ACCEPTANCE & PROCESSING

RS2 will deliver managed acquiring services for PXP across more than 30 European markets, including the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, the Nordics and Central and Eastern Europe. PXP will run card-present and card-not-present acceptance on RS2’s BankWORKS platform, covering real-time authorisation, interchange prediction, scheme-fee calculation and settlement. The deal lets PXP consolidate scheme processing for both channels onto a single managed infrastructure rather than maintaining separate systems per market. It reflects a broader trend toward outsourcing core switching and settlement infrastructure to specialist processors, freeing acquirers to focus on merchant-facing product and pricing.

Nexi has extended contactless transit acceptance to JCB and UnionPay cardholders on public transport across Italy’s Campania region. The two agreements, signed with JCB and UnionPay International, add open-loop tap-to-pay acceptance for both schemes’ cards to the Unico Campania ticketing consortium covering Naples-area buses, metro and rail, building on Nexi’s earlier open-loop transit rollouts in Rome and Naples for Visa and Mastercard. Passengers can now tap a JCB or UnionPay card directly at transit gates instead of buying a separate ticket. The expansion illustrates how open-loop transit acceptance is becoming a standard acceptance point, allowing international schemes to capture international visitor spend and reduce cash and closed-loop ticketing costs.

Handwave expanded its Visa integration to link cards to palm biometrics for in-store payments across the Baltic states. Handwave uses Visa’s Token Management Service and Acceptance Platform to tokenise a shopper’s registered card against a palm scan taken at checkout, letting them pay by presenting a hand rather than a card or phone. Handwave plans pilots with banks and retailers across Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, targeting production deployment within a year. The rollout adds the Baltics to a small but growing list of European markets testing biometric authentication at the point of sale, positioning palm and other biometric modalities as a checkout-speed and fraud-reduction layer.

Ecommpay launched a QR code payments tool for merchants, aimed at small businesses, pop-ups and charities collecting one-off or variable payments. Static QR codes are linked to a merchant-branded hosted payment page, letting customers choose a preset or custom amount and pay with any method the merchant already supports through Ecommpay, without additional coding. The launch extends low-friction acceptance tools to micro-merchants and informal or seasonal selling.

Checkout.com partnered with Minor Hotels to consolidate its acquiring infrastructure across the hospitality group’s global brand portfolio. The deal adds local-currency settlement and domestic acquiring routes intended to improve authorisation rates. The partnership reflects a broader push by large hospitality groups to consolidate acquiring onto a single global processor rather than maintaining market-by-market banking relationships, trading local acquirer relationships for centralised reporting and currency management against the promise of higher authorisation rates on cross-border card-not-present hotel bookings.

CORPORATE ACTIVITY

ACI Worldwide agreed to acquire Cranium Ventures, adding microservices capability to ACI’s Connetic for Cards platform. Cranium’s services include the SYNAP framework, a cloud, on-premises and hybrid card-switching system. The deal extends a run of consolidation among independent card-switching vendors, as larger processors buy cloud-native challengers rather than rebuild legacy switching stacks in-house, narrowing the pool of standalone switching specialists serving European acquirers and raising the bar on modernisation speed for those that remain.

Mollie completed its acquisition of GoCardless. The combined group serves more than 350,000 businesses across over 30 markets, spanning card acquiring, direct debit, open banking, business accounts and merchant financing. The deal follows Mollie’s expansion beyond card acquiring into a broader European payments and banking stack over the past two years. The combination illustrates the pressure on mid-sized European PSPs to bundle recurring-revenue rails such as direct debit and open banking alongside card acquiring, as merchants increasingly expect a single provider to cover both one-off and subscription payment flows rather than stitching together separate specialists.

FRAUD & CYBERSECURITY

Visa launched an enhanced version of A2A Protect, its account-to-account fraud-prevention tool, adding a unified fraud score built on technology from Cambridge-based Featurespace. Visa Europe cited a pilot with a European bank showing more than 50% additional fraud detection, and referenced roughly €2.5 billion in annual European A2A fraud losses that the tool targets; a separate Featurespace case study reported a 75% increase in detection within six months of deployment. The tool is aimed at banks and payment institutions processing account-to-account transactions, including pay-by-bank flows increasingly used at checkout. As open banking and A2A rails take a growing share of European commerce, fraud tooling built for card schemes is being retrofitted for bank-transfer flows, and acquirers offering A2A acceptance will increasingly need to match the fraud protection of the card schemes they compete with.

MOBILE MONEY/WALLETS

Orange became the first merchant in France to accept Wero for subscription bill payments. BNP Paribas customers can now pay recurring bills on Orange’s Sosh platform via Wero, with other French banks to follow in the second half of 2026. The launch is Wero’s first live subscription-billing use case with a named merchant, moving the wallet beyond peer-to-peer transfers into recurring commerce. It signals acceptance-side momentum for bank-backed A2A wallets against card-based direct debit and standing orders for recurring merchant billing in France and, as EPI expands, across the euro area.