ACCEPTANCE & PROCESSING

HSBC UK launched Tap to Pay for small businesses with Stripe, letting sole traders and small firms accept contactless payments on a compatible smartphone without a separate card reader. Customers apply for a Stripe account through the HSBC Business Banking app and can then accept contactless debit and credit cards and wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, priced at 1.4% plus 5p per transaction. Bank-distributed SoftPOS shows UK clearing banks increasingly renting PSP infrastructure rather than rebuilding legacy acquiring, putting pressure on SME-focused terminal providers whose propositions rest on hardware and standalone merchant accounts.

Genome launched Visa and Mastercard acceptance for online merchants, settling card payments directly into merchants’ Genome business accounts. Genome offers a hosted payment page or a host-to-host integration for fully on-site checkout, with settlement in EUR, USD or GBP as early as the next business day. Card acceptance sits alongside the SEPA Instant and SWIFT transfers, FX, Visa business cards and bulk payments that clients already use, and complements Genome’s existing open banking Pay by Bank method, with Apple Pay and Google Pay slated to follow. The move illustrates how EMIs that own the merchant’s operating account are bundling acquiring into it, competing with standalone PSPs on settlement speed and multi-currency treasury rather than on price per transaction.

SurveyMonkey selected Checkout.com as its payment acquirer across the US, UK, Europe, Canada and Australia, aiming to improve payment performance and recover failed subscription payments. Checkout.com’s platform, including payment orchestration, is expected to give SurveyMonkey greater resilience and higher authorisation rates, while AI-driven network insights will be used to identify and manage failed recurring transactions that drive involuntary churn. The win adds to Checkout.com’s enterprise roster as it expands direct acquiring and pursues digital subscription merchants with multi-region footprints. Enterprise acquiring mandates are increasingly won on measurable authorisation uplift and recurring-payment recovery, turning acceptance performance analytics into a primary competitive lever rather than an add-on.

CASH(less)

The Post Office urged UK retailers to review their cash acceptance policies after research found that nearly three in ten UK adults had been unable to pay at a checkout in the past year because their preferred payment method was not accepted. Its new guidance asks businesses to prepare for payment disruptions and explain accepted payment options clearly to customers. Resilience is becoming an acceptance criterion in its own right, strengthening the case for multi-rail acceptance, offline card capability and cash retention, which may temper the pace at which UK merchants go card-only.

CORPORATE ACTIVITY

Nexi agreed to sell Ratepay to Affirm, transferring the German pay-by-invoice provider serving merchants in Germany, Austria and Switzerland to the US BNPL network. Alongside the sale, Nexi and Affirm signed a memorandum of understanding to expand their existing partnership in the DACH region and explore new joint opportunities. Under Affirm, Ratepay plans to add instalments and build a full BNPL portfolio around its Rechnungskauf franchise. Nexi will provide transitional support, and closing is subject to regulatory approvals expected in the first half of 2027. The deal underlines how European acquirers are exiting balance-sheet-heavy credit products to focus on core merchant processing, while retaining distribution partnerships with specialist lenders to keep local payment methods available at checkout.

DIGITAL WALLETS

Uber added Revolut Pay as a native payment option for rides and Uber Eats across the UK and Europe, extending an existing partnership between the two companies. The account-to-account method lets users authorise payments in the Revolut app with biometrics, with transactions processed in local currency. The integration shows how neobank-owned A2A wallets are using loyalty economics to win placement at large platform merchants, a model that challenges card-based wallets on cost while relying on rewards rather than interchange to drive adoption.

Wero passed 75 million registered users, as the European Payments Initiative’s wallet added further merchant acceptance in Germany and moved ahead with the Dutch iDEAL migration. Electronics retailer Euronics has added Wero alongside Apple Pay and Google Pay on euronics.de for the Black Season trading period, while dm is offering customers a one-off €10 coupon for orders paid with Wero between 1 and 30 November. In the Netherlands, merchants are moving from iDEAL to Wero, with migration due to complete by the end of 2027, and the European connection network ENP has appointed a managing director. Wero’s growth now depends less on registrations than on converting users into repeat checkout transactions, making merchant-funded incentives and PSP enablement the decisive variables in its contest with international wallets.

