ACCEPTANCE & PROCESSING

Checkout.com has expanded into in-person payments, partnering with Mollie to give enterprise merchants one acquiring relationship across online and physical channels. The offering is software-led and device-agnostic, so merchants can connect existing terminals or choose their own hardware. In-store and online transactions share Checkout.com’s Unified Payments API, contract, settlement and dashboard. The service launches first in the UK and EEA. A device-agnostic model lets an online-first acquirer enter card-present acquiring without building a terminal estate, which has been the main barrier protecting incumbent in-store acquirers.

Visa and Symphopay have partnered to help banks in Central and Eastern Europe launch or modernise merchant acquiring through a single API connection. The offering links Visa Intelligent Authorisation, delivered through the Visa Acceptance Platform, with Symphopay ONE, the Romanian firm’s acquiring platform. Banks gain merchant onboarding, card-present and card-not-present processing, multi-vendor terminal management, clearing, settlement and reporting, plus access to Visa tokenisation and risk tools. New entrants keep their licence, commercial strategy and merchant relationships while Symphopay supplies the technology layer. Established acquirers can replace fragmented legacy systems in stages rather than in a single migration.

DNA Payments has started piloting a terminal-based loyalty programme with Zeal for selected UK merchants. Customers are identified when they tap their card, loyalty is awarded automatically and merchants can view customer-level purchasing data, without shoppers needing to download an app. The pilot combines transaction data from DNA Payments’ terminals with Zeal’s loyalty and reporting software. Card-linked data services give in-store acquirers a way to compete on merchant insight rather than price, as terminal hardware and processing become harder to differentiate.

BNPL

easyShop has added Klarna to checkout across 19 European markets, ahead of the new marketplace’s first Black Friday and Christmas trading period. Shoppers on the marketplace can choose Klarna’s Pay in Full, Pay in 3 or Pay in 30 options, all interest free. Klarna also went live the previous day on Lands’ End’s UK, German, Austrian and French sites through Stripe, following a US launch in May. Klarna is building merchant reach through PSP-enabled integrations and new marketplaces, so BNPL increasingly arrives at checkout bundled by the acquirer or platform rather than through a separately negotiated merchant contract.

DIGITAL & eCOMMERCE

EPI has started rolling out Wero for ecommerce payments in the Netherlands, beginning the next phase of the migration from iDEAL. Wero ecommerce is available to customers of 11 Dutch banks, including ABN AMRO, ING, Rabobank, bunq and Triodos. Payment service providers can deploy Wero progressively and merchants can switch from iDEAL when ready, with EPI aiming to complete the migration before the end of 2027. Subscriptions and pay-on-delivery will be added in Q2 2027, and purchase protection is due by January 2028.

Checkout.com has signed a global partnership with Samsung Electronics to process its digital commerce payments and extend Samsung Pay to more merchants. The deal extends the acquiring and payment optimisation Checkout.com already provides for Samsung.com in the Gulf to further Samsung.com and Galaxy Store environments in the EU and North America, using Checkout.com’s AI-based Intelligent Acceptance engine. Samsung Pay goes live on Flow enabling its merchants to add the wallet for online and in-app payments. Wallet providers are using acquirer-hosted checkouts as distribution, because one integration makes a wallet available to an acquirer’s whole merchant base.

AGENTIC COMMERCE

Mollie has launched official AI plugins for Claude and ChatGPT and an open MCP server, letting merchants run more than 60 business operations from AI assistants. Supported tasks include creating payment links and checkouts, managing subscriptions, drafting invoices and credit notes, and reporting on payment methods and order values. The assistant cannot move money on its own: funds move only after a user reviews and approves a transfer summary, and existing account roles, daily limits and security controls apply. Access is set up through OAuth, with scopes visible to account operators. The launch follows Mollie’s selection as Checkout.com’s in-person partner earlier in the month. PSPs are starting to compete on how much of the merchant back office can be operated through third-party AI assistants, not only on authorisation rates and pricing.

EPC/SEPA

The European Payments Council has approved development of SCARLET, a scheme to standardise how payment service providers accept EU Digital Identity Wallets for strong customer authentication. SCARLET, the Strong Customer Authentication Acceptance Rulebook and Liability Framework for EUDIW Transactions, will set eligibility, rights and obligations, common operating rules and liability between PSPs and wallet providers. It responds to eIDAS 2.0, which will require PSPs to accept the wallets for authentication when users choose them, and is expected to cover more than 3,000 PSPs and more than 27 wallet providers. An open consultation is planned for summer 2027 and the first rulebook for December 2027, with a later version aligned to the Payment Services Regulation. Settling liability before deployment matters for acceptance, because uncertainty over who bears fraud losses has repeatedly slowed adoption of new authentication methods.

FRAUD & CYBERSECURITY

Mastercard is extending its First-Party Trust programme to Europe, targeting disputes in which cardholders challenge genuine purchases. The programme reaches Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa in October 2026 and the rest of Europe in July 2027, after launching in the US, Canada, Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia-Pacific in 2024. Merchants, including small businesses, can share purchase, delivery and authentication evidence with issuers at authorisation or during disputes, and those meeting Mastercard’s compelling-evidence rules gain chargeback protection. Issuers receive risk signals to separate third-party fraud from first-party disputes. Linking dispute outcomes to merchant-supplied data raises the value of acquirers and PSPs able to capture and pass on order and delivery evidence at scale.

