ACCEPTANCE & PROCESSING

Revolut has launched Pay with Smile, a facial recognition checkout for in-store payments, at three Kiss the Hippo cafés in London. The feature runs on Revolut Register, the firm’s new two-screen hospitality point-of-sale terminal. Customers opt in through the Revolut app, and the terminal matches their face against the selfie captured during onboarding checks. Revolut is charging merchants 0% processing fees on Pay with Smile transactions and says biometric data is encrypted end-to-end and not held by merchants. The pilot shows how a neobank with a large base of identity-verified customers can bundle hardware, biometrics and A2A rails to sidestep card acceptance economics, putting pressure on SME acquirers whose pricing still rests on interchange-plus-margin models.

Mangopay has launched Echo, a PSP-agnostic product that lets marketplaces and platforms keep their existing payment service providers for pay-ins while centralising post-acceptance money movement on Mangopay’s infrastructure. Echo brings reconciliation, wallet allocation, payment splits and payouts from multiple PSPs into a single record showing where funds sit, who owns them and when they can be released. A connector is available for Mirakl-powered marketplaces, including hybrid set-ups in which Mangopay acts as one of several acquirers. The launch reflects a wider unbundling of acceptance, in which platforms spread authorisations across competing PSPs and value migrates to whoever controls the downstream ledger, splits and payouts.

BNPL

Amazon has partnered with Affirm to offer instalment financing at checkout on Amazon.co.uk, rolling out progressively to eligible UK customers. Approved shoppers can choose a 0% Pay-in-3 plan or an interest-bearing plan of up to 48 months at a fixed 22% representative APR, both on baskets of £50 or more. Neither plan carries late fees or early repayment penalties. The launch follows Affirm’s UK agreement with Costco earlier in September and arrives shortly after the FCA began regulating third-party deferred payment credit. Longer-term, regulated instalment credit is becoming a standard tender at large UK marketplace checkouts, eroding the pay-in-three differentiation on which incumbent BNPL providers built their merchant fee premiums.

CORPORATE ACTIVITY

Trustly is cutting around 200 jobs, roughly a quarter of its workforce, as the Swedish pay-by-bank provider narrows its focus to priority markets. Trustly, which employs more than 800 people and acquired UK open banking firm Ecospend in 2023, reported a 2025 net loss of SEK 534 million, up from SEK 401 million a year earlier, and negative cash flow of SEK 261.7 million in the first half of 2026. A2A acceptance providers are retreating to markets where real-time rails and merchant demand support profitable scale, suggesting pay-by-bank will advance unevenly by geography rather than as a uniform alternative to cards.

CRYPTOASSETS/BLOCKCHAIN/DLT

UK banks have completed the first live customer transactions using tokenised sterling deposits, through the Great British Tokenised Deposit (GBTD) initiative convened by UK Finance. Participants are Barclays, HSBC UK, Lloyds Banking Group, Monzo, Nationwide, NatWest and Santander, using a shared platform built by Quant. The pilots covered two remortgage completions, in which funds were locked and released automatically at completion, and a marketplace purchase from a private seller, where the buyer’s money was released only once the goods were exchanged. Programmable, conditional settlement in commercial bank money gives marketplaces a bank-native escrow alternative to card-based buyer protection, which could eventually change how online acceptance handles disputes and chargebacks.

IBM has connected its Digital Asset Haven platform to Swift’s blockchain-based shared ledger, letting banks instruct tokenised deposit transactions using standard ISO 20022 payment messages through a new adapter. The ledger supports bank-issued tokenised deposits that can move 24/7, with final settlement still passing through existing systems such as real-time gross settlement and correspondent banking. By letting banks reach tokenised money through messaging formats they already run, incumbents are lowering switching costs and strengthening bank-issued tokens against stablecoins as the likely settlement asset for future programmable merchant payouts.

DIGITAL WALLETS

bunq has become the first bank to offer Wero for both person-to-person and online checkout payments across the Netherlands, Germany, France and Belgium. Personal and business customers can send money using a phone number or select Wero at checkout on participating merchant sites, paying directly from their bunq account without entering card details. A digital-first neobank reaching full four-market coverage extends Wero to app-native users, strengthening the case for merchants and acquirers to add Wero at checkout as a European alternative to international card schemes.

mBank has launched BLIK mobile payments for its customers in Slovakia, becoming the second Slovak bank to offer the Polish scheme after Tatra banka. At checkout, shoppers generate a six-digit code in their banking app, enter it on the merchant’s payment page and confirm the transaction in the app, without sharing card details. BLIK aims to replicate its Polish bank-cooperation model in Slovakia by adding further banks and expanding merchant acceptance, primarily through payment gateways. The move shows domestic A2A schemes exporting their bank-led acceptance model into neighbouring EU markets, widening the set of card alternatives that PSPs must integrate at gateway level.

AGENTIC & eCOMMERCE

GoCardless has processed the UK’s first agentic account-to-account payment, a recurring donation to anti-poverty charity Trussell completed entirely within a conversation with an AI agent. Donors can ask the agent about Trussell’s work, choose a monthly gift of £5, £10 or £15, and then enter bank details so the agent can set up a Direct Debit mandate without a separate form or redirect. GoCardless built the flow within the FCA’s AI Live Testing programme, which it joined earlier in 2026. Early live agentic transactions in the UK are running on bank rails, signalling that A2A providers intend to compete for agent-initiated recurring payments before card-based agent frameworks become entrenched.

Mastercard and Danske Bank have completed Denmark’s first payment made by an AI agent on a consumer’s behalf. The consumer asked an agent to book a coffee tasting on Mastercard’s Priceless.com platform, and the agent completed both the booking and the payment. The transaction ran on Mastercard Agent Pay, with explicit consumer consent and confirmation through Mastercard Payment Passkeys, while PayOS managed technical execution. Mastercard plans to extend authenticated agent transactions to further European industries. Card schemes are building a country-by-country European footprint for agent payments through incumbent issuers, positioning tokenised card credentials as the default agentic tender and raising the bar for A2A alternatives seeking the same merchant reach.

DIGITAL, RETAIL & ‘Neo’ BANKING

The digital euro has debuted in wholesale financial markets, as the European Central Bank launched Pontes, enabling banks to settle tokenised-asset transactions in central bank money. Pontes links distributed-ledger platforms to the Eurosystem’s TARGET services, with access limited to credit institutions, market infrastructure providers and central banks. As the first live component of the Eurosystem’s digital euro architecture, Pontes adds weight to ECB pressure on co-legislators over the retail scheme, whose merchant fee caps and mandatory acceptance rules would directly reshape card acceptance economics.

FRAUD & CYBERSECURITY

Adyen has launched an upgrade to Authenticate, the authentication module of its Adyen Uplift suite, which now uses machine learning to pick the best authentication method for each transaction. The system decides whether authentication is needed, selects between 3DS, Google Secure Payment Authentication, Mastercard and Visa Payment Passkeys or data-only flows, and optimises the data sent to issuers to lift approvals. Live passkey transactions are already being enabled in the UK, with wider rollout through 2027. As strong customer authentication fragments across passkeys and wallet protocols, acquirers that own both authentication and authorisation data can turn compliance into a conversion lever that standalone 3DS vendors struggle to match.