Truelayer, the London-based open banking vendor, reported continued strong growth and firm cost control in 2025 but remains a long way from profitability. The business hasn’t yet convinced that A2A payments alone can support a viable business model.
Founded by Franceso Simoneschi in 2016, Truelayer is backed by a stellar roster of investors including Stripe, Tiger Global and Anthemis. It has received funding of $321m in total according to Crunchbase with its latest $130m round in 2021 valuing the business at $1bn.
Truelayer says it is “Europe’s fastest growing Pay by Bank network” and trades with regulatory licences in London and Dublin. Management claims market leading positions in UK, Germany, Ireland and France. Truelayer recently bought Zimpler, a struggling Nordic open banking vendor, which expands its reach in that region and brings direct access to Swish, Sweden’s consumer A2A scheme.
Total payment volume processed grew 52% to £65bn ($85bn) and management says it’s now running at an annualised rate of $150bn. This is impressive stuff. Up until now, most of Truelayer’s business comes from Fintech (moving money into and out of investment accounts, paying credit card bills etc) and gaming (loading accounts at online casinos and payment of winnings.) This focus explains why Truelayer’s ATV, up 16% to £264, is much higher than typical retail eCommerce.
Truelayer says enterprise merchants such as eBay and Amazon have begun offering open banking payments as an alternative to card payments for eCommerce transactions. Management expects “broader adoption to accelerate as enterprise merchants come to view it as a proven and scalable payment method” although, in the UK at least, there seems no acceleration yet in open banking payment growth.
Revenue grew 39% to £28m in 2025. This is strong growth although the context is important. Against £65bn of payment volume, that represents an implied revenue yield of roughly 4bps, compared with perhaps 15–40bps for a typical merchant acquirer depending on its mix of SME and enterprise merchants. After direct costs, TrueLayer generated gross profit of just over 3bps of volume.
Truelayer’s core problem is that open banking payments are low margin.
That is TrueLayer’s conundrum. Pay by Bank is attractive to merchants partly because it is much cheaper than cards. But you can’t undercut the card networks and acquirers on price and still expect to earn card-like margins.TrueLayer added $29bn of payment volume in 2025 while revenue increased by just £8m. Even at enormous scale, there simply isn’t very much money in moving the money.
The hope is that A2A payments is a low-margin anchor product on which more profitable businesses can be built.That’s why Truelayer has invested in new services to sell its customers around the transaction. These include payment-related products such as recurring transactions and one-click check-out but also identity verification and a move into lending with the acquisition of PayIn3, a Dutch BNPL specialist in Q2 2026.
Upselling customers high-margin value added services makes sense but, given Truelayer’s enterprise base, won’t be straightforward. These are sophisticated buyers that are comfortable multi-sourcing and good at negotiation.
Returning to the 2025 accounts, administrative expenses fell 2% to £56m, suggesting some strong cost controls, and helping narrow the operating loss to £36m from £43m in 2024. Staff numbers have fallen from a peak of 434 in 2022 to an average of 235 in 2025. The business is still burning cash – £28m outflow in 2025 – and raised an additional $25m from CDP Venture Capital, the Italian sovereign wealth fund, in June 2026. This is unlikely to be the last capital injection needed. Cumulative losses now stand at £268m.
Truelayer leads the open banking sector and is doing many things right. Volume and revenue are strongly up. Costs are flat. Cash burn is reducing and the brand is attracting marquee customers. With these results, the business demonstrates a credible route to profitability for the first time. However, this is critically dependent on proving it can sell additional, high-margin services to enterprise customers.. There’s simply not enough money in processing A2A payments alone to keep the show on the road.
Lloyds Cardnet, the bank’s merchant services joint venture with Fiserv, returned to growth in 2025 although the recovery came at a price. Volume grew for the first time since 2020, cashflow was strong and the business was able to pay a dividend to its parents. But income per transaction fell sharply.
