Europe

ACCEPTANCE & PROCESSING

Worldline, ING and Mastercard completed Europe’s first end-to-end agentic payment in production, processed between an ING cardholder and a Dutch merchant. The transaction used an AI agent to initiate and authorise a purchase on the cardholder’s behalf, with the card scheme providing the rails and trust layer. The move signals that schemes and acquirers are racing to embed agent identity, authorisation limits and liability allocation into existing card infrastructure before AI-initiated checkout scales, positioning the card schemes to keep control of the acceptance layer as autonomous purchasing emerges.

Hey Savi and PayPal launched what they describe as the UK’s first agentic commerce platform with in-app checkout, with Debenhams Group signing on as the first retail adopter. Hey Savi is a brand-agnostic AI fashion search app that ranks results across more than 10,000 brands by relevance rather than paid placement, with PayPal’s Agentic Commerce Services surfacing live pricing and availability and powering native in-app purchase. As discovery and checkout migrate into AI agents, acceptance shifts away from the merchant’s own site toward third-party platforms, placing payment providers that control the agentic checkout layer between retailers and their customers.

Checkout.com launched stablecoin acceptance built with Coinbase Payments, letting enterprise merchants take stablecoin payments alongside cards, wallets and bank transfers. A parallel partnership with Fireblocks adds stablecoin settlement on a 24/7 rail, removing the cut-off times and multi-day delays of traditional banking infrastructure. The launch marks a shift from stablecoins as a speculative asset toward a merchant acceptance and settlement instrument, and indicates large acquirers now treat stablecoin rails as a competitive necessity, particularly for faster merchant payout and around-the-clock settlement.

Click to Pay is now live across 32 markets, with returning customers accounting for more than 70 percent of checkouts, while biometric payment passkeys are expanding for frictionless authentication. Payments technology firm Juspay joined the Mastercard Engage network as a certified Click to Pay partner, extending one-click checkout to merchants. The data points to token-first, authenticated checkout consolidating around scheme-controlled rails, which tightens Mastercard’s grip on the European online acceptance stack and raises switching costs for merchants and gateways building on its tokenisation and Click to Pay infrastructure.

Google confirmed Google Pay direct checkout for merchants in the EU, with biometric-only authentication replacing one-time passcodes for many online payments. Google Wallet will also support digital identities from selected EU states this summer, alongside an age-verification feature built with Sparkasse that confirms a user’s age without sharing name or address. The checkout changes align with the EU’s eIDAS 2.0 identity framework and the European Digital Identity Wallet. By moving deeper into direct merchant checkout and identity, big-technology wallets are intensifying competition for the EU online acceptance layer, pressuring acquirers and gateways whose value increasingly rests on orchestration and conversion rather than the wallet button itself.

Enfuce entered the Irish market through a migration deal with Payac, taking on processing for Payac, the provider supporting credit unions across Ireland. The deal extends Enfuce’s Irish footprint and adds a sizeable account base to its processing operation. Cloud-native migrations are steadily displacing legacy in-house and incumbent processing, widening the addressable market for European processor-as-a-service providers and reshaping processing economics for smaller institutions that cannot justify proprietary platforms.

CORPORATE ACTIVITY

OpenPayd agreed to list on Nasdaq through a merger with Titan Acquisition Corporation, in a deal valuing the London-based financial infrastructure firm at 1.145 billion dollars. The combination will see OpenPayd trade under the ticker OP and receive up to 276 million dollars in gross proceeds, with closing expected in the fourth quarter of 2026. A European money-movement platform choosing a US public listing underscores the continent’s persistent capital and scale gap, a theme that dominated Money20/20 Europe and shapes where the next generation of payments infrastructure firms seek growth funding.

CRYPTOASSETS/BLOCKCHAIN/DLT

Triple-A launched stablecoin-enabled multicurrency accounts in Europe, giving businesses named IBAN access alongside direct stablecoin rails, unveiled at Money20/20 Europe. A business can collect in euros, with Triple-A receiving the funds and paying out in stablecoins or in US dollars directly to a bank account, removing the need for local entities and shortening settlement. The firm is targeting PSPs and EMIs that struggle to access local euro rails without building their own infrastructure. The launch illustrates how stablecoin specialists are packaging blockchain settlement inside familiar account and IBAN constructs, lowering the adoption barrier for European acceptance providers that want faster cross-border payout without taking on direct crypto-asset exposure.

