ACCEPTANCE & PROCESSING

Viva.com became the first international bank to connect directly to Multibanco, enabling in-store, contactless, QR code and online acceptance of MB cards and MB WAY for merchants. The direct connection gives Viva.com’s merchants access to roughly nine million MB cardholders and seven million MB WAY users without routing through an intermediary processor, alongside real-time settlement and reporting. Direct scheme connectivity is becoming a differentiator among pan-European acquirers competing for merchants selling across markets and reinforces consolidation pressure on smaller PSPs unable to justify similar integration costs.

Ecommpay added Bizum to its platform alongside its existing connections to MB Way and Bancomat Pay, giving merchants a single integration for three domestic mobile payment methods. Ecommpay settles these transactions directly rather than through intermediaries enabling merchants to expand their operations across these markets, improving their conversion rate with various domestic payment options at checkout. PSPs that bundle several domestic methods behind one integration are positioning themselves as the default route to conversion for merchants unwilling to negotiate each local scheme separately.

BNPL

Solidgate integrated Klarna into its platform, letting merchants offer Pay in Full, interest-free instalments and longer-term financing at checkout without extra setup, across every European market where Solidgate operates. The integration lets Solidgate’s merchants add flexible payment options without a separate commercial or technical relationship with Klarna. BNPL’s expansion into subscription-heavy and B2B-adjacent verticals through PSP-level integrations, rather than through direct retailer deals alone, points to the model maturing into a standard checkout feature that PSPs bundle by default rather than a discretionary add-on merchants must actively negotiate.

AGENTIC & eCOMMERCE

Visa and Revolut completed France’s first passkey-authenticated agentic card payment, with a Visa test agent using a live Revolut-issued French card to buy from merchant Cleverbridge. A login-style passkey confirmed the customer had already authorised the purchase, replacing a manually entered PIN or click, while Revolut still ran its standard authorisation checks before approving the transaction. Card schemes are racing to define how liability, consent and authentication work when an agent rather than a person initiates checkout, and pilots like this one are designed to keep that authority, and the associated fraud-liability model, with the card schemes rather than ceding it to merchants or agent platforms.

BLIK completed its first pilot transaction carried out independently by an AI agent, making the purchase of hand cream from a Polish retailer’s online store without the user’s involvement at the moment of purchase. The agent used chat functionality built by Juo to monitor product availability and place the order, while PayU processed the payment; authorisation still required a six-digit BLIK code and banking-app approval, with the user controlling the initial instruction and final confirmation. The pilot signals that domestic instant-payment schemes intend to stay relevant to agentic checkout rather than cede that ground entirely to scheme-led frameworks.