PayPal set out plans to extend its merchant checkout playbook to Europe from mid-2027, with Germany as the primary market and the UK, France, Italy and Spain also included. Speaking at an investor conference. The programme, which includes checkout changes and co-marketing, will widen from PayPal’s top 50 US merchants to its top 200 global merchants in 2027. Incumbent wallets are now competing for checkout placement merchant by merchant, signalling that button position and merchant-funded incentives matter as much as consumer reach in European ecommerce.

AGENTIC & eCOMMERCE

A draft of the EU’s Digital Fairness Act would tie AI shopping agents’ autonomy to their commercial incentives, under the proposal the European Commission formally presented on 11 November. Article 26 would allow consumers to delegate purchases to agents but require fresh approval where the agent’s provider is paid for proposing a contract or has a conflict of interest involving the merchant. Consumers would set at first use which purchases need their confirmation, and financial services are excluded. Traders could not make an agent the only route to purchase. Proposed as a directly applicable regulation, the Act would allow fines of up to 6% of worldwide turnover and now passes to the European Parliament and Council. If adopted, the rules would make consent design, merchant identification and audit trails core requirements for agentic checkout in the EU, favouring acquirers and PSPs that can evidence user mandates at transaction level.

Duffel and Katanox partnered to combine hotel bookings, payments and financing in a single flow for travel sellers. Through the integration, sellers using Duffel, including challenger banks and fintechs, can access live inventory from 1.6 million hotel properties, while Katanox handles the payment flow, replacing virtual cards with instant account-to-account payments and automating reconciliation and settlement. Eligible sellers can also access Katanox Capital, which offers advances based on live booking, payment and settlement data. Hotels are expected to benefit from faster payouts, direct contracting and clearer settlement data. B2B travel remains one of the largest virtual card niches, and A2A settlement embedded at the booking layer threatens a high-interchange use case that acquirers and card issuers have long relied upon.

FINTECHS

Sage partnered with Adyen and Mastercard to embed business accounts and debit cards in its software, announcing the arrangement at its Future for Partners event in Amsterdam. Adyen will provide banking-as-a-service infrastructure and onboarding, and Mastercard will act as card scheme partner, for a service combining a business account, debit cards, payments and reconciliation. The first implementation is planned for Sage 50, Sage 100 and Sage Active in France, as part of a wider European strategy, and is designed to complement rather than replace customers’ existing bank relationships. The deal shows ISVs becoming the primary distribution channel for SME financial services, with acquirers such as Adyen monetising embedded accounts alongside acceptance to deepen platform lock-in.

REGULATION (EU)

The Bundeskartellamt said PayPal’s ban on merchant surcharges may breach competition law, issuing its preliminary assessment to PayPal on 11 November. The German competition authority found that PayPal has prohibited online merchants from charging customers extra for using PayPal since 2018, has enforced the rule and can terminate merchants that breach it. It considers PayPal’s merchant fees above average, meaning merchants recover the cost through prices paid by all customers, while PayPal users have no incentive to choose cheaper methods. German law would in principle allow PayPal surcharges that do not exceed the merchant’s actual costs. Competing online methods include cards, Klarna and the newly launched Wero. Should the finding stand, German merchants would gain a pricing lever to steer consumers towards lower-cost methods such as A2A wallets, sharpening price competition at the online checkout.

REGULATION (UK)

The Payments Association published its Payments Manifesto 2027, setting out a national strategy for UK payments to 2030 and calling for payments to be recognised as critical national infrastructure. Building on the Government’s National Payments Vision, the manifesto is organised around four objectives: growth, competitiveness and resilience; trust, security and consumer protection; AI, data and digital infrastructure; and the future of money. It sets out eight recommendations covering infrastructure modernisation, earlier fraud prevention through intelligence sharing, trusted rules for agentic payments, and proportionate regulation for stablecoins and tokenised money. It also seeks clearer coordination between regulators and government and wants account-to-account payments made more attractive for everyday purchases. The industry’s push to position A2A as a mainstream retail rail signals continued pressure on card acceptance costs as the UK’s next-generation infrastructure and commercial VRP models take shape.