In another busy month, while the incumbents struggle, the international card schemes continue to prosper and agentic payments move up and down the hype curve faster than anything before. Read on for all the latest news from the Business of Payments.
The Payment Business
McKinsey’s 2026 Global Payments Report forecasts continued slow growth in payment revenues, rising just 3% CAGR over the next five years. The consultants expect cards to hold their ground but predict that much future cash-digital displacement will benefit account-to-account schemes instead. Growing fragmentation will drive increased IT spending, rising roughly double revenue growth although McKinsey thinks that AI should drive considerable efficiencies in customer operations and software engineering.
In this increasingly difficult environment, Adyen looks like one of the winners although its stock price fell 12% following its Q3 update. Despite impressive numbers – net revenue up 23% – management disappointed investors with lower profit forecasts for next year. Adyen plans to hire 550 more people than expected, mainly to support the new billing and loyalty products which arrived through the acquisitions of Talon.one and Orb. Analysts are very unhappy, one describing the news as “clearly a nasty surprise.” Adyen remains very bullish on both the new capabilities and the cross-sell potential but the stock is down 36% year to date. It now trades at 17-19 times forecast earnings, with 20% of the market cap accounted for by net cash. This looks remarkably cheap for a high-margin business growing at >20%.
The Q3 update from Worldline was less exciting although its long-suffering investors will be pleased. The new management team is gaining credibility by hitting (admittedly rather low) targets and reaffirming full-year guidance. Having sold off businesses outside Europe, the new, smaller Worldline describes itself as “fully pruned,“as if this were an overgrown rose bush rather than one of Europe’s payments champions. Reported revenue (see below) was down around 16%, reflecting the disposal of businesses in Australia, New Zealand, the US and India.
Ongoing merchant services revenue was flat after scheme and partner fees. Remarkably, this is Worldline’s best performance on this measure for some time. Growth is promised for 2027. Current highlights include SMB in Greece (where Worldline now owns 100% of its local business), Italy (where it has won bank partnerships from Nexi) and the Nordics. Investors initially welcomed the results, sending the shares up more than 12%, but enthusiasm has since faded. The market seems willing to give the new management credit for stabilising the business, while remaining unconvinced that it can deliver sustained growth and positive cash flow.
PayOne, Worldline’s German JV has succeeded in consolidating the German acquiring market but has been rather less successful at consolidating itself. PayOne was built from several acquisitions but, according to its 2024 annual report “Successive mergers created a highly complex and complicated systems landscape. Existing transformation programmes progressed more slowly than expected, and important synergy targets were not achieved on time”. The 2025 report shows healthy growth in payment volume (up 11% to €245bn) but deteriorating economics. Profits were down by 33% at €48m.
Staying in Germany, Unzer, the Frankfurt-based acquirer/PSP formerly known as HeidelPay, reported sales up just 2% in 2025 at €225m despite the addition of over 5,000 new customers. Although the company’s software business (based on the acquisition of Tillhub) prospered with revenue up 35%, group EBITDA halved to €9m.
PayPal is another long-standing payment business struggling to grow. International revenues fell 2% in Q3 with management blaming the EU de minimis charge, a new €3 parcel duty that has reduced sales volumes at Temu and Shein.
Hard times continue in hardware. Miura, based outside London, reported another year of falling sales in 2025. Revenue declined 22% to $17m, while the operating loss widened to $4.3m. Pretty much all the hardware vendors are telling the same story. Weak sales, higher costs and little scope to raise prices.
In the latest round of musical payment chairs, GTCR, the Chicago based PE fund, is rumoured to be preparing a $40bn bid for Global Payments. GTCR bought Worldpay from FIS and then flipped it to Global Payments at the beginning of this year, doubling its money. With the Global Payments share price down 60% this year, the bid could equate to just 7x EBITDA. Frank Young, a former Global Payments exec, thinks GTCR could make a lot of money.
“Tap Pack”
Results for the year to March 2026, show Dojo‘s growth continuing to slow despite its international expansion and aggressive move into lending. Volume was up 8% to £50bn and revenue up 11% to £501m. The unit economics are solid – revenue yield of 1.03% and an operating margin of 4% – but with accumulated losses of £792m and £625m of loans to repay in 2029, Dojo needs to keep growing. With the UK increasingly competitive, successful market entry in Italy and Spain will be critical. More details on the Business of Payments blog.
Square’s international volume grew 25% to $18bn in Q3 as the business invested field sales and ISO relationships in UK, Ireland, France and Spain. Square is moving upmarket and recent wins include Tap and Public House Group in London.
