The Payments Blog

TL;DR Twenty-one global banks have announced plans for a shared USD stablecoin, with a launch targeted for the first half of 2027. The initiative is designed to operate within the US GENIUS Act and EU MiCA frameworks, making it a regulated bank-owned payment infrastructure project. Genuine stablecoin economic payments reached approximately US$390 billion annualised in 2025. Around 58% was B2B activity, but this still represented only about 0.02% of global payment volumes. Th

Note: The 47-country rollout and reported payout times referenced below come from the supplied industry report. Stripe’s official Treasury material separately refers to stablecoin financial accounts being available across 101 countries. These should not be treated as the same product or coverage figure. TL;DR Stripe has reportedly launched production-ready stablecoin settlement across 47 countries, with USDC operating as an intermediate backend settlement rail. Merchants ca

TL;DR: EMVCo’s draft EMV Agentic Payments – Framework for Specifications, released on 1 September 2026, proposes “Intent Services”: a shared layer for registering, retrieving and managing consumer-authorised intent before, during and after a card transaction. The goal is to solve a central problem in AI agent payments: a valid card credential proves an agent can pay, but not whether it should make a particular purchase. The draft focuses on recurring purchases, cumulative bud

TL;DR: Mollie completed its €1.1 billion acquisition of GoCardless on 1 September 2026, creating a group serving more than 350,000 businesses across 30+ markets. The strategic importance is not simply that cards and bank payments now sit under one corporate roof. It is that payment providers are moving towards a unified financial operating layer covering checkout, recurring payments, accounts, reconciliation, risk and business finance. For fintechs, SaaS platforms, Payfacs, P

TL;DR: FIS and Ericsson’s pre-integrated wallet platform is aimed at solving the biggest practical barrier to mobile wallet adoption: the integration tax. By connecting payments, issuing, wallet infrastructure, digital identity, ledgering and APIs, the partnership could make wallet-led financial services faster to launch and easier to scale. For fintechs, payfacs, issuers, remittance businesses, POS companies and telcos, the strategic question is no longer simply whether to b

TL;DR Visa announced an enhanced version of A2A Protect on 1 September 2026. The solution combines AI, Visa network intelligence and Featurespace behavioural analytics to produce real-time risk insights for account-to-account payments. Its purpose is to help financial institutions identify scams and account takeovers before funds leave a customer’s account. Visa says A2A Protect has increased fraud detection by 75% in the first six months of deployment. The strategic issue f

TL;DR: Australia’s interchange framework changes on 1 October 2026, alongside the ban on surcharging Visa, Mastercard and eftpos debit, prepaid and credit cards. The domestic consumer credit interchange cap falls to 0.3%, the debit and prepaid cap becomes 8 cents per transaction, and the commercial credit cap remains 0.8%. From 1 April 2027, foreign-issued card interchange will be capped at 1.0%. The result is structural: issuers must rebuild rewards and card economics, while

TL;DR Digital wallets accounted for 56% of global e-commerce spend and 33% of global in-person payment spend in 2025, according to Worldpay’s Global Payments Report 2026. Payment apps are forecast to represent 46% of global POS value by 2030, worth approximately US$15.6 trillion. Payment apps are growing 135% faster than overall point-of-sale spending. Wallets are not simply replacing cards. They are becoming the interface through which consumers use cards, account-to-accoun