ACCEPTANCE & PROCESSING

Ecommpay added Payment Links to its small-business proposition targeting micro-merchants such as hairdressers, tradespeople and window cleanersLinks are generated from the merchant dashboard and sent by email, SMS, WhatsApp or social media, with funds typically received within one business day. A day earlier, Ecommpay launched Partial Approval, which lets issuers authorise a lower amount when funds are insufficient rather than decline, enabled by a single flag per payment for top-up and subscription merchants. Both launches target informal and recurring payments that card terminals and full e-commerce checkouts do not reach, where acquirers compete on ease of set-up and authorisation rates rather than on merchant service charges.

Lloyds announced Get Paid, an in-app invoicing and payment-link tool for small businesses built with technology from BankiFi and due to launch later in 2026. The tool sits within the Lloyds app and online banking, letting business customers create invoices, send secure payment links, track paid and outstanding requests and issue automated reminders at no additional cost. Banks embedding invoicing and payment links in the business current account position themselves against PSP and accounting-software providers for SME collections, a segment where acquirers have relied on terminal and online-checkout bundles.

DECTA partnered with SAPI to launch DECTA Capital, a payment-linked working capital product for UK SMEs that process card payments through DECTA. Funding offers are typically made within 24 hours, with no collateral or credit score requirement, and businesses repay through a small, pre-agreed share of their card sales, so repayments rise and fall with trading volumes. SAPI provides the financing infrastructure and gains access to merchants already served by DECTA. Revenue-based financing drawn from settlement flows is spreading from the largest PSPs to mid-sized processors through infrastructure partners, adding a lending margin to acquiring relationships whose transaction fees are under pressure.

CRYPTOASSETS/BLOCKCHAIN/DLT

Lloyds Banking Group and Visa completed a seven-day live pilot of stablecoin settlement, settling $750,000 of US dollar obligations in USDC purchased through UK-regulated exchange Archax. The settlement was booked through Lloyds’ Jersey Corporate Markets branch and transferred to Visa in the US, with funds arriving in under an hour, including at weekends, against a day or more for conventional settlement outside banking hours. Lloyds used its own node on the Canton network while Visa used a separate public blockchain, testing interoperability between the two. Weekend settlement between schemes and their member banks is a precondition for faster funding of merchants, since acquirers depend on scheme settlement cycles that can pause outside banking days.

DIGITAL WALLETS

Bancomat, Bizum, EPI/Wero, SIBS-MB WAY and Vipps MobilePay created the European Network for Payments (ENP) to run interoperability between their solutions. The network covers about 130 million users in 13 countries, over 70% of the population of the EU and Norway, and follows a memorandum of understanding signed in February 2026. Rollout is phased: cross-border peer-to-peer payments first, then e-commerce, then point of sale. Other European solutions may join by agreement. Interoperability gives domestic account-to-account schemes a route to cross-border merchant acceptance without a single pan-European brand, although acquirers will need ENP-wide acceptance rules and pricing before merchants treat it as an alternative to international card schemes.

Token.io signed Bitkom’s memorandum of understanding supporting the European Digital Identity Wallet in Germany. Under eIDAS 2.0, EU member states must make at least one compliant wallet available to citizens by the end of 2026. Token.io sees use for verified credentials alongside Pay by Bank, including streamlined onboarding and checkout. In 2025 it became the first third-party provider admitted to giroAPI, Germany’s account-to-account payment scheme, and in 2026 it co-led the launch of the European Third Party Providers Association’s German chapter. Linking identity credentials to account-to-account payments addresses two weaknesses of pay-by-bank at checkout, customer authentication friction and merchant confidence in payer identity, where cards rely on 3-D Secure and tokens.

OPEN BANKING & PSD

Brite Payments launched Pay by Bank in the UK after receiving an electronic money institution licence from the FCA. Brite Payments offers merchants a single API connecting to more than 3,800 banks across 27 European markets, together with payouts, and is rolling out in phases. A further European entrant raises competition among UK pay-by-bank providers, with merchant adoption still dependent on refund handling and consumer protection that match cards.