Cardnet is owned 51% by Lloyds and 49% by Fiserv and mainly serves the bank’s business customers in the UK. The P&L is almost pure merchant acquiring. Technical costs are recharged to Fiserv which processes the transactions and provides gateway, terminals and Clover ePOS. People, sales and marketing costs are recharged to the bank.
Following four years of declines, total processed volume rose 10% in 2025 to £57bn but sits well below the £66bn recorded in 2021. Management points to wins in food, drink, entertainment, retail and travel. Total transactions were up 18% but there is a long way to go to recover Cardnet’s previous position. Recent wins in the travel sector, notably Ryanair, should certainly help. So should new partnership deals with PayPoint and EPOS Now. However, Lloyds Bank’s new tie-up with Stripe for small business products suggests that the Cardnet JV may increasingly focus on enterprise merchants.
Cardnet splits out debit and credit processing. Debit has caused most of the pain in recent years. Despite growing 9% in 2025 to £41bn, debit volumes are well below the peak of £54bn in 2021. In contrast, credit has performed much better and reached a record level of £16.5bn in 2025.
Average transaction value fell 6% to £54. This explains why 18% transaction growth only delivered 10% volume growth.
Despite the higher processed volumes, net fee and commission income grew just 2% to £54m. Cardnet’s unit margins continue to be squeezed, possibly by the addition of volume from large enterprise clients. Net fee income per transaction fell 13% to 5.1p.
Margins were boosted by much improved settlement-related interest income which doubled to £6m. The bottom line was also helped by much lower fraud provisions which fell from £3.5m to £1.7m.
Good cost control saw total expenses falling 10% to £36m. This includes £17.8m recharged to Lloyds for salary and related costs, down 3% on the previous year and £11.5m towards Cardnet’s “strategic investment programme.” Fiserv received £15.4m, roughly in line with previous years.
Profit before tax was up 51% to £23.7m. Having missed a payment in 2024, the JV was able to pay a dividend of £31m to its parents.
Cardnet is winning again. Volumes and transactions have returned to growth and there have been significant merchant wins. But it’s earning less from that activity: a very healthy 18% increase in transactions yielded just 2% more net fee income. Yet, profits rose strongly in 2025 as interest income, lower costs and lower fraud losses compensated for weaker acquiring economics.
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
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.
Business of Payments | Geoffrey Barraclough | Substack
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.
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 boughtAlcineo, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Bosankićexplains 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.
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.
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.
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.
Why are payments always blue? A brand guru looks at the industry, calls for more colourful marketing and praises Mastercard’s easily recognisable palette.
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.”
Flatpay, the hyper-aggressive SME payment unicorn from Denmark, has published its 2025 annual report which shows fast growing revenues and widening operating losses.
Founded in 2022, Flatpay claims to be the fastest growing payment business ever and might be right. In June 2026, the business said it had reached €20bn annual volume at €100m annualised revenue from over 100,000 customers. It’s one of the most successful members of the “tap pack” – a group of start-ups focusing on small shops and restaurants across Europe. This includes Dojo, Viva, myPOS, Square and SumUp.
Focusing on the audited statements for 2025, revenue more than tripled to €39m as Flatpay’s fast-paced European expansion began to deliver results.
Here’s a good podcast in which Sander Janca-Jensen, Flatpay’s founder explains the secrets behind its phenomenal growth.
Sander doesn’t mention Flatpay’s innovative, although controversial, policy of offering merchants free processing of business and international cards funded through a consumer surcharge. Competitors think this is one of the key factors behind its growth and one that could soon be replicated by others in the market.
Flatpay’s expansion is made possible by its ruthlessly simple proposition. One payment terminal (a PAX A920) and one distribution model. All sales are direct sales which means there are no partners to manage or pay commissions to.
Looking in more detail, Germany (€15m) has become Flatpay’s largest market although Finland (€6m) and Italy (€4m) have begun to make significant contributions. France, Great Britain and the Netherlands should start delivering in 2026.
