Payments News Update – October 3, 2025
Legal and Regulatory Developments
SPOTLIGHT:
Payments Dive – September 30, 2025
Stablecoins and distributed ledger technology could make payments cheaper and more efficient and shouldn’t be feared, Federal Reserve Board Governor Christopher Waller said Monday in a speech.
“Let us remember that this is not a new story and that we should not fear new technologies, nor new types of providers,” Waller said at the global Sibos financial conference in Frankfurt, Germany. “Instead, we should ask how new technologies could benefit all types of actors, including the most sophisticated financial firms as well as consumers, while not losing sight of the need for guardrails that promote safety for consumers and the broader financial system.”
Stablecoins and DLT have shown promise thus far, Waller said. . . .
Tearsheet – September 30, 2025
The open banking regulatory space has been in flux for some time. In 2023, CFPB’s first proposal to implement Section 1033 signaled that some clarity may be on the horizon.
But even then, the rifts between banks and fintechs was clear: Fintechs saw CFPB’s move as a positive step forward for competition. Banks, on the other hand, characterized the rulemaking as short-sighted, a law that was likely to move the brunt of responsibility on the bank if things went wrong.
The following years have not helped matters, however. In this article we break down twists and turns the regulations have taken and how recent partnerships are likely to impact the industry. . . .
Industry Developments
SPOTLIGHT:
Digital Transactions Magazine – October 1, 2025
It’s now 10 years since the era of the EMV standard dawned for the U.S. payments industry. It ushered in chip cards—and along with them an effective defense against fake cards. Herewith a report on how the industry has reacted—and how effective EMV has been.
In October 2015, the big four card networks made it official, implementing a technique called a “liability shift” to nudge U.S. processors and merchants to adopt the EMV standard for card security. It would be one if the most momentous technology overhauls ever undertaken by American Express, Discover, Mastercard, and Visa—not to mention processors and merchants.
The shift imposed the liability for fraud on the party that hadn’t adopted EMV technology. Preparing for it in 2015, U.S. card issuers, merchants, and ATM operators spent an estimated $10.5 billion on compliance, with the bulk of that expense falling on merchants in the form of new point-of-sale technology. . . .
Retail Dive – September 30, 2025
As consumers turn to AI for shopping recommendations, OpenAI just announced a function that aims to keep the buying process on its ChatGPT platform.
The company on Monday debuted Instant Checkout for U.S. ChatGPT Plus, Pro and Free users. Such users can now buy directly in the platform from U.S. Etsy sellers and will soon have the same option for over a million Shopify merchants (including Glossier, Skims, Spanx and Vuori).
“As a marketplace of over 5 million creative entrepreneurs, it’s our job to remove barriers for shoppers so they can easily discover and be delighted by our sellers’ special items,” Etsy Chief Product and Technology Officer Rafe Colburn said in a separate company post. . . .
Digital Transactions News – September 30, 2025
Visa Inc. announced early Tuesday it will launch a cross-border payments service that will rely on stablecoins to fund transfers. The service, meant ultimately as an improvement on existing transfers that require users to commit capital in advance, will run on the payments company’s Visa Direct real-time payments rails.
It is expected to transition to “limited availability” by April, Visa says, though timing for the pilot itself was not announced.
The initiative represents the first time Visa has ventured into stablecoins for cross-border transactions, the company says. With the new service, “businesses can now prefund Visa Direct with stablecoins,” Visa says, though recipients can elect to receive funds in their local currency. . . .
TechCrunch – September 30, 2025
Venmo and PayPal — two of the most popular apps for digitally sending money to friends, family, or businesses — have never been natively compatible. But according to Venmo, this is changing in November.
“Venmo users and PayPal users will be able to pay each other in the U.S. and worldwide,” Venmo wrote in an email to customers. “That means that PayPal users will be able to find and pay you using your phone number, and later using your email address.”
For years, customers have used convoluted workarounds to transfer money between the services. . . .
PYMNTS – September 29, 2025
PayOS and Mastercard announced Monday (Sept. 29) that they have completed the first live agentic payment using a Mastercard Agentic Token, a milestone that shifts agentic commerce from theory to practice and shows how AI agents could begin to transform the way payments are authorized, secured and scaled.
The demonstration was powered by Mastercard Agent Pay, a framework built on the same network tokenization infrastructure that underpins mobile contactless payments, card-on-file storage, and Mastercard Payment Passkeys.
By extending those rails, the system enables AI agents to initiate payments while still enforcing user consent, authentication and fraud protection what Mastercard calls the “trust layer” for agentic commerce. . . .
Payments Dive – September 29, 2025
Global payments revenue growth is set to slow over the next four years, and North America is expected to record some of the smallest transaction-related revenue growth by region, according to a new report from Boston Consulting Group.
North America’s annual transaction-related revenue growth is projected to be about 5.6% through 2029, higher only than Asia-Pacific (4.5%) and Western Europe (4.3%). By comparison, Latin America – fueled by real-time payment systems in Brazil – is expected to record 10.5% growth, Eastern Europe, 13%, and the Middle East and Africa, 9%, according to the firm’s 2025 Global Payments Report, released Sept. 22.
“Payments growth in North America is slowing because the market is already so advanced,” said Inderpreet Batra, a New York-based managing director and senior partner at BCG, in an email. . . .
Financial Times – September 25, 2025 (subscription may be required)
Circle, the world’s second-biggest issuer of stablecoins, is examining ways to make it possible to reverse transactions involving its tokens, in a rare admission by a major crypto firm that it needs to take lessons from the traditional financial sector.
Circle president Heath Tarbert said a mechanism that allowed money to be refunded in cases of fraud or disputes would help the stablecoin industry’s push to become part of the financial mainstream.
“We are thinking through . . . whether or not there’s the possibility of reversibility of transactions, right, but at the same time, we want settlement finality,” Tarbert told the Financial Times. . . .
Digital Transactions News – September 25, 2025
Landing a coveted merchant account is a top goal for many banks and payment technology firms, but banks may be at a disadvantage. It can cost up to 2.3 times more, on average $496, for a financial institution to onboard a merchant for payment services, as a paytech may spend $214 to do that, says a new report from advisory firm Capgemini Research Institute.
Released Thursday, the report, “World Payments Report 2026,” also says it may take a bank seven days to complete the onboarding, while a paytech may do it in as little as 60 minutes.
Capgemini defines paytechs as companies that develop and provide solutions for processing payments, including mobile payments, contactless transactions, digital wallets, and payment gateways. . . .