Adyen has rolled out Visa Payment Passkey in the UK, letting eligible consumers authenticate online card payments with the method they use to unlock their device. The method is delivered through Authenticate, a module of Adyen’s Uplift optimisation suite, which uses machine learning to decide whether a transaction needs authentication, which method is likely to perform best and what data to share with the issuer. The issuer verifies the cardholder’s identity when the passkey is created, and later purchases rely on device biometrics. Adyen plans a global expansion in 2027. Checkout.com went live with Visa Payment Passkey on the same day, rolling it out in phases to selected UK and European merchants through its existing authentication infrastructure. As authentication options multiply, method selection is moving into PSPs’ optimisation layers, giving schemes single-integration distribution to large merchant bases and making authentication performance a point of competition between acquirers.

LITIGATION

Visa and Mastercard face a proposed £5bn UK collective claim over interchange fees paid by businesses. The claim alleges that limited competition let the schemes set excessive multilateral interchange fees on debit, credit and prepaid cards, and seeks compensation for overcharges since October 2020. Around 1m UK businesses, organisations and charities with revenue below £100m would be included unless they opt out, while larger firms would need to opt in. The £5bn estimate comes from sources close to the case, and the claim has not yet been certified. Both schemes reject it. Because it covers fees set after the 2015 interchange caps, the case tests capped interchange levels, not the pre-cap period at the centre of earlier merchant litigation.

MOBILE MONEY/WALLETS

Revolut Pay has gone live at Just Eat checkout in the UK and Ireland, giving customers one-click account-to-account payment for restaurant and grocery orders. The integration lets customers authorise payments with biometrics in their Revolut account, without entering card details. Customers earn five times the usual RevPoints on Just Eat purchases until 27 December 2026 and twice the usual rate afterwards, redeemable as instant discounts at checkout. Revolut is funding the loyalty incentive itself, so the merchant gains an account-to-account option that can carry lower acceptance costs than cards without paying for the consumer reward.

BLIK has launched BLIK Recurring Payments for Netflix subscribers in Poland, allowing subscriptions to be paid without a payment card. Customers activate the service once and confirm consent in their banking app, after which fees are collected automatically on the subscription schedule, with authorisation remaining with the user’s bank. BLIK recurring payments are also available to ChatGPT users, and Stripe added support for BLIK recurring off-session payments in September 2026. Recurring billing is one of the last ecommerce use cases where stored cards hold a structural advantage over local A2A schemes, and wins with global subscription merchants narrow that advantage in Poland.

Spanish grocery chains are rolling out acceptance of Bizum Pay, the NFC in-store payment function Bizum launched in summer 2026. Caprabo was the latest to announce acceptance, following the lead of Carrefour, Eroski, Alcampo and Lidl. Mercadona plans a gradual rollout beginning with pilots in selected supermarkets. Bizum had 30.6m users at the end of 2025 and processed €67.7bn in 2025, up 53.3% on 2024. Grocery is a high-frequency, low-margin category where acceptance costs weigh heavily, so a national A2A scheme that wins supermarket acceptance gains the everyday in-store usage that card alternatives have struggled to build.

OPEN BANKING & PSD

ZEN.COM has launched Pay by Bank in nine European markets through Mastercard Open Finance, covering merchant payment acceptance and wallet top-ups. The service has been live since September 2026 in Germany, Austria, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and Lithuania, and is available to all ZEN.COM merchants. The fintech connected through a single integration to Mastercard’s European open finance platform. Mastercard has signed comparable pay-by-bank partnerships with Deutsche Bank and Paytently since 2025. Mastercard is positioning itself as an aggregator of account-to-account acceptance in Europe, so that it earns revenue from A2A volumes that would otherwise bypass card rails.

REGULATION (UK)

The CMA has proposed requiring Apple to open iPhone contactless technology to rival wallets at substantially lower fees. The proposed conduct requirement would oblige Apple to offer NFC access through both secure element and host card emulation, whereas it currently offers only secure element in the UK. The CMA would set principles for Apple’s charges, not prices. It notes that no UK firm has launched a rival wallet, while Vipps, PayPal, Klarna, Curve and BBVA launched alternatives in the EU after Apple opened NFC access there. Cheaper NFC access would let banks and A2A providers offer tap-to-pay on iPhones at existing UK terminals, opening in-store acceptance to credentials other than Apple Pay.

The UK government has confirmed it will introduce mandatory software standards for EPOS and MPOS systems to tackle electronic sales suppression, or till fraud. Measures under consideration include cryptographic protection and audit trails for transactions, refunds and voids, standardised data export, certification by manufacturers or independent assessors, and receipt requirements. A technical consultation with detailed proposals will follow in summer 2027, with no implementation date yet set. The UK is moving towards the fiscalisation regimes used in Germany and Italy, which make POS software providers and ISVs responsible for tax compliance features alongside payment acceptance.