Operating losses widened from €20m to €70m. Average FTE jumped from 257 to 957 and staff costs rose by €49m to €69m, almost matching the €50m increase in operating losses. Headcount has continued to rise, reaching 2,000 by June 2026.
Rapid merchant acquisition consumes capital as well as eating operating cash. At year end, Flatpay had €40m of equipment on its balance sheet – presumably including the stock of payment terminals to be leased to merchants – including €14m prepaid for future deliveries.
The total resulting cash burn is startling. Free cash outflow, before financing, was €94m although this was more outweighed by an additional €146m raised during 2025 at a €1.5bn valuation and a €24m loan from Denmark’s Export and Investment Fund.
Flatpay shows every indication of keeping its foot on the accelerator. Management expects revenue to more than double again in 2026 to reach €100-105m but forecasts losses ballooning to €140-150m as the business continues investing heavily in expansion. With customer numbers growing at a remarkable 7% a month, Flatpay is conducting a fascinating experiment in just how quickly a European payments business can be built, and how much capital it takes to do it.
Nexi reassured investors with another quarter in which it delivered what it promised: modest growth but strong cashflow.
Total revenues grew 1.1% in Q2 to €915m. Merchant solutions, the largest division was flat as the impact of new merchant signings was offset by the migration of the Banco BPM portfolio in Italy. This was 140.000 POS terminals lost to Numia.
Issuing grew 1.4%, held back by the continuing migration of a large issuing customer which is bringing processing in-house.
Digital banking solutions, up 6%, was the best performer, boosted by its role in Zippay, the Irish bank’s quixotic attempt to build a home-grown wero.
Management is very excited to be part of the digital euro programme and has been selected in a consortium run by G&D to provide offline acceptance. Meaningful revenues are many years away but involvement in the ECB’s project nicely positions Nexi at the heart of Europe’s new payment infrastructure.
Merchant solutions revenue was flat in Q2 at €522m despite 5% volume growth, reflecting the BancoBPM loss and pressure on non-transaction revenues. One competitor in Italy (Nexi’s largest market) is drving down hardware margins by offering free payment terminals. Flatpay looks the likely culprit.
Management highlighted macro weakness in Germany, citing the redundancies in the automotive sector and higher level of business insolvencies. This has impact volumes in hospitality. Poland continued to be squeezed by pricing pressure in eCommerce.
On the positive, new customer wins are “growing mid-teens” and the German ISV channel at “about 30%,” helped by migrating Orderbird volume from another acquirer. Nexi took full control of Orderbird, a Berlin-based restaurant software vendor, in 2022, eight years after Concardis first invested, It says concerns about channel conflict mean that Nexi won’t be taking Orderbird outside Germany.
Nexi presented another quarter of good cost control. Total expenses rose just 2% with personnel expense up 4%.
Nexi isn’t growing much, but it is becoming a formidable cash machine; generating over €400m in H1, ahead of expectations. EBITDA margins stable at 50% and Nexi cut leverage despite paying a €350m dividend in May, redeeming €1bn of debt and spending c.€160m on the Banco Popolare di Sondrio portfolio.
Nexi also confirmed to UBS that it recently rejected an offer for Digital Banking Solutions (DBS). Management now believes that digital euro opportunity makes DBS strategic to the group. Meanwhile, investor chatter continues about a possible private-equity bid for Nexi as a whole.
But for the moment, investors are beginning to buy the story. The stock price is up 50% since its all-time low in March with the market capitalisation now standing at almost €5bn. Nexi is no Worldline; but it’s no Adyen either. Even after the recent rally, Nexi still offers a dividend yield of about 7% and trades on an equity free-cash-flow yield of roughly 15%, suggesting the market continues to price in considerable risk.
The first detailed numbers from the combined Global Payments (GPN) and Worldpay reveal just how different the two businesses are. And the scale of the opportunity if Global can bring Worldpay’s profitability anywhere close to its own.
