Photo by Getty Images on Unsplash
Hello TWIF UK & Europe friends,
This week sees several stories on the topic of agentic payments. For instance, Santander and Mastercard completing Europe’s first live end-to-end agentic AI transaction. If we consider that in Europe agentic payments have yet to fully take off, in some markets such as China, the story is quite different. Over the Lunar New Year period, consumers placed over 120 million orders on Alibaba Cloud’s flagship Qwen AI app.
Yet, what we think of agentic payments is fast evolving. Initially, the idea was that consumers would place orders in ChatGPT or other LLM apps. This never appealed to me. I mean, is this user interface really easier or quicker than using, for instance, Amazon website or app? And tech news website The Information reported that ChatGPT is killing off Instant Checkout — the product that enables users to purchase without leaving the app.
Many of the agentic transactions during China’s Lunar New Year period were conversational AI. Think chatting with your Starbucks app and saying “buy the same as usual” rather than going through pages of menus when ordering ahead. The example of Luckin coffee’s collaboration with Alipay announced last year set the tone for this in China, and a recent announcement of Alipay’s trust framework allows conversational commerce across a wider set of platforms.
Mastercard’s recent launch of Verifiable Intent follows in the same path. Agentic payments requires more than just authentication, but the intent of the instruction or parameters the agents operate within will be key to capture also. European regulations such as the requirement for Strong Customer Authentication will need careful consideration in the months and years to come — will SCA need to sit at the intent level as well as, or instead of the transaction level?
Exploring this topic further, I recently spoke with Gertjan Dewaele, VP Product & Technology at Worldline, who pointed out that existing agentic commerce protocols do not necessarily cater for the things that merchants in Europe find essential. The biggest one is the liability shift with SCA. The challenge isn't only technical adaptation, but creating entirely new rules for emerging concepts such as “agent initiated transactions” alongside today’s customer-initiated or merchant-initiated payments.
Merchants that work with global PSP’s will be able to see developments in agentic commerce across the globe, and fast moving tech first innovators will seek to bring best practices for AI led payments to London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid and beyond.
One thing is clear, as technology is moving so quickly in this area, regulators will need to move faster than usual in order to make sure that the European model of payments — combining safety, security, and convenience — doesn’t fall behind leading AI powers such as the US and China.
Please find another week of fintech news, financings and exits below!
Matt Jones
👍 👎 Have any feedback or news to share?
Funding/Financing 💸
Highlights below of deals since the last post in the fintech space across the UK & Europe. Deal data powered by Dealroom.
Amsterdam-based Silverflow raised a $40m Series B to further expand and develop their cloud native payment processing solution — the round was led by Picus Capital, with participation from Rabo Investments and existing investors Inkef, Global PayTech Ventures, Crane Venture Partners, and Coatue
Wealthyhood, which seeks to help younger investors build wealth has closed a $6m funding round — led by the Bank of Cyprus, and supported by Genesis Ventures
Payr raised a $2.1m seed round to bring credit card payments to the UK rental market — the round was led by Ingenii Capital, with participation from Haatch, Velocity Capital, the British Business Bank and a group of strategic angel investors
Vivox AI, which offers Atomic AI Agents for regulated financial products, with a focus on AML/KYC/KYB and financial crime, has raised a £1.3m funding round to scale its platform — the round saw participation from Axel Weber, former president of Germany's central bank and chairman of UBS Group
Traditional Banking 🏛️
🇬🇧 Lloyds strives to be ‘UK’s biggest fintech’ by selling more customer data
🇬🇧 Barclays is in talks with various vendors regarding a potential blockchain solution for payments and tokenised deposits
Challenger Banking 🚀
🇬🇧 Revolut launched a premium credit card for business account holders
🇬🇧 🌍 Revolut filed for a US bank charter
Digital Assets ₿
🌍 Noah and Nafolo partnered to launch stablecoin virtual accounts in Sub-Saharan Africa
🌍 a16z is raising a new crypto fund — targeting around $2 billion in committed capital
🌍 Bridge is expanding their partnership with Visa to launch stablecoin backed cards in more than 100 countries
🌍 Kraken became the first crypto firm to gain access to the Fed’s core payments system — important as this means less reliance on partner banks
Payments 💰
🇬🇧 Segpay launched Pay by Bank as payment option in the UK — powered by True Layer
🇪🇺 SME payments financing start up Flowpay has acquired Tapline to expand its position in European markets
🇪🇺 Santander and Mastercard completed Europe’s first live end-to-end agentic AI transaction
🇪🇺 Wero launched online merchant payments in Belgium — the second market to achieve this milestone (Germany was the first)
🌍 OpenAI is scaling back shopping plans for ChatGPT — killing off its instant checkout product
🌍 Klarna and Stripe are partnering to bring BNPL payments to AI agents
🌍 Apple is in talks with banks in India to launch Apple Pay later this year
🌍 Mastercard unveiled a trust layer for agentic commerce to create a record of what a user authorises for an AI agent
Regulatory Corner 🔎
🇪🇺 The Swedish central bank urged the public to horde a week’s worth of cash
Longer Reads 📜
Annual Letter 2025 - Stripe
Less radical, more profitable: here come Europe’s new fintech unicorns - Financial Times
Block & Tackle: Job Cuts & the AI Narrative - Om Malik
Stablecoins and monetary policy transmission - ECB Working Paper