FINTECHS

Wallester UK secured authorisation from the FCA as an Electronic Money Institution. The licence lets Wallester expand its Business and white-label card-issuing and embedded-finance products in the UK market. The firm said it invested heavily in establishing a UK operation to meet the regulator’s expectations on compliance and resilience. EMI authorisation is increasingly the entry ticket for European fintechs seeking to offer card issuing and embedded payments to UK businesses.

Spendesk launched a Model Context Protocol solution, letting finance teams query their spend data directly from AI assistants. The MCP server connects payables, settlements, suppliers and purchase orders to assistants such as Claude, replacing static reports with natural-language queries. The launch shows European B2B payment and spend platforms positioning as the data infrastructure layer for agentic finance, a move to remain the system of record as AI assistants become the primary interface to financial data.

OPEN BANKING & PSD

GoCardless launched Recurring Pay by Bank in the UK, backed by the newly live UK Payments Initiative (UKPI) scheme. The product adds intelligent routing that defaults to Direct Debit where open banking is unavailable, plus bank identification drawing on 15 years of UK payer data. GoCardless completed its first recurring open banking transaction in March on behalf of Jellyfish Energy. Recurring account-to-account payments are emerging as the most credible structural challenge yet to the card duopoly in UK collections, with the scheme layer, rather than the rails themselves, now the decisive battleground for adoption.

TrueLayer launched Bank on File, bringing recurring Pay by Bank to the UK, bringing recurring Pay by Bank to the UK, with Trading 212, IG Group, InvestEngine and East Lothian Housing Association among the first businesses live. The method lets customers authorise recurring payments directly from their bank account with no card involved, enabled by the UK Payments Initiative, a scheme developed with the FCA and more than 30 banks and fintechs. By removing card expiry and stored-card fraud from recurring flows, account-to-account is targeting subscriptions and utilities first, the segments where card-on-file economics are weakest and churn from payment failure runs highest.

Acquired became a founding shareholder of the UK Payments Initiative, the industry-led scheme aims to create a shared framework for commercial Variable Recurring Payments. The initiative is aligned with the UK Government’s National Payments Vision and aims to scale account-to-account payments beyond one-off transactions, giving businesses a collection alternative to cards and Direct Debit. Control of the commercial VRP scheme layer is becoming a strategic prize, as payment providers position to capture recurring volumes migrating away from cards and to shape the rules, routing and economics of the UK’s nascent open-banking collections market.

PaidBy has partnered with Mastercard to scale cross-border A2A payments, combining Mastercard’s Open Finance connectivity with PaidBy’s orchestration and settlement infrastructure, announced at Money20/20 Europe. The A2A platform from Xryma lets consumers pay merchants directly from their bank accounts in their domestic currency while merchants settle in their preferred local currency, with simplified reconciliation and next-business-day settlement across markets. The collaboration initially expands PaidBy’s real-time A2A capabilities across Europe and the UK, targeting global merchants, PSPs and platforms. Cross-border has been open banking’s structural weakness against cards, which clear internationally by default. Scheme-backed interoperability narrows that gap and signals that the card schemes intend to monetise A2A growth rather than be disintermediated by it.

REGULATION (UK)

The Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology formed a coalition to build a Supported Payments framework, aimed at enabling people with learning disabilities and other vulnerable customers to make everyday payments safely. CFIT’s coalition brings together banks, payment firms and consumer groups to design standards that let a trusted person assist with payments without ceding full control of an account. The work responds to long-standing gaps in how payment systems accommodate supported decision-making and to the UK’s Consumer Duty expectations. Accessibility and vulnerability are moving from the margins toward the design centre of UK payments, and acceptance providers building checkout and authentication flows will increasingly need to account for assisted and delegated payment models.

SCHEMES

Mastercard confirmed its role in a Eurosystem pilot testing instant cross-currency settlement on the TIPS platform, with Mastercard Move processing atomic settlements between euros and Danish kroner. Both currency legs complete simultaneously, reducing settlement risk and cutting the need for intermediaries. The pilot links a card scheme’s cross-border infrastructure to a central-bank instant-payment system, an unusual convergence of scheme and public rails. For acquirers and merchants, faster and de-risked cross-currency settlement could lower the cost and working-capital drag of multi-currency acceptance in Europe. The tie-up also shows schemes embedding themselves into instant-payment infrastructure that was, in principle, conceived as an alternative to them.