Global Payments is notoriously discreet with its public disclosures. The 10-Q document has historically given little detail on revenue breakdown by segments or geographies. Very few KPIs are ever published but the H1 26 results do now show worldwide sales and margin numbers from its three reorganised operating units – SMB, platforms and enterprise.
Global includes Worldpay in its numbers from January 2026 so, by comparing the combined 2026 numbers with legacy Global Payments’ 2025 results, we can estimate the contributions from the Worldpay acquisition for the first time. The precise Worldpay segment margins presented below are estimates, of course, but are directionally accurate and back up a widely held view that Global has bought a structurally different merchant portfolio.
My key conclusions are:
SMB – overwhelmingly legacy Global Payments and very profitable, possibly because of its portfolio of software businesses. Worldpay’s rather smaller SMB portfolio appears to be losing money although the numbers do include significant acquisition related intangible amortisation. 25% of Global’s SMB revenue comes from outside the US compared with 45% of Worldpay’s; the vast majority likely to be in the UK.
Enterprise – overwhelmingly Worldpay although legacy Global has much better margins. The portfolios are quite different: Worldpay enterprise is 80% CNP (eCommerce) but Global is majority (54%) POS.
Platforms – relatively evenly sized but, again, Global has much better profitability. Worldpay platforms is 41% embedded – likely mainly through the Payrix PF as a service proposition. Global is 93% traditional integrated payments.
Improving Worldpay’s margins will be a key focus for the new management team. The prize is substantial. Business of Payments estimates that closing just half the margin gap between Worldpay and the legacy Global businesses could add close to $1bn of annual segment income. Global itself is targeting $600m of annual Worldpay integration expense synergies by the end of 2028. This won’t be easy; not least because almost half of Worldpay’s SMB business is in the UK which (according to Global’s CEO) “is kind of struggling from a macro standpoint. And certainly, we’re seeing a little bit of softness in the UK market.”
Commenting on the enterprise segment, Global’s management had some good news as the company has gone live with processing at two large UK supermarkets – Morrisons and Aldi. Less positively, Global Payments is one of the few payments companies reporting a significant impact from the Middle East turmoil, with a $31m Q2 net revenue hit from airline clients inherited with Worldpay.
These initial numbers show why Global Payments was so keen to buy Worldpay. It has acquired considerable additional scale, particularly in enterprise, but at much lower margins than its legacy businesses. If management can close even part of that profitability gap, the financial upside is substantial. The challenge will be doing so while simultaneously consolidating platforms, developing new products, retaining customers and managing all the personnel issues that come with such a massive merger.
Despite increasing political focus on payment sovereignty, total payment volume growth from the American schemes in Europe picked up a little in Q2 according to the latest financial results from Visa and Mastercard.
Total volume rose 12% in dollars (9% in euros) to a combined €1.47 trillion. This is slight uptick after six quarters of declining growth rates but well below the consistent double digits we saw through 2023 and 2024. Nonetheless, 9% volume growth is 2-3 times nominal GDP growth and roughly double nominal consumer spending growth. This indicates that Visa and Mastercard remain key beneficiaries of the secular shift towards digital money.
Visa maintained its slight lead over Mastercard with volume of €749bn vs €721bn. Overall average transaction value was flat at €33.50.
Both schemes also report cash transactions – mainly withdrawals from ATMs – and these have proved remarkably resilient. But the headline figure of €285bn of cash transactions in Q2 masks changing consumer behaviour. People are taking out more cash less often. A fall of 9% in the number of transactions was almost entirely offset an increase in ATV to €285.
Globally, the lucrative cross-border card payment market keeps growing, up 12% in constant dollars in Q2. Despite the Middle East disruption, commercial transactions were buoyant and inbound spending by foreigners in the US continued to improve, boosted by the World Cup in June. Visa reported that card present transactions in host cities were up 20% on match days; notably contactless payments in mass transit.
Mastercard added that impacts from the instability in the Middle East moderated throughout the second quarter and were less severe than anticipated. Wealthy residents of the impacted GCC countries, have begun spending more money abroad.
