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For decades, the Point of Sale was a fixed destination: a counter, a terminal, a moment at the end of the customer journey. That mental model is now obsolete. As Global Payments’ 2026 Commerce and Payment Trends Report makes clear, payment is no longer a place but a capability — one that follows the customer

Agentic AI represents a decisive break from the assistive technologies that have defined the past decade of fintech innovation. Agentic AI and the rewiring of financial services These systems do not merely recommend or optimise; they evaluate options, select outcomes, authorise actions and execute transactions across interconnected systems, all within pre-set human constraints. In financial

The commodification of identity on the dark web is reshaping the economics of financial crime — and exposing the limits of biometric verification. The dark web’s discount identity market New analysis from AMLTRIX, an open-source anti-money laundering framework, illustrates how mature and accessible the illicit identity trade has become. Across 25 widely available dark-web markets

Christmas 2025 may be remembered as the moment agentic commerce truly entered the mainstream, with new research from Checkout.com signalling a decisive shift toward agentic AI. Agentic commerce to transform shopping Nearly half of consumers surveyed say they expect to use an AI agent to support their festive purchasing this year — a striking indication

Dutch payments processor Mollie is on the brink of acquiring UK fintech GoCardless in what would be one of Europe’s most consequential private-market payments deals this year. According to people close to the discussions, the transaction could be announced within days, marking the culmination of months of strategic manoeuvring by both companies as competition intensifies

The pressure on payment service providers to find ways of dealing with the burgeoning demand of real-time payment settlement services has been tremendous, with real-time transaction volumes rising 42.2% across the year to $266 billion in 2023. Accelerating real-time payment adoption The pace of such a transformation has seen most institutions scurrying to modernise old

On 07 November 2025, the Payments Vision Delivery Committee (PVDC) published its “Strategy for Future Retail Payments Infrastructure.” As a quick refresher, the PVDC was set up in November 2024 to realise the National Payments Vision (NPV) – which set out the ambition for a world-leading payments ecosystem – and comprises representatives  from HM Treasury (HMT), the Bank

Think about your smartphone. Now imagine it’s not just a digital wallet, but the entire checkout counter. No big machines to buy, no setup headaches. Just tap your phone, pay, and walk away. Tap-to-Pay: Can smartphones replace POS That’s Tap-to-Pay on Phone, or Tap-to-Phone for short. It’s been catching on more and more, especially as

Stablecoins have long been marketed as the digital bridge between volatile crypto assets and the perceived solidity of fiat money. Yet their accelerating adoption — particularly in the US — is raising difficult questions for the rest of the world about who really benefits from this transformation of money, and at what cost. Stablecoins deserve

In 2024, commercial gaming revenue in the US hit a record of around $72 billion, the fourth straight year of all-time highs, according to the American Gaming Association. A growing share of that total now comes from digital products. A world of one-tap online slots Online casinos, table games, and especially online slots have become