NFC World

Citi and Coinbase are deepening their partnership as the boundary between conventional banking infrastructure and stablecoin payments continues to narrow. Citi and Coinbase Link Stablecoin Payments Under the expanded arrangement, Coinbase will use Citi’s Virtual Account Wallet to support Coinbase Virtual Accounts, allowing businesses to receive conventional currency and automatically convert those funds into stablecoins.

Revolut has completed a three-day UK pilot of its Pay with Smile facial recognition checkout, giving customers at selected London cafés the ability to make in-store payments simply by looking at a point-of-sale terminal. Revolut completes UK ‘Pay With Smile’ Pilot The trial ran from 24 to 26 September at Kiss the Hippo locations in

Seven major UK financial institutions have completed the first live customer transactions using tokenised sterling deposits, marking an important step in Britain’s attempt to move programmable money from experimentation into everyday payments. The transactions were carried out through the Great British Tokenised Deposit initiative, convened by UK Finance and involving Barclays, HSBC UK, Lloyds Banking

Six major banks have joined forces to establish principles for trusted agentic commerce, warning that the rapid adoption of AI shopping agents could outpace existing safeguards around fraud, scams, privacy and payment liability. Global Banks set ground rules for AI Commerce Bank of America, NatWest, ING, Capital One, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and ASB Bank

PayPal has partnered with Meta to enable users of the technology group’s new Muse personal AI agent to shop and check out across PayPal’s merchant network, adding another major payments provider to the emerging agentic commerce ecosystem. PayPal Joins Meta’s Muse to transform shopping The agreement means Muse users will be able to complete purchases

Russia’s attempts to circumvent Western financial sanctions have developed into a sophisticated parallel payments architecture combining traditional banking, front companies, commodity revenues, promissory notes and stablecoins. Inside A7: How Russia Built Payment Alternatives A Financial Times investigation based on leaked internal documents from A7, the Kremlin-backed payments group founded by Moldovan businessman Ilan Shor, shows

Banks could lose as much as $230bn in payments revenue as stablecoins, tokenised deposits and central bank digital currencies move from experimentation into commercial use, according to Capgemini’s latest World Payments Report. Banks Face $230bn Payments Revenue Threat  The consultancy estimates these forms of “accelerated intelligent money” could account for around 4% of global payments

Mastercard and Danske Bank have completed Denmark’s first payment carried out entirely by an artificial intelligence agent on behalf of a consumer, providing another indication that agentic commerce is moving from concept towards live transactions. Mastercard and Danske Bank complete AI payment The transaction involved a customer instructing an AI agent to book a coffee-tasting

The European Central Bank has taken a significant step towards integrating distributed ledger technology with Europe’s core financial infrastructure, launching Pontes to allow wholesale tokenised asset transactions to settle in central bank money. ECB brings Central Bank money to tokenised market Pontes is designed as a bridge between distributed ledger networks and the Eurosystem’s TARGET

Most of the payments industry’s attention over the past decade has gone to the front end of the transaction. Card-present acceptance, tokenisation, wallet provisioning, real-time account-to-account transfers. The disbursement side, where large sums move once rather than small sums move constantly, has attracted far less scrutiny. That imbalance is starting to look like a problem.