ACCEPTANCE & PROCESSING

payabl. embedded Visa’s Rapid Dispute Resolution tool into its payabl.one platform, giving UK and European merchants automated pre-dispute resolution before a chargeback is formally raised. The pan-European payment service provider, with offices in London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Limassol and Vilnius, positions the integration alongside payabl.one’s existing online and in-person acquiring, multi-currency accounts and payouts. The move extends an existing Visa-payabl. relationship that already covers Click to Pay and SoftPOS acceptance. As dispute volumes climb alongside instant and card-not-present growth, automated pre-chargeback resolution is becoming a competitive differentiator for acquirers and PSPs.

Rubean added Spain’s Bizum payment scheme to its SoftPOS Tap-to-Phone app, letting Spanish merchants accept Bizum transactions directly on a smartphone with no extra hardware. The SoftPOS provider’s app passed 150,000 active terminals as of 22 July 2026, and the Bizum integration rounds out coverage of Spain’s dominant instant-payment scheme, which counts more than 30 million active users and around 90% of the country’s real-time payments market. Merchants gain Bizum acceptance alongside existing card acquiring through the same Tap-to-Phone terminal, without a dedicated card reader. The addition follows a broader push by domestic account-to-account schemes such as Bizum, Bancontact Payconiq and Swish to move beyond peer-to-peer transfers into in-store and SoftPOS acceptance, competing directly with card schemes on cost and settlement speed.

Guzco partnered with Mollie to automate dispute resolution across the Benelux and DACH markets with UK coverage planned. Guzco’s API pulls delivery, tracking and signature evidence from a merchant’s own systems and assembles chargeback defence packages ahead of scheme deadlines, removing the need for merchants to handle disputes manually. The startup builds on Klarna, PayPal, iDEAL, Visa and Mastercard rails, and reports its automation roughly triples merchant recovery rates on contested transactions while virtually eliminating missed evidence deadlines. For mid-market PSPs, dispute automation is increasingly bundled in as a standard platform feature rather than sold separately, mirroring the fraud-tooling arms race already under way at the larger acquirers.

Viva.com won a 67-month Cyprus government payment-processing contract worth more than €1.5 billion in annual transaction volume, displacing incumbent JCC Payment Systems after a four-year procurement process. Under the deal, Viva.com will provide the gov.cy payment gateway, a smart checkout product, card and account-to-account processing, and point-of-sale terminals under its ‘Tap on Any Device’ proposition, covering tax, vehicle licence and social insurance payments. The contract is one of the larger public-sector acquiring mandates awarded in Europe this year and gives Viva.com a reference deployment spanning online and in-person government payment channels. Public-sector processing contracts of this scale are increasingly fought on total cost and channel breadth rather than price alone, and incumbency is proving less durable against acquirers offering unified acceptance.

PingPong launched a single-API European acquiring product for games and digital-entertainment publishers at Gamescom in Cologne, bundling local acquiring and alternative payment methods with sector-specific fraud controls. The product is aimed at publishers seeking acceptance coverage across multiple European markets through one integration, rather than negotiating local acquiring relationships market by market. The launch timing around Gamescom underscores gaming’s status as a priority vertical for acquirers chasing higher-margin, fraud-sensitive merchant categories. Single-API, multi-market acquiring products aimed at specific verticals such as gaming are becoming a standard go-to-market wedge for challenger acquirers competing against incumbents with legacy market-by-market licensing models.

EPC/SEPA

dm-drogerie markt became one of the first major German retailers to accept Wero at online checkout, integrating the European account-to-account wallet via processing partner Nexi DACH. The rollout covers dm’s German e-commerce operation, letting customers pay via SEPA Instant Credit Transfer without entering card details. Nexi DACH acted as the technical and acquiring partner enabling the checkout integration. The signing of a large-format German retailer adds meaningful volume to Wero’s merchant-side rollout, which has so far leaned on bank distribution; retailer-led acceptance will determine whether Wero can become a genuine alternative to international cards schemes.

REGULATION (UK)

The UK’s Retail Payments Infrastructure Board opened a consultation on redesigning the country’s retail payments infrastructure, explicitly including account-to-account payments at the point of sale as a card alternative. The board is also examining enhanced cross-border payment capability as part of the redesign. A formal infrastructure review naming point-of-sale account-to-account payments as a card alternative signals that UK policymakers now see A2A acceptance as core national payments infrastructure rather than a niche fintech feature, raising the stakes for acquirers and PSPs still reliant on card-only rails.