The growth numbers tell only half the story. Behind the scenes, the real battle is for issuers, where both schemes continue to invest heavily in winning new issuing mandates. In Q2, both schemes trumpeted new client wins in Europe that will deliver more cards, or credentials as they are now often called. Yet there seems some evidence they are becoming more disciplined about the economics of portfolio wins.
Visa says that through portfolio migrations and organic expansion it has added more than 40 million European cards in the last 12 months and say that a further 30 million are in the pipeline. Visa recently won “the entire consumer credit portfolio” of Natwest’s retail bank and says it expects to continue to win debit business from domestic schemes such as Giro in Germany and Carte Bancaire in France. These local players are now investing in new features such as pre-authorisations, pay-outs and Apple Pay support but have been slow to modernise, leaving a gap for Visa and Mastercard to grow their debit business in Europe.
This explains why Mastercard is serious about replacing the old-fashioned Maestro with feature-rich Mastercard Debit. The number of Maestros issued fell 19% to 271m.
Mastercard says it “flipped” Eurobank’s entire consumer and commercial portfolios in Greece and is working with Santander in the UK to accelerate cross-border spend through targeted marketing campaigns. Michael Miebach, Mastercard’s CEO says he has refused European issuing deals which don’t make financial sense, including Lloyds Bank’s credit portfolio. He added: “winning share of a portfolio which is growing at 1% helps me in the first year and then is a huge drag on growth for the years thereafter.”
Both schemes discussed the impact of AI on their operations. Visa says that it has changed its product development model. Instead of teams of ten people, product development is now carried out by “nimble agentic squads” of two to four staff. This delivers “80% more code commits and 80% plus improvement in requirement definition from 30 days to 5 days, which has translated to 65% plus faster feature development.” This improved productivity, helped Visa ship more than 300 major product releases over last 12 months. Result: an announcement of layoffs impacting 7% of its global headcount, with most cuts landing on technology and product teams.
Today’s stablecoins look complicated and there’s a clear opportunity for the schemes to bring the scale, security and interoperability necessary for mass-market adoption. Although stablecoins have clear utility in global treasury and possibly some B2B and P2P flows, they seem unlikely to make many inroads into merchant payments. “There’s no problem to solve,” says Michael Miebach, Mastercard’s CEO. He added that its crypto co-brand volume had more than tripled over the last 2 years although didn’t give figures.
Both schemes are investing in stablecoin capability, mainly related to settlement. Mastercard has acquired BVNK, giving it a ready-made stablecoin infrastructure business serving merchants, PSPs and finTechs. Visa has instead built Visa Stablecoin Platform in-house, targeting banks and payment institutions with a platform integrated into Visa’s existing network. VSP will integrate with Visa’s very successful Pismo card issuing platform, likely making the whole proposition very attractive to its bank customers.
Visa and Mastercard are both key members of the new Open Standard initiative which will issue the Open USD stablecoin. Many think that Open USD is going after Circle and Tether (the businesses behind the two leading stablecoins today) but Ryan McInerney, Visa’s CEO says that “Visa going forward will remain multi-coin, multi chain. Our role is not to pick winners.”
Visa’s Cybersource eCommerce gateway has launched a “unified checkout” which orchestrates multiple payment types. 4.500 sellers and acquirers have enabled unified checkout including one of the largest acquirers in the UK; most likely to be Barclaycard Payments. And Corpay will adopt Visa’s Fleet 2.0 solution for its fuel card platform in Europe.
In litigation news Visa has been granted leave to appeal the UK Competition Appeals Tribunal decision on Interchange. Less positively, a group of merchants has filed a claim at the UK high court alleging interchange fees are an unlawful restriction and seeking damages dating back to 2019. Mastercard’s trial in Portugal for similar allegations is set for October.