Agentic Commerce
Agentic commerce is moving up and down the hype curve faster than anything I can remember. This month, we’re climbing back to the peak of inflated expectations based on the stunning success of a new wave of personal agents, notably Meta’s Muse and Instinct. My first agentic transaction was getting Instinct to book a tennis court using a stored Visa card. I’m not alone. In London, a specialised agent that books public tennis courts has caused controversy by charging £1 to reserve peak-time slots just 9 seconds after the booking window opens.
More than a quarter of active Muse customers use the service for shopping with an average purchase size of $200. Travel seems to be the most popular use case which is consistent with reports from Instinct. With a technology this exciting, the public will find their own solutions and not always helpful ones.
Personal agents have caught the public imagination very quickly but that’s not the same as finding a viable business model. These services are very expensive to provide; Zuckerberg admitted that sheer compute intensity (and the associated cost) was the reason Muse hasn’t been launched outside North America. And it’s not clear how the agents get paid. Meta may be hoping to get a cut of transaction value but there’s no obvious mechanism to deliver this. And merchants may well object to paying extra taxes on purchases that were going to happen anyway.
Shopify CEO said that “Q3 saw personal agents hit the mainstream.” While this is certainly true for research and product discovery, the numbers are not yet there for purchasing. Uber said it had received just 500 agentic orders for Uber Eats in Q3 and only four for ride sharing.
If you live in Europe and haven’t been invited to join Instinct, you could try this Menta demo which allows you to buy products directly from ChatGPT or Claude using a stored credit card.
Despite the excitement, simply giving an agent your credit card today is not a reliable way of making a purchase. Visa revealed new research showing almost half of test purchases failed before even getting to the payment. Many websites aren’t optimised for agents; indeed, most are designed to block bots if they spot them. The anti-fraud controls used by merchants (eg Captcha) and issuers (velocity checks) are blocking many attempted transactions. Some of the big merchants, such as Amazon, are flatly refusing agents access to their sites. And several larger issuers, notably Chase in the USA, are not accepting the Visa and Mastercard’s new agentic tokens.
Importantly, we’re no closer to knowing who is liable when agentic transactions go wrong. Established players are updating terms and conditions to put the onus back to users. Stripe says if you ask an agent to make a purchase, you’re on your own (see below). So has Wells Fargo.
In response, Meta, Walmart, Visa and many other industry heavyweights have launched a Personal Agent Protocol which could resolve many of these questions. Or it could just add another protocol to the alphabet soup surrounding agentic payments. As to the payment itself, a number of models are emerging: give the agent your card details, card-on-file linked to the schemes’ new agentic tokens, Stripe Link (where the merchant supports this) or try a one-time virtual card.
It’s going to be an interesting few months while the industry rewrites its fraud tools to let the good bots through while still blocking the bad ones. This question is wider than cards of course. People will want to give agents access to domestic payment rails too. PPRO, the alternative payment gateway, has founded the Local Payments Council for Agentic Commerce with initial members including Blik (Poland), EPI (owners of Wero), Bancontact (Belgium) and DIAS (Greece).
Sovereignty
European payment sovereignty is based around the twin projects of Wero, a private sector project from the European Payment Initiative (EPI) and the digital euro from the European Central Bank (ECB).
The digital euro pilot should begin within 12 months and will include point of sale (using SoftPOS) and eCommerce. There is intense lobbying from retail groups to keep fees as low as possible. Discussions are proceeding and the EU’s current proposal is thought to be 2c per transaction for small merchants although the Italian government is proposing that transactions less than €10 should be free of charge.
The EPI has not yet released any transaction numbers for Wero, preferring to highlight its 60m users. But success requires people to take advantage of the service on offer. A recent promotion – offering €15 to anyone making two payments of at least one cent – caused chaos. Many users decided to donate one cent to a good cause, resulting in one small charity having its account frozen following 8,000 individual deposits of 1 cent.
Wero’s merchant network is growing. EPI claims 4,000 merchants live in Germany although this doesn’t include DHL which has publicly refused Wero, saying it does not see “sufficient added value for our platform and our customer structure.” ‘
The EPI bought iDEAL, the payment service used for over 70% of eCommerce transactions in the Netherlands, and has begun to migrate merchants to Wero. The move will bring enhanced functionality, such as subscriptions, and greater consumer protection. There is an introductory price freeze but Wero will quickly become more expensive than the product it replaces. This has given Mollie, fresh from its acquisition of GoCardless, the opportunity to position “Pay by Bank” with notoriously cost-conscious Dutch merchants as a cheaper alternative to Wero.
