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For decades, the global card business treated the United States as its anchor: the market where consumers swipe the most, margins run the fattest, and regulators mostly leave pricing alone. That sense of stability cracked when President Donald Trump went on Truth Social and demanded a one‑year, 10 percent cap on U.S. credit card interest rates, saying the American public is being “ripped off” by companies charging 20 to 30 percent or more.​ In a single post, the U.S. governme

Retail technology has spent years accelerating. Checkout flows shortened. Catalogs expanded. Marketing and fulfillment tools multiplied. Automation quietly embedded itself across the stack, reducing manual work and increasing reach. Each improvement pushed commerce forward, enabling businesses to operate at greater volume and velocity. Over time, these changes enabled businesses to operate at greater volume and speed. As systems grow more complex, the next inflection point ce

Every year, come January, the subscription economy reveals itself.  Usually in the space between holiday credit card statements and New Year’s resolutions, consumers open their banking apps, scroll through recurring charges, and begin trimming. Streaming services, fitness apps, productivity tools, meal kits, memberships– anything that auto-renews without demanding attention is a prime candidate for removal. This annual ritual has become so common it now resembles a seasonal e

BNPL Becomes a Holiday Default The holiday season has long served as a stress test for consumer finances. Each year, it reveals how confident shoppers feel, how much elasticity remains in household budgets, and how willing people are to stretch spending in pursuit of tradition, convenience, or celebration. In 2025, that stress test is producing a clear signal: buy now, pay later has become a central mechanism through which consumers are navigating affordability at checkout. A

Big Tech has spent years exploring crypto cautiously, testing ideas without reshaping its core systems. Last week, YouTube made a meaningful move in that direction by quietly adding a new payout option inside one of the largest creator economies in the world. U.S.-based creators on the platform can now choose to receive earnings in PayPal’s U.S. dollar–backed stablecoin, PYUSD. YouTube has distributed more than $100 billion to creators over the past four years , placing it am

Visa’s Launch Signals a New Phase for Syria’s Financial Recovery Visa’s announcement last week that it will begin operations in Syria marks one of the most significant developments in the country’s financial landscape since the start of the civil war. After years of isolation from global payment networks, Syria has reached an agreement with Visa and the Central Bank that outlines a roadmap to build a fully modern digital payments ecosystem. Speaking at the Reuters NEXT confer

Something seismic is happening across the Shopify ecosystem. Stores that operated smoothly—no fraud spikes, no major chargeback issues, timely fulfillment—are suddenly finding their payment processing disabled. Merchants wake up to discover Shopify Payments shut down, funds locked for 120 days (or more), and no path forward. These aren’t outlier cases of fraud or bad intent. All evidence points to a restructuring in how card networks classify risk. At the center of this shift

For months in the Brief, we’ve been tracking Wero’s evolution from an EU-backed ambition into a real payments network with political weight, consumer reach, and institutional buy-in. Belgium’s coordinated expansion gave the project a coherent foundation. Revolut’s integration signaled fintech validation. Banks across three markets delivered millions of users directly into the wallet’s ecosystem. Now two developments arrive back-to-back — Airwallex becoming a Principal Member

A Letter That Revealed the Future Amazon and Perplexity collided last week in a moment that felt like the future of commerce arriving ahead of schedule. The tension began with a letter: Amazon sent a formal demand to Perplexity AI insisting that its Comet browser agent stop shopping on Amazon’s site without revealing that it was an automated system. Perplexity had built a feature that allows users to ask the agent to buy something—cat food, a charger, a new bottle of shampoo—

“It’s a whole new paradigm for shopping,” said Alex Chriss, CEO of PayPal, as the company unveiled a partnership with OpenAI that could reshape how consumers buy online. The deal will embed PayPal’s digital wallet directly inside ChatGPT, allowing users to purchase items they discover through conversations. A new “Buy with PayPal” button will appear in the app, giving shoppers a seamless, protected checkout experience. Behind the interface, PayPal will manage merchant verifi

The 2025 holiday season is shaping up to be a high-volume quarter, just like the forecasts promised. Mobile is expected to dominate. Buy Now, Pay Later is surging. And ecommerce, once again, is projected to outpace physical retail by a wide margin. But while headlines highlight growth and sales opportunity, they tend to leave out what matters most to merchants: staying live, getting paid, and avoiding sudden processor shutdowns during the biggest revenue window of the year. E

The Sale You Never Saw Picture this: a shopper is looking for a winter jacket. She doesn’t just want “something warm.” She wants a specific color—forest green—delivered within five days, under $180. So, she tells her AI assistant exactly that. In seconds, her assistant scans online stores across countries, checks product options, shipping timelines, and return policies. Then it does something new: it creates a digitally signed instruction—a “mandate”—that says, in effect, “If

A fundamental shift in digital commerce is underway. Through a new partnership between Shopify and OpenAI, merchants can now transact directly inside ChatGPT. Conversations that once guided discovery can now complete the full transaction flow—from search to checkout—within a single interaction. This is not a campaign or limited beta. It’s a structural addition to Shopify’s merchant infrastructure and OpenAI’s conversational interface. The integration is powered by real-time p

In a quiet but critical shift, the European Central Bank (ECB) has formally advanced the development of the digital euro — a central bank...

Currency shifts are one of the most persistent challenges in global commerce, yet they remain widely underestimated by businesses...

In today’s payment landscape, maintaining stable processing requires far more than just avoiding fraud. Processors are under pressure...

Mastercard has announced Agent Pay, a new framework designed to allow artificial intelligence systems to execute payments on behalf of...

In late August, German banks halted more than €10 billion in PayPal transactions after detecting a wave of suspicious direct debits...

Writer: Trevor Johnson September 2, 2025 On a Friday afternoon in Lagos, a small logistics firm pushes a $30,000 payment to a supplier in...

By Trevor Johnson “This overreach from banks is only possible because there’s still no clear UK regulatory framework in place governing...