ACCEPTANCE & PROCESSING

Elavon renewed its acquiring partnership with Sage, keeping card acceptance embedded directly within Sage’s small-business accounting software across the UK and Ireland. The renewal secures Elavon’s continued access to Sage’s large UK and Ireland small-business base illustrates how accounting and ERP platforms are becoming the primary distribution channel for SME payment acceptance, pushing acquirers toward software partnerships to defend share against embedded-finance-led challengers.

Payzone partnered with Miconex to launch digital gift cards in Ireland, adding a merchant-redeemable digital gift card rail to Payzone’s Irish retail network. The partnership lets independent and multiple retailers across Payzone’s Irish acceptance network issue and redeem digital gift cards through Miconex’s online platform. The deal broadens the value-added services layered onto its core acceptance network at a time when acquirers and PSPs are increasingly bundling loyalty, gifting and prepaid propositions to differentiate beyond pure transaction processing.

Midnite launched Pay by Bank at checkout via TrueLayer, adding an account-to-account payment method alongside cards for its UK customers. The gambling operator integrated TrueLayer’s payment initiation technology to let customers pay directly from their bank account rather than by card, aiming to speed up deposits and reduce reliance on card schemes. The rollout follows a broader pattern of UK merchants in cash-intensive and high-velocity sectors adopting pay-by-bank to lower acceptance costs and settlement friction.

Tod’s partnered with Adyen for unified payment acceptance across its stores and online channels in Europe. The Italian luxury group adopted Adyen’s platform to consolidate in-store and e-commerce acceptance onto a single infrastructure, replacing a more fragmented set of processing relationships across its European retail footprint. The move supports unified customer payment data and reporting across channels, a priority for luxury retailers seeking to link online and in-store purchase behaviour for high-value customers.

BNPL

Klarna launched in-store BNPL at Garage and Dynamite stores, extending its point-of-sale financing beyond online checkout. Shoppers at Garage and Dynamite can now access Klarna’s instalment options directly at physical tills rather than only at online checkout, continuing Klarna’s push to close the gap between its dominant online BNPL position and a still-developing in-store presence. The rollout adds to a growing list of European and UK fashion retailers offering in-store Klarna financing alongside existing card and cash acceptance.

Float reported early merchant traction for its UK BNPL product, citing growing adoption among small business customers since launch. The UK fintech has been building out a buy-now-pay-later proposition allowing small businesses to defer payment on supplier invoices and other business costs. The product places Float alongside a small number of UK fintechs proposing BNPL as an alternative to working capital by repurposing BNPL mechanics for business-to-business payment acceptance.

CASH(less)

The ECB reported that cash acceptance rebounded to 92% among euro area businesses, reversing several years of declining merchant willingness to take physical cash. The finding comes from the ECB’s latest survey of merchant payment behaviour across the euro area and marks a shift after a sustained multi-year decline in cash acceptance as card and digital payments displaced cash at the till. The rebound suggests that acceptance-side cash policy is increasingly being shaped by regulatory expectation as much as by merchant cost economics.

CORPORATE ACTIVITY

Cashflows invested in Tap & Go to expand SoftPoS-based card acceptance for UK small merchants. The investment gives Cashflows a SoftPoS capability to offer alongside its existing acquiring and gateway services, targeting micro-merchants and mobile traders who have traditionally been underserved by terminal-based acceptance. The deal underscores how acquirers are moving to own SoftPoS capability directly, treating hardware-free acceptance as core payments infrastructure.

AGENTIC COMMERCE

Stripe agreed to acquire AI model gateway OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, taking the payments processor deeper into artificial-intelligence infrastructure. OpenRouter runs an API marketplace giving developers a single access point to more than 400 large language models. The deal signals that the contest in agentic commerce is shifting upstream from merchant checkout to the developer infrastructure that meters and bills AI traffic, with acquirers and PSPs increasingly buying positions in the routing layer rather than the acceptance layer.

PPRO partnered with BLIK to bring agentic commerce payments to Poland, enabling AI shopping agents to trigger BLIK payments on behalf of Polish consumers. The partnership connects PPRO’s local payment method infrastructure with BLIK, enabling autonomous purchasing agents to initiate and complete BLIK transactions within merchant checkouts. It extends the small but growing set of local payment methods that are being made addressable to agentic commerce flows, which have so far concentrated on card rails and major wallets.