Industry News

THREDD, an issuer processing platform provider supporting card accounts in more than 50 countries using a single API, has implemented Visa Cloud Connect (VCC) in the Asia-Pacific region. VCC provides organizations access to the VisaNet payment network through cloud-based infrastructure. Thredd’s access to VisaNet is through its Singapore regional hub.

VISA has expanded to 9 the number of blockchains participating in its global stablecoin settlement pilot program, which is testing how issuers and acquirers can standardize settlement with the network. There are 130 stablecoin-linked Visa card programs in 50 countries. The new blockchains are Arc, Base, Canton, Polygon and Tempo. They join Avalanche, Ethereum, Solana and Stellar. Currently, stablecoin settlement at Visa is at an annualized run rate of $7.50 billion.

PRIMAX will provide credit card processing and related value-added services to Bankers’ Bank of Kansas (BBOK), which provides correspondent banking services to more than 200 community banks.

ACI WORLDWIDE has become a technical service provider to the European Payments Initiative (EPI). It will integrate EPI’s Wero wallet with the ACI Payments Orchestration Platform. Wero is a pan-European digital wallet service that runs on the European Union’s Sepa instant payment rails. Wero offers instant account-to-account payments to customers in Belgium, France and Germany. Rabobank in the Netherlands is converting its domestic iDeal online payment business to Wero.

REVOLUT will offer 40 million European (including UK) customers the opportunity to check out at online merchants without manually entering card details, one-time codes or passwords if they enroll with Visa Click to Pay.

NATWEST BANK’S merchant payments unit, Tyl by NatWest, which serves small and midsize businesses in the UK, has worked with Endava to define a comprehensive business and technology strategy for modernization of its payments business. Endava’s expertise includes in-app payments for digital wallets, pay later financing options, omnichannel commerce and payment orchestration. Tyl by NatWest will use components of Endava’s Payment Gateway Accelerator.

PAYPAL’S suite of agentic commerce services and trusted payment layer is being used in the UK by Hey Savi, the country’s first brand-agnostic fashion search engine. Debenhams is the first retailer in the UK to work with Hey Savi. PayPal’s technology connects merchant storefronts to AI platforms, which makes pricing, images, descriptions, reviews and inventory readily available.

ZIP, which offers BNPL point-of-sale payment options and digital payment services in Australia, New Zealand and the US, will support Stripe’s shared payment tokens (SPTs) in the US. SPTs allow AI agents to initiate transactions on a customer’s behalf using their preferred payment method without exposing payment credentials.

VENMO, the PayPal-owned money app, is now a payment option within the Wedding Registry of The Knot Worldwide, which offers couples information about more than 200,000 wedding organizers. Wedding guests can use Venmo to send cash gifts to couples, who can then spend at merchants. There are more than 100 million Venmo customers worldwide.

KWIK PAYMENTS, a South Africa-based payment service provider, has deployed ACI Worldwide’s Payments Orchestration Platform, It uses a single API to connect ATM, in-store and online merchant channels with Visa, Mastercard and American Express.

SQUARE FINANCIAL SERVICES, a wholly owned subsidiary of Block, has launched Square High Yield Savings, a new deposit feature that pays 3.50% APY to Square sellers who maintain a daily balance of $10,000 or more in their Square Savings account. About 3 million US merchants use Square for payment processing.

WORLDLINE, Europe’s sixth largest merchant acquirer, is the first payment provider in the region to enable Click to Pay one-click checkout for recurring payments to international merchants. The service is available on Worldline’s Global Collect platform for cross-border payments.

STRIPE will provide a suite of payment tools to small business customers of Lloyds Bank in the UK. The payment infrastructure within Lloyds Accept integrates directly into Lloyds Business Account and enables businesses to accept payments in-store on POS terminals (including with tap to pay) as well as online. Set up takes minutes.

FISERV ISSUER SOLUTIONS, a top third-party provider of card account processing services, will connect its financial institution issuer customers
to Strivve to access that company’s Top of Wallet platform. Strivve’s platform makes it easy for cardholders to save their card on file at merchant and bill pay sites from within their issuer’s mobile app or website. They select the sites they use and Strivve’s automation and AI agents handle the task of entering card details on their behalf in seconds. No merchant integration is required.

CORTRUST BANK, which operates 37 locations in South Dakota and Minnesota, will deploy Jack Henry’s Banno Platform, which digitally integrates with more than 1,000 third-party providers of value-added services. Through Banno, the bank also gains access to JHA Card Processing Solutions for debit and credit card services.

INTEGRATED RESEARCH, a Sydney, Australia-based provider of real-time intelligence platforms built for multivendor infrastructure, unified communications, customer service and payment environments, has offered its Iris for Card Payments for beta testing to its customers worldwide. The AI-powered assistant was designed to provide payment teams handling large transaction volumes with insights pertaining to response codes, flows, performance metrics and more in real time via natural language prompts.

EARLY WARNING SERVICES, the network operator of money mover Zelle, will launch a remittance service in the US to facilitate payments to India. The company also announced launch of ZelleUSD, a proprietary US dollar-backed stablecoin. ZUSD will be a feature of international money transfers and payments from the US to other international markets.

WERO, the real-time account-to-account open banking-based payment network and digital wallet of the European Payments Initiative, will move into Austria. Erste Bank and Raiffeisen Bank have become EPI shareholders. Wero now connects to 55 million consumers for debit transactions.

MAXIO, a US-based billing automation and revenue management platform for B2B SaaS and AI companies, has launched surcharging capabilities in its Maxio Payments unit, which serves high-volume subscription businesses. Customers can configure their surcharge rules and apply them across invoice payment, billing portals and self-service checkout.

GETNET, Santander’s global merchant payment platform, offers customers the ability to accept and process payments initiated by AI agents through a single integration. Identification and authentication are incorporated. Mastercard and Getnet have completed the first real-world AI payment in Mexico (and Latin America) using Mastercard Agent Pay.

HSBC offers mobile virtual commercial cards in the UAE using Mastercard in Control for Mobile Payments. Cards are issued through a virtual card portal. Users can add them to digital wallets after a sign-up process via Mastercard’s app. They can also check the card limit, available balance and near-real-time transaction records on the app.

EMVCO, the technical body that creates and manages EMV specifications and programs, has released a draft framework to support the interoperable use of verifiable digital credentials for card-based payment authentication. Interested parties can click here before July 23, 2026 to provide feedback for the EMV Digital Payment Specification Scheme Framework.

QOLO provides a commercial payment infrastructure platform that banks and fintechs use to unify card issuing, ledger and money movement into a single programmable layer without replacing their core systems. The company is providing a virtual commercial card program to customers of KeyBank that operates within the bank’s Virtual Account Management platform, the same system they use for treasury and cash management.

WORLDLINE, Europe’s sixth largest merchant acquirer, processed Europe’s first end-to-end agentic commerce payment transaction on the Mastercard network last month. The cardholder and merchant were from the Netherlands.

TFY (Transformify), a UK-based Contractor of Record platform, has added Visa, Mastercard, UnionPay, Uzcard & Humo (Uzbekistan) and Elcard (Kyrgyzstan) to the card networks it supports for contractor payroll and vendor payouts through a partnership with cross-border money transfer company Paysend. Transformify can now send payments directly to eligible cards on those networks at lower transaction costs versus typical bank transfers.