Scheming
Visa and Mastercard reported strong sales growth in their Q3 results
last week with both schemes highlighting continued outperformance of high
margin cross-border transactions and increased attachment of value-added
services. In Europe, payment volume growth picked up to 10% in Q3 or 11% when measured in dollars. Mastercard’s CFO says, “European consumers are very resilient.”
Embedded payments, finance etc
Shopify, which provides eCommerce software to 4m merchants worldwide, is the market leader in software/payment integration. Q3 results show its European revenues up 25% to $766m, driven primarily by continued strong growth in merchandise volume, up 33%. I estimate Shopify is doing c.$80bn in annual volume in Europe, with a substantial proportion going through its own payments product. Merchants generally pay an additional fee to use a third-party processor.
Shopify says its share of European eCommerce has doubled in the last three years – growing online merchandise volume at 37% annually versus 8% for the market – and believes it now captures more than 40% of incremental eCommerce spend. That’s seriously impressive and a major worry for European ISVs and their payment partners, who are locked out of much of this volume.
Shopify is also making the most of its scale. Shopify Payments has long relied on Stripe, but now also uses Adyen in several European markets, giving it greater commercial leverage. Shopify’s CFO says higher payments margins came from “savings negotiated with partners across the full payments ecosystem.”
We’ve seen a steady increase in the number of ISVs registering as payment facilitators (PF) according to new research from Flagship Advisory. PF status allows them to control the payment flow but normally requires regulatory approval so can be quite expensive to set up. The majority of European ISV PFs are operating in food, hospitality, mobility and vending. Examples include Guesty, Flowbird and Lightspeed. Mews, the fast-growing hotel software vendor, just secured its EMI licence in Amsterdam, will likely become a PF soon.
Many software players are also moving into lending money to merchants secured on card payment receipts. This is fast becoming a major revenue earner. Toast, which dominates the US restaurant market, reported 50bps of “take rate” from payments and a further 11bps from Toast Capital.
SoftPOS
SoftPOS is a downloadable application which turns any Android device into a payment terminal. Rubean, the Munich based SoftPOS vendor, has raised €2.5m from a new share placement. Rubean says it has 20 distribution partners, mainly banks, and has 150,000 active terminals.
Rubean’s latest partner is HG-Soft, a German ISV specialising in software for bakeries. Its CEO said: “This means: one less device, lower costs, and every new till can accept cards straight away, without the need to have a separate terminal delivered and set up first.” So far, so good. But how much money can Rubean charge for each SoftPOS instance? Forecast annual revenues of €5m-€6m equates to just €30-40 per terminal per year. SoftPOS will be big but it’s not clear that the vendors providing the acceptance apps will make a lot of money.
Elsewhere, Worldline says it has now processed more than €1bn through SoftPOS, mainly through the Tap on Mobile solution acquired when it bought Poland’s Softpos.eu. Business is brisk as you can read in this interview with one of its founders. Although most volume is with large merchants such as Polish Railways, Worldline’s SoftPOS application is now featured inside mBank’s business banking app. In the first month’s operation, 1,500 customers activated their new “smart terminal” and made 19,000 transactions.
And in Germany, MediaMarktSaturn, the electronics retailer, has deployed CCV’s SoftPOS across 400 stores in just 48 hours. This application sits on portable Android tablets used by sales advisors and is integrated into Computop’s gateway as part of an omni-channel solution.
Crypto corner
Visa and Mastercard both spoke about their emerging stablecoin capabilities on the Q3 results call. Both schemes were explicit that there will be no meaningful revenues in the near term.
Industry focus has moved to stablecoin cards which allow people to spend stablecoins at any merchant that takes Visa or Mastercard. The merchant is settled in fiat money in the usual way. These volumes are certainly growing, albeit from a very low base.
According to Paymentscan, a little over $1bn was spent on stablecoin cards in September, 90% of this on Visa cards. Stripe has begun issuing stablecoin cards and plans to make them available in 100 countries. Most consumer interest seems to be in the Far East. Western markets are less excited. The Cleveland Fed surveyed 148 American businesses and found just one using stablecoins today. 140 had no plans, had never heard of stablecoins or said they didn’t know.
Stablecoins have been dominated by two commercial coins – USDC (from Coinbase) and USDT (from Tether) – which will now face competition from OpenUSD. This stablecoin is issued by a not-for-profit consortium of establishment players including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and Shopify. This will feed into further fears about payment sovereignty in the rest of the world and underline the need for Qivalis, the Euro-coin backed by 37 banks, to become a viable alternative. Qivalis just got its EMI license in Amsterdam but hasn’t announced a launch date. No rush.
