ACCEPTANCE & PROCESSING

MONEI has launched Tap to Pay on iPhone for merchants in Spain, letting businesses accept contactless cards and digital wallets through the MONEI Pay app without a separate terminal. The service targets small retailers, mobile service providers and hospitality businesses. MONEI already offers Tap to Phone on Android and supports more than 40 payment methods online and in store, including Bizum. Phone-based acceptance removes terminal cost from the micro-merchant segment, so SME acquirers in Spain increasingly compete on software and payment-method range rather than on hardware.

Cardstream Group has relaunched its white-label PayFac-as-a-Service offering under the Flowes brand, aimed at acquirers, platforms, payment service providers, software vendors and independent sales organisations. Flowes supports payment facilitator, virtual PayFac, marketplace and merchant-of-record models, with multi-acquirer connectivity and payment types beyond card acceptance. Partners run payment services under their own brand and commercial model on Cardstream’s infrastructure. Outsourced PayFac infrastructure lets software platforms take a share of payments revenue without building their own licensing and risk functions, which moves acquirers towards wholesale processing for merchant relationships that platforms own.

Yuno has partnered with Ecommpay to give its enterprise merchants access to Ecommpay’s payment methods through a single integration, extending local method coverage in selected European and Asia-Pacific markets. The portfolio covers cards including Apple Pay and Google Pay, instant payment schemes, open banking in 11 European markets and more than 100 global and local methods, such as PayPal and MB Way. The partnership targets retail and subscription businesses. Orchestrators are becoming a distribution channel for acquirers seeking enterprise volume, which makes local method coverage and authorisation performance the basis of competition between acquirers behind the same routing layer.

ING Bank Romania has deployed Cambrist’s Payments Acquiring Data Analytics platform to automate analysis of merchant performance in its acquiring business. The platform processes and reconciles high volumes of acquiring data and allocates it across the merchant portfolio, with analysis available per merchant, per terminal and per transaction. Product, finance and commercial teams use it to monitor merchant performance and make decisions in real time. ING approached Cambrist because tracking payments data manually was slow and limited. As fintech acquirers compete for SME merchants in Central and Eastern Europe, bank acquirers need merchant-level profitability data to reprice and defend their portfolios.

Repayd and Axcess Payments Group have launched the Travel Payments Health Check, a free online assessment of the payment journey from customer payment to settlement and supplier payouts. The ten-minute tool gives travel businesses a score out of 100, with red, amber or green ratings across seven areas, including multi-currency pricing, cross-border cost, pricing transparency, payment method fit, cash flow and supplier payouts. It also produces indicative estimates of annual savings and of additional revenue from multi-currency pricing, based on benchmark rates rather than a quotation. Target users include airlines, cruise operators, online travel agencies, tour operators and accommodation providers. In travel, foreign exchange, settlement timing and supplier payouts can cost merchants more than the headline processing rate, so specialist providers are positioning on the total cost of the payment journey.

BNPL

easyShop has added Clearpay at checkout in the UK, letting shoppers split eligible purchases into four interest-free payments as Christmas trading begins. The first payment is taken at purchase and the remaining three every two weeks. The option covers millions of products on the marketplace launched by the brand behind easyJet and powered by OnCommerce. easyShop also added Klarna across 19 European markets in late October. New marketplaces are launching with more than one BNPL provider at checkout, so providers compete on reach and conversion rather than on exclusive merchant relationships.

Klarna has extended its enhanced dispute management and Consumer FX capabilities to Mollie merchants across Europe, expanding a long-standing partnership between the two firms. Mollie merchants that already offer Klarna receive the features through their current integration, while new merchants can enable them alongside Pay in full, Pay in 3 and Financing. Consumer FX, launched on 21 October 2026, lets shoppers pay participating merchants in their own currency without an exchange fee. BNPL providers are bundling post-purchase services such as disputes and currency conversion into PSP integrations, which makes the acquirer rather than the merchant the main channel for BNPL distribution.

CORPORATE ACTIVITY

Liberis and Qred have completed their merger following approval from the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority, combining an embedded finance platform with a deposit-funded digital bank for small businesses. Liberis works through more than 30 distribution partners, including Deliveroo, Vagaro and Nexi. Both brands will remain for now. Deposit funding lowers the cost of capital for merchant cash advances distributed through acquirers and platforms, which improves the economics of embedded lending as a revenue line alongside acquiring.

FINTECHS

Mollie has launched Mollie Capital in Spain, offering revenue-based financing of between €500 and €500,000 to businesses that process payments through Mollie. Offers appear in the Mollie dashboard and are based on sales history processed through Mollie, not on a bank application or credit check. Businesses pay a single flat fee set at the outset, and repayments adjust with daily sales. Merchant financing priced off processing data gives PSPs a revenue line beyond transaction fees and raises switching costs for SMEs whose access to credit depends on staying with their payment provider.

OPEN BANKING & PSD

Trading 212 has launched automated deposits using TrueLayer’s Bank on File, which runs on the UK’s commercial variable recurring payments (cVRP) framework. Customers set up a mandate in their banking app and choose an AutoInvest schedule, after which deposits arrive instantly from their bank without card details or re-authentication. Bank on File’s share of recurring deposits has grown more than fivefold in under four months, and the average payment is more than 50% higher than the average card payment. All six major UK banks are live. Success rates at this level give recurring account-to-account payments evidence to compete with cards and Direct Debit in other subscription sectors.

REALTIME/INSTANT PAYMENTS

The Central Bank of Iceland has proposed a domestic account-to-account payment scheme for in-store and online purchases and person-to-person transfers, to reduce reliance on international card schemes. Card payments dominate Icelandic retail spending and there is no widely used account-to-account option. The Central Bank would provide shared infrastructure, operating standards and settlement, while banks and payment firms would build consumer apps and merchant services. Iceland agreed with the European Central Bank in June 2026 to join TARGET Instant Payment Settlement for króna payments, with readiness targeted for the second half of 2028. Iceland joins other European national account-to-account initiatives framed around resilience, each creating a domestic alternative to card acceptance that acquirers will need to support.