Finally, neither scheme provided meaningful evidence that agentic commerce is yet generating material payment volumes. Maybe we’ll learn more in Q3 but I suspect I suspect meaningful payment volumes remain at least another year away.
Four years ago, I wasn’t convinced Santander could turn a collection of disparate payments assets into a coherent platform but the latest results suggest it has done exactly that. Santander is now a rare European bank making a success of merchant payments, delivering consistent growth and rewarding shareholders with eight successive quarters of profitability.
It’s not been an easy journey. Santander first put its payment assets together in 2020 under the PagoNxt brand and bought Wirecard’s tech platform and Munich operations. The result: an alphabet soup of brands and €170m write-offs.
The business is much clearer now. PagoNxt has been renamed Santander Payment Solutions and consists of three divisions:
Getnet merchant acquiring, active in Iberia and Latin America
Getnet Platforms, including A2A and Santander’s issuing processing which services the group’s retail businesses in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Spain and the UK
With 1.2m merchant customers, Getnet is the division that most interests readers of Business of Payments. Getnet Payment volume grew an impressive 17% in Q2 to €67bn, and has roughly doubled since 2021.
Getnet offers a single API to connect to its Latin American markets which helps international merchants easily navigate multi-market entry. This was one reason for improved performance in Mexico and Brazil. The latter despite the rapid growth of PIX, which has yet to make a meaningful dent in card acquiring.
Recent product enhancements include “Pay In” for Brazil which allows international merchants to receive payments without establishing a legal entity in the country, DCC in Mexico and white-labelling AEVI’s POS platform (initially in Mexico) which will help secure business from large retailers.
The total number of transactions, including both Getnet acquiring and Getnet platforms, rose to 8.6bn in Q2 26, up 48% year on year, largely driven by increased A2A activity in Brazil. This number may well be associated with PIX.
Santander management has highlighted the importance of scale in driving down unit costs. This strategy is working. Cost per transaction for the half year was 1.6c compared with 2.9c a year ago and 3.6c in 2024.
The improved unit economics has begun to flow to the bottom line.
Net revenue grew 19% to €387m, expenses were up 16% to €337m reflecting continued platform investments and net operating income rose 46% to €51m. The operating margin is a very respectable 13%. Cash performance is even better. Santander Payment Solutions generated EBITDA of €123m in Q2 26, a healthy 32% margin.
Santander has proved it can build a profitable merchant acquiring platform. The next challenge is to turn Getnet from a regional champion into a genuinely pan-European proposition. That means expanding beyond its traditional Iberian and Latin American strongholds and strengthening its merchant offering in markets where the bank has a major presence such as the UK and Poland.
Mollie is one of Europe’s fastest-growing payment companies. Its 2025 annual report, posted at the Dutch Chamber of Commerce, shows a business executing well operationally, but about to embark on a far riskier phase.
“We’re here to eliminate financial bureaucracy,” says Mollie, positioning itself as the one-stop shop for European SMEs. Adrian Mol, who founded the business and named it after himself, believes there is a substantial opportunity to build a true European payment champion. You could characterise Mollie as an Adyen for SMEs with its full stack of products including online and POS payment acceptance, omnichannel reporting and support for complex use cases such as marketplaces, franchises and embedded payments for software vendors.
Mollie depends on its acquiring partners, Checkout.com and Rapyd, for processing. This keeps capex low, reduces the compliance overhead and simplifies expansion into new markets. But leaves Mollie with less control over authorisation optimisation and interchange economics than vertically integrated acquirers such as Stripe, Adyen and Checkout.
Despite the launch of a number of payment-adjacent products including lending (partnering Youlend), business accounts and loyalty, over 90% of turnover came from payment processing on behalf of over 250.000 merchant customers. “Capital revenue”, likely to be mainly commission income from merchant cash advances more than doubled to €5.7m. This could form the basis for an important new business line.
Although Mollie has begun to internationalise, the vast majority of revenue came from its heartland of Benelux (€165m) and DACH (€63.9m). Sales from other geographies (including the UK) grew more slowly, up 19% to €46m.