Open banking
Ten years after launch, we’re still waiting for open banking payments to become mainstream. Yet the mood at Open Banking Expo was remarkably buoyant. The industry is happy with the performance of the new UK Payment Initiative which is tasked with making a success of commercial variable recurring payments (cVRPs). These are the open banking equivalent to card on file or direct debit. The UKPI will implement a charging structure for cVRPs and some scheme rules that will include consumer protection.
There is a lot of work to do. Even open banking evangelists concede the industry needs to “address gaps in reliability, consistency and transaction data if they are to become a mainstream alternative to cards.” And it needs a brand. We need an
agreed name for this.
Looking at the numbers, there might be some grounds for optimism. There were 42m open banking payments in the UK during September. The annual growth rate of 36% is much in line with recent months but masks a pick-up in cVRPs which were up 72% to 8.11m. This is still rather small compared to the c420m of conventional direct debits processed each month but possibly the start of a positive trend.
Vendors are still finding the market tough. Norwegian open banking provider Neonomics has raised another $4m from existing shareholders, reporting that it has cut operating costs by almost half. Neonomics recently filed 2025 accounts that show revenue growing 35% to NOK 10.2m (€0.9m), but an operating loss of NOK 70m (€6m).
Digital payment success in Greece
I joined the EPSM meeting in Athens to learn more about Greece’s remarkable transition to digital payments. The banking crises of 2015 sparked a major public policy initiative to promote cards as a means of consumer payment, primarily to force small businesses to pay VAT. The results are impressive. I’m told the VAT compliance gap has been largely closed for taxi drivers and hairdressers. Doctors and lawyers are the next target. The Greek Government’s action in promoting card payments is generating €400m pa additional taxes. One academic study shows that 8% growth in card spending is associated with 1% increase in VAT receipts. Other countries will learn from this.
Iris, the Greek mobile payment scheme, has been very successful P2P and has now begun offering QR payments at POS. Feedback from the EPSM meeting in Athens is that volumes are very low and likely to remain so. The QR scan works well but the number of extra clicks required to “push” the payment from your banking app makes the process much slower than NFC. This commercial is very slick but omits this critical step.
In other news
An excellent update from Stripe on its fraud modelling. The more recent data is less useful because fraud takes so long to show up. After two weeks, Stripe is aware of less than half of fraud that will eventually be reported. This makes sense. People often don’t realise there is fraud on their account until they review their bank statements.
The world’s airlines spent an astonishing $24.5bn in payment costs in 2025 according to IATA. Put into context, that’s $5 per passenger at a time when IATA forecasts net profit at $4.50. Airlines pay high processing costs because of their inherently risky business model and often need to post significant cash deposits with their merchant acquirers. IATA has launched IATA Pay which, it hopes, can divert some passengers away from high cost cards onto cheaper, domestic schemes.
Adrian Mol, founder of Mollie, the fast growing Dutch PSP, is offering up to €50m in equity to encourage teams to join him and “build an intelligence layer on top of our banking infrastructure.” The team will have its own budget and no formal reporting lines. Applicants will need to be willing to work seven days a week and deliver agreed milestones. This is a high-risk assignment. Mol says “if the team isn’t performing… we’ll replace the team and bring in a new one.”
Merchants consistently say that they want to multi-source merchant acquiring yet few of them actually do this. New research from PaymentGenes, based on a sample of 58 enterprises reveals that, even where merchants have built (or rent) an orchestration layer, they rarely use it for dynamic routing, either for least cost or highest acceptance rate. The blockers are tokenisation – over half its sample use PSP tokens, compared to one third with using network ones – and lack of capacity in their in-house payment teams.
The Payment Association (EU) has been bought by Nineteen Group, a PE backed B2B media business that also owns the UK Payment Association and London’s Retail Technology Show. This move may create a gap for a payment trade association focused on public policy. Elsewhere in the conference world, Tracey Davies, who took Money 20/20 global, has quit after ten years at the helm.
Operation Chargeback, a series of criminal allegations that German PSPs knowingly facilitated payment fraud may be falling apart. The Koblenz judges are “considering releasing the accused who are in pre-trial detention after reviewing results of interviews with suspects held in the US.” Meanwhile, Markus Braun, ex-CEO of Wirecard, is still in gaol, despite not having been found guilty of anything yet.
And finally
What’s the smell of money? Revolut is looking for a perfume with which to brand its first physical branch, located in Barcelona. It’s a move calling out for parody. Just click on Mr Storonsky’s picture. Hat tip to A2Z Fintech.
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.
