to €85m. Network fees grew 23% but most of the increase came from the new “infrastructure services division” (built by Nexi) which has begun taking processing volume from regional banks.
In contrast, Girocard, the German scheme, grew volume less than 1% to €152bn in H1 2026 even as the number of terminals rose by 11% to 1.4m.
Digital euro
The digital euro is increasingly viewed as essential for payment sovereignty although many in the industry are sceptical about whether it genuinely solves a pain point for merchants or shoppers. Rachel Greener looks at the arguments and concludes that, although the digital euro has limited value today, it does bring option value for an increasingly uncertain tomorrow.
Returning to 2026, the EBA has selected 36 PSPs to join a pilot programme. The list includes Adyen, Nexi (which seems particularly excited), Stripe, SumUp and Worldline. The pilot begins late 2027 with full launch scheduled in 2029. With the draft rule book already approaching 1,000 pages (including the annexes), Goran Bosankić explains what vendors need to be doing now.
Open banking
The industry trumpeted the remarkable 100bn API calls made since the competition authorities mandated open banking in 2018. Yet despite the high-profile adoption of open banking payments by Amazon and others earlier this year, the rate of growth dipped in July to 38%. A little over 41m payments were made that month compared to over 2bn debit card transactions. There’s a long way to go.
Many are hoping that the UK Payments Initiative will come to the rescue by speeding adoption of variable recurring payments, the open banking equivalent of direct debits.
One immediate challenge is that both public and merchants are familiar with direct debits and feel very positively about them. Volume may be hard to shift. Researchers from pay.uk found merchants particularly valued the “direct debit guarantee” which allows consumers to repudiate transactions. The UK PI will need to match this.
Figure 4 Direct debit attitudes. “What drives your usage of direct debits?”
Another challenge is user experience. Open banking fraud levels are low (just 2.4bps of payment volume in Q1 2026) but the headline figure hides a major problem. Most of the fraud is authorised push payment (APP) but the tactics used by banks to minimise APP work directly against the slick user experience open banking needs to compete with cards. Each time a customer is presented a screen asking “do you really want to make this transaction”, the likelihood of a purchase is reduced. At the ACI Payments Unleashed conference in June, the head of payments at Vinted explained why his business was sticking with cards despite the cost advantage of open banking. Each extra customer click cuts conversion rate 25%, he said.
Agentic
Everyone thinks agentic commerce will be big, although nobody knows when. In anticipation of big volumes ahead, the industry is adopting a bewildering array of new standards and partnerships. The latest is the Agentic Payment Alliance featuring Visa and Mastercard.
Yet it’s not clear that consumers are ready to delegate serious buying decisions to agents. Google has pulled back from its “buy for me” proposition, favouring less autonomous shopping experience. For example, Square and Toast have both integrated with Google Maps via Google’s UC protocol to help Americans buy junk food on the way home from work. But this isn’t pure agentic commerce. You have to press “confirm” for each order.
Card payments – flexible and globally accepted – will be relatively easy to adapt to agentic commerce although liability needs some thought. Who should reimburse the consumer if an agent makes a mistake? And there’s a risk of agents overwhelming the industry with disputes, particularly when used for low-value high-frequency purchases. Rivero has a good white paper that lists the issues ahead.
Crypto corner
Stablecoins are much hyped but we’re still waiting for data that demonstrates widespread adoption. Here’s a summary of today’s use of stablecoins in merchant payments.
Starting with uses where a customer pays the merchant in stablecoins, nearly always USDC, Visa’s chain analytics calculates that roughly $6bn per month of stablecoin transactions are “retail sized” – that is, less than $250.
FXC Intelligence calculates that just 0.59% of cross-border consumer-to-business transactions – roughly $29bn annually – are using stablecoins. Shopify now allows its merchants to accept stablecoins in most developed markets although has made no comment on volumes.
One reason stablecoin acceptance is not growing more quickly is that it’s actually quite complicated for merchants. Rapyd prepared a good deck that lays out the challenges, notably: multiple blockchains, networks, wallets and providers, liquidity spread across different places, FX still happening on both ends, on-ramps and off-ramps that don’t always behave consistently and users who don’t fully trust or understand the flow.
This is one reason why the industry is excited about stablecoin cards. With these (normally Visa) cards, the consumer spends coins, but the merchant is settled in his usual currency. Latest data shows c.$500m a month spent in this way with Hong Kong fintech Redotpay accounting for slightly more than half. Although growing, this is still a drop in the ocean compared to Visa and Mastercard’s combined payment volume of c.$2 trillion each month.
Figure 5 Stablecoin card purchases. Source: Dune
In other news
If your marketing team begins any piece with “In today’s fast-moving landscape, how do you stay ahead?, get a new marketing team. Cokie Hasiotis writes that we need to ban the unreadable corporate slop which pervades LinkedIn and the avalanche of white papers clogging our inboxes. One downside giving your staff access to Co-pilot is the massive increase unreadable B2B content.
Walmart has finally agreed to accept NFC payments in stores. The US grocery giant was the last hold-out against Apple Pay but has bowed to the inevitable. Consumers want to pay with their phones and retailers must accept this.
The state of Florida has named Worldpay and Trustly in legal action against online casinos. It’s increasingly common for processors to be held responsible for their customers. What’s new, and potentially very uncomfortable for the industry, is that the docket also includes Yodlee and Praxis. These payment orchestrators sit outside the money flow and wouldn’t normally be required to run KYC and AML checks.
Weak KYC, poor expense controls. Pymnts reimagines the Odyssey as fintech.
Poland is axing its “small payment institution” licence. This was a pro-innovation move by the regulator to encourage start-ups but, in reality, it seems that small PIs “are associated with a very high risk of enabling money laundering and circumvention of sanctions.” There are no shortcuts to compliance.
Dutch research shows people love contactless ticketing on public transport but are very confused about what they are billed and when.
Why are payments always blue? A brand guru looks at the industry, calls for more colourful marketing and praises Mastercard’s easily recognisable palette.
I’m always looking for new uses of payment data but wasn’t expecting Stripe to tell the UK statistics authorities that its numbers of new business formation are wrong.
In Spain, CaixaBank has made 40 benches from plastic recycled from expired bank cards. The benches, which don’t look very comfortable, will be installed in villages across Castilla y Leon where the bank’s mobile branches stop.
And finally
The Association of Banks in Singapore got in trouble when it began masking parts of users’ names with the letter “X”. “My entire family’s surname just became NSFW (not safe for work),” wrote Facebook user Jeremy See, whose name was displayed as “JERXXX SEX WEX LOXX”. Another user, Ron Foo, wrote: “My name becomes so erotic … FOX SEX POX.”
Figure 6 Channel News Asia
