Foundation model developer StepFun and Alipay have announced a system-level partnership aimed at bringing AI agents beyond conversational assistance and into everyday consumer services. The collaboration was unveiled on July 17 during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) 2026 in Shanghai.
The European Central Bank (ECB) has renewed its warning that widespread stablecoin adoption could weaken Europe’s banking system by diverting deposits away from commercial banks, strengthening the central bank’s case for introducing a digital euro as a secure, publicly backed alternative for digital payments.
Global markets entered the week caught between geopolitical uncertainty and the start of one of the busiest periods of the corporate earnings season, creating a challenging backdrop for payments and fintech companies preparing to report quarterly results.
AI agent payments infrastructure is rapidly becoming one of fintech’s fastest-growing segments, with startups and global payment networks racing to build financial rails for autonomous AI. Natural’s latest funding round suggests investors believe AI agents will soon become independent economic participants, propelling beyond simple productivity tools.
The Philippines has been seeing a remarkable digital shift for the last decade, and one of the major forces behind this change is the fast adoption of e wallets. At first, it was just a simple, easy way to pay bills or send money, but then it slowly turned into this bigger setup where millions […]
Every online store handles something a blog never does. A stranger types a card number into a form and trusts that it reaches the bank and nowhere else. That single transaction pulls the store into a security obligation most owners underestimate, and a large part of that obligation lives on the server the store rents. […]
Sunrate and Mastercard have released a joint white paper, Beyond Automation: Defining Agentic Global Payments, at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai.
The European Commission has taken one of its most significant steps yet to loosen Google’s control over the Android ecosystem, adopting binding requirements under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) that will require the company to open key Android capabilities to competing artificial intelligence assistants and share portions of its search data with eligible rivals.
Escalating geopolitical tensions in the Middle East are doing more than shaking global financial markets. They are also making cross-border payments more expensive. Here’s how. Rising oil prices and geopolitical tensions are increasing cross-border payments costs by driving foreign exchange volatility and raising hedging expenses for payment service providers. Combined with diverging Federal Reserve and […]
Visa has unveiled a new institutional stablecoin platform, marking another step in the payment giant’s expansion beyond traditional card processing towards blockchain-based financial infrastructure. The new tool is not a consumer payment product. The initiative is designed to support institutional participants managing stablecoin operations at scale instead.
The World Bank’s Global Findex 2025 indicates that 79% of adults own a financial account, with the use of digital financial services continuing to rise. In this day and age, digital payments are mainstream, and a wealth of digital financial platforms is reshaping how users manage their savings, spending, and investments. Speed, accuracy, and analytics […]
Money20/20 Europe is the highest-scoring payments event for 2026 in PaySpace Magazine’s benchmark, followed by MPE – Merchant Payments Ecosystem and Money20/20 USA.
Payment security has spent two decades treating automated traffic as a threat to be filtered out. Agentic commerce is reversing that logic. Visa has enrolled local banks in its Agentic Ready programme, Mastercard has launched Agent Pay, and OpenAI has integrated Instant Checkout with Stripe. In March 2026, Mastercard and Google open-sourced a protocol called […]
Payment providers are widening how and where money moves, from BNPL at the checkout of long-distance travel, to a mobile wallet issuing its own cards, and a wallet infrastructure provider deepening multi-currency support for global platforms.
This year, PaySpace Magazine Global team had a chance to visit Point Zero Forum, which ran alongside Swiss Fintech Week 2026, held in Zurich from June 19 to June 25. The two parallel events covered AI adoption in banking, agentic commerce, and the infrastructure for programmable money. As those topics are among the most-discussed within […]
Cedar Money and Noah have announced a strategic partnership aimed at improving cross-border payment infrastructure for businesses trading between Africa and international markets. The collaboration combines Cedar’s regulated compliance framework with Noah’s stablecoin-powered payment technology to help importers and exporters settle international invoices more efficiently while meeting global regulatory requirements.
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