This may change soon as Mollie is well funded and has big plans. Management says the business is now operational in all 30 countries of the EEA plus the UK and will invest €350m in building out its product offer and team across Europe. Mollie has set up “regional development hubs” in Milan, Stockholm and Warsaw. Lisbon is coming soon.
The €350m investment excludes the Netherlands (Mollie’s home market) and the UK where it is making a major strategic move in buying GoCardless. The price is €1.1bn in stock, a rather generous 6x multiple of GoCardless’s 2025 revenues. The combined group is valued at €4.1bn (according to Mollie) and has moved its domicile to the UK while keeping tax residency in the Netherlands.
GoCardless is growing more slowly than Mollie – sales were up 18% to £155m in 2025, despite its acquisition of Nuapay, a leading direct debit provider. GoCardless 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 but it is less obvious why Mollie’s investors should be enthusiastic. Mollie is growing nicely with a clear path to profitability and a stronger balance sheet. Building A2A capability internally would likely be rather cheaper than paying the equivalent of €11,000 per GoCardless merchant. Possibly the prize is an opportunity to cross-sell card processing to the large UK GoCardless base.
Returning to Mollie’s 2025 results, costs were well contained and are growing proportionally to revenues. Administrative expenses rose 28% to €159m including a 19% increase in staff expenses to €106m. Employee numbers rose 16% to 857 at an average cost of €125K each.
Mollie looks to be running a tight ship. Expected credit losses were €2.7m, a steady 2% of net revenue which is very reasonable for an SME book. Chargeback provisions grew slightly to €2.9m indicating that Mollie is sticking with low-risk merchants. Operating losses slipped to €19m from €9m in 2024.
Mollie has been one of the stand-out successes in European payments over the past few years. Beginning with a simple online acceptance product, it’s now offering a complete proposition including omni-channel without (yet) needing to own the acquiring infrastructure beneath it. The future may be riskier. Managing the €350m European expansion at the same time as digesting its €1.1bn acquisition of GoCardless will be a significant challenge
PayPoint remains under pressure from the “tap pack” of dynamic POS-focused providers offering modern terminals, slick support and integrated bundles of software and payments to SMEs. Competitors such as Flatpay, SumUp, myPOS, Dojo, Square continue to reshape the UK market. And ePOS vendors such as EPOS Now are now also taking market share in payments through partnerships with Adyen and others.
The pain is most pronounced on PayPoint’s core acquiring estate (powered by Lloyds Cardnet and typically integrated with PayPoint’s EPOS), where payment volume fell 9.6%. Handepay, the ISO acquired for £70 million in 2021, performed somewhat better, with volume down 4.6%. Handepay primarily resells Global Payments’ acquiring services.
Management is now repositioning the merchant services business towards larger SMEs and the mid-market, where it believes profitability will be stronger. Rather than chasing merchant numbers, the company says it will focus on “net revenue, improved profitability and a merchant estate managed for value rather than estate growth.” This is reflected in a sharply improved take rate – up 4bps to 0.52%.
PayPoint has stopped publishing merchant numbers, although management says the business serves around 10,000 merchants on its core estate and a further 20,000 through Handepay.
Elsewhere, the picture is more positive. Merchant Rentals, the terminal leasing business acquired with the Handepay deal, is gaining traction through a new partnership with FreedomPay. More than 1,000 devices are already deployed. Merchant cash advances, provided through YouLend, grew strongly, with loan volumes up 39% to £33 million.
Open banking has begun to make a meaningful contribution following the OB Connect acquisition. Revenues reached £4.2 million, making PayPoint one of the larger UK players in the sector. Management highlighted new business wins including DWP, AccessPay, Gousto and the Insolvency Service.
But overall, these results underline how quickly the SME acquiring market is changing. Legacy providers built around a simple terminal + card acquiring proposition are increasingly being challenged by software-led competitors whose economics and customer proposition look fundamentally different.
