Top 45 Merchant Acquirers in Europe—2025
Cards carrying the global brands—Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Diners Club/Discover, UnionPay and JCB—generated 150.83 billion transactions, an increase of 6.6%.
Area of Interest: Merchant Acquiring
Lydian Stablecoin Processing for Merchants
Acquirers need only one link to Lydian to gain access to more than 300 digital assets and 860 million consumers with crypto wallets (MetaMask, Binance, Trust Wallet, etc.). Lydian provides a checkout user interface SDK and a suite of APIs and unified merchant reporting. There is no operational overhead tied to crypto wallet management or treasury management. No new workflows are required.
Know Your Agent Pay Protocol Consortium
Skyfire, which launched end-to-end interoperable network infrastructure capabilities for autonomous agentic commerce early in 2025, assembled a consortium of more than 15 security vendors, bot managers and identity and access management companies to create a trust protocol they call KYAPay to make the web just as useful to an AI agent as it is to a human when making a payment.
Global Payments AI-First Handheld POS Device
The ultra-thin Genius will deliver AI features such as the ability to accept menu item orders in high-noise environments based on conversations between the customer and the server, with the software identifying what is being ordered.
US Card Spending at Merchants — 2025
Purchase volume included Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover cards, combined with Interlink, Star, Pulse, Nyce and other domestic-only PIN-based (predominately) debit networks. Airline, hotel, gasoline and other co-branded card partnerships that operate on the Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover networks are included.
Verifone AI Supports Fuel/C-Store Retailers
The company supports more than 55,000 locations in the US, the Caribbean and Central America that generate 35 million transactions daily.
Linux Foundation’s X402 Agentic Commerce Protocol
Because only stablecoins are used, all transactions are irreversible. There are no chargebacks. This allows for agent-to-agent and machine-to-machine payments.
Certos B2B Fraud Fighting
Certos is the name Early Warning Services has chosen for a business that screened more than $11.400 trillion in payments (ACH, check, bank transfers) last year, stopping more than $3.70 billion in fraud.
Amex to Protect Cardholders Against AI Agent Errors
American Express is the first card company to announce it will protect its customers when errors occur by an agent registered with American Express through Amex Agent Purchase Protection.
Silverflow Cloud-Native Merchant Processing
Silverflow is a third-party back-end processor financial institutions can partner with to complement their core strengths with API-based functionality that modernizes and completes their services.