Payments News Update – November 28, 2025
Legal and Regulatory Developments
SPOTLIGHT:
Bloomberg – November 21, 2025 (subscription may be required)
Nine years ago, the $5.7 billion sticker price to settle one of the biggest class-action lawsuits ever was rejected. Last year, it climbed to $30 billion, just to be thrown out again. Now, it’s north of $200 billion, and there’s growing doubt even that will be enough to end two decades of fighting.
Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. this month took yet another swing at a deal that seeks to end a battle with thousands of retailers — and reshape the fees underpinning the credit-card industry in the process. Yet opposition is already pouring in from merchants and lawmakers.
Making the call will be US District Court Judge Brian Cogan, who took over the long-running case after Judge Margo Brodie last year struck down the earlier settlement, saying that finance firms could afford to take a bigger hit. . . .
Payments Dive – November 21, 2025
Several senate Democrats called on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Thursday to keep pursuing open banking rules that give consumers the ability to easily shift their personal data from one financial institution to another.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden and Richard Blumenthal pressed CFPB Acting Director Russell Vought in a letter to continue the federal agency’s work in writing a rule under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that would further such consumer rights, without fees.
The agency issued such a rule last year during the Biden administration, but bank trade groups sued over the regulation and it has been tied up in court. . . .
Industry Developments
SPOTLIGHT:
Digital Transactions News – November 21, 2025
Fraudsters are becoming better organized and building industrial-strength infrastructures to commit fraud, making their actions harder to detect and prevent, says Visa Inc.’s Fall 2025 Biannual Threats Report.
The report, which pulls data from Visa’s global network, identifies the five biggest fraud threats facing the payments ecosystem: the industrialization of fraud from artisan to assembly-line attacks; the development of a monetization playbook to maximize the value of stolen cardholder credentials; the increase of synthetic content generated by artificial intelligence; the erosion of legacy defenses; and the vulnerability of third parties—such as service providers, processors, merchants, and non-financial ecosystem participants—to attack.
The five threats “reveal how criminals are adapting faster, operating at greater scale, and exploiting structural vulnerabilities in ways that challenge conventional defenses,” the report says. . . .
PYMNTS – November 20, 2025
EMVCo, the technical body behind EMV Specifications and programs for card-based payments, is now considering global specifications to support agentic payments.
The organization is working on how EMV Specifications such as EMV 3-D Secure (3DS), EMV Payment Tokenisation and EMV Secure Remote Commerce (SRC) can be developed to promote seamless and secure card-based agentic payments, it said in a Thursday (Jan. 20) press release.
Agentic payments have unique characteristics in how transactions are initiated, authenticated and secured, and a globally interoperable and scalable approach may help make the payments trusted by consumers, merchants and issuers, the release said. . . .