Payments News Update – September 19, 2025
Legal and Regulatory Developments
SPOTLIGHT:
Reuters – September 15, 2025
A U.S. judge on Monday upheld the Federal Reserve’s “swipe fees” regulation that caps the amount banks charge merchants for processing debit transactions, a win for the board after a different federal judge last month reached the opposite conclusion and vacated the rule.
In the new ruling , U.S. District Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove in the federal court in Frankfort, Kentucky, found the Fed had justified the regulation, which sets a debit fee cap at 21 cents per transaction. The decision was a loss for Frankfort restaurant Linney’s Pizza, which sued in 2022.
In the earlier case, a federal judge in North Dakota struck the Fed’s rule in August but placed his decision on hold pending an appeal. . . .
Dodd Frank Update – September 12, 2025
The House passed its version of the Fiscal Year (FY) National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) by a vote of 231-196. The bill did not include certain amendments supported by community banking and credit unions advocates.
The bill left out amendments seeking to expand funding for Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI), which was supported by some financial trade organizations . . . .
However, not all the amendments left on the cutting-room floor brought disappointment for financial institutions. ACU President and CEO Jim Nussle praised the House for not including certain proposed amendments he asserted would be harmful to credit unions, such as the Credit Card Competition Act. . . .
Industry Developments
SPOTLIGHT:
Digital Transactions News – September 15, 2025
Peer-to-peer payments competition has increased with the debut of PayPal links, a new way for PayPal users to send funds to others.
PayPal links enables users to create a personalized link to share that contains the amount and a short description. PayPal says they can be shared in any conversation, such as a text, a direct message in a social-media app, or via email. The link is created within the PayPal app. PayPal says PayPal links is distinguished by its ability to keep money movement within conversations where individuals already are discussing payments.
Recipients need a PayPal account to receive the funds and can do so in the PayPal app or on PayPal.com. . . .
Payments Dive – September 16, 2025
JPMorgan Chase and one of the largest financial data aggregators, Plaid, announced an agreement Monday in which the fintech will face new fees to continue gathering consumer financial information from the largest U.S. bank.
The companies presented their deal in a joint press release as one that allows “continued innovation” for U.S. open banking, which has been snarled in litigation and regulatory uncertainty for nearly a year since federal regulators enacted a rule in October 2024 smoothing the way for the new trend.
Three trade groups representing fintechs criticized the new pact due to the fees. “Large data providers are exploiting the current period of regulatory uncertainty to impose unlawful tolls on consumers and competition,” Steve Boms, executive director of the Financial Data and Technology Association, said Monday in an emailed statement. . . .
Digital Transactions News – September 16, 2025
Google Inc. early Tuesday launched its Agent Payments Protocol, an open protocol to authenticate consumers who are initiating a payment using an AI agent when shopping online.
Developed with 60 payments and technology companies, including Adyen NV, MasterCard Inc., and PayPal Holdings Inc., the protocol is intended to remove a key hurdle to agentic commerce—validating an AI agent has the authority to initiate a purchase on behalf of the shopper. Authentication of AI agents reduces the risk of these agents being used to commit fraud.
Agentic commerce is a new commerce model that enables an artificial-intelligence system to handle commercial transactions on behalf of users. . . .
PYMNTS – September 15, 2025
Investors are signaling that the hottest FinTech initial public offerings (IPOs) are not vehicles for frenzied, momentum-based trading but are underpinned by new architectures for traditional financial services.
The transformations are demonstrated in company filings tied to those public listings through the past several days, where double-digit percentage leaps right out of the gate were commonplace.
The shared element isn’t cryptocurrency speculation or flashy consumer apps. It’s digitally transforming the same activities that have powered banking for centuries, like moving money, extending credit and settling trades. Investors appear to be rewarding that disciplined innovation. Klarna’s IPO priced above the initial range, for example. . . .
Payments Dive – September 12, 2025
Enactment of the Genius Act this year unleashed a stablecoin era, with fintech players racing to develop new tools in that realm. PayPal CEO Alex Chriss views stablecoins as an opportunity more than a threat.
Speaking at a Goldman Sachs conference this week, he dismissed the suggestion from an analyst interviewing him that stablecoins might threaten the existing payments ecosystem, and segued instead to outlining the opportunities they present.
“I don’t quite know what a threat to the payment ecosystem means,” Chriss said Tuesday at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference. “Anytime that you can continue to create more efficient ways to move money and more efficient ways for commerce to occur, that’s an advantage.”. . .
Yahoo! Finance – September 11, 2025
Early Warning Services, the company behind the Zelle payments network, plans to explore issuing its own stablecoin for retail bank customers in the coming weeks, according to people familiar with the matter.
Still in its early days, the plan would focus on the infrastructure to create and issue a stablecoin aimed at retail bank customers. A stablecoin is a crypto asset that, unlike bitcoin, isn’t supposed to fluctuate. Instead, it has a price pegged to other assets, most commonly the US dollar.
This undertaking, which would likely start with a small-scale test project, would give customers at some of the country’s biggest US banks a way to use stablecoins in everyday payments. . . .
Digital Transactions Magazine – September 1, 2025
With merchants growing more heated in their opposition to card-acceptance costs, processors are looking for strategies that could help sellers gain from improvements in card authorizations.
An important example of this emerged this summer with news from the big Canadian processor Nuvei Corp. It launched a pair of technologies it says could boost card-authorization rates for North American merchants by as much as 3.5 percentage points. Will that claim hold up? We shall see.
The two services, PINless debit and least-cost routing, are far from novel, but they could help merchants “bypass traditional card rails in favor of lower-cost debit networks,” says Nuvei, which is making the services available now in the U.S market. . . .