- Key insights: Australian regulators are pressuring Visa and Mastercard on payment fees.
- What's at stake: The card networks are facing regulatory pushback on card fees globally.
- Forward look: The slate of new fee rules in Australia will go into effect later this year and in early 2027.
Australia's central bank is preparing to enact new payment rules that would eliminate surcharges, cap interchange rates and increase transparency following a
The country's Payments Systems Board has decided to remove surcharges on prepaid, debit and credit cards for electronic funds transfers at point of sale and Visa and Mastercard card networks. The board also plans to lower the cap on interchange fees paid by Australian businesses and increase the transparency for those businesses on the fees they are paying.
"The surcharging framework, introduced more than two decades ago, is no longer achieving its intended purpose of steering consumers towards making more efficient payment choices," according to the Reserve Bank of Australia. "The increased prevalence of businesses surcharging all cards at the same rate, challenges with enforcing the current surcharging framework and consumers using less cash have reduced the effectiveness of the surcharging regime."
Changes to interchange caps and the removal of surcharges on domestic card transactions will go into effect on Oct. 1, 2026, and the interchange cap on foreign cards and changes to payment cost transparency will take effect on April 1, 2027, according to the central bank.
The move in Australia comes as regulators and court cases in several countries, including
Wells Fargo recruits community banks for cross-border rail
Wells Fargo and capital-markets technology firm Derivative Path are expanding an international-payments collaboration that began in February, by including a connection to Jack Henry's treasury platform. This enables commercial clients to execute cross-border payments without leaving their bank's site. Most of Jack Henry's clients are smaller banks, creating a potential distribution channel for Wells Fargo. Nashville-based FirstBank is the initial client using the enhanced cross-border rail, which is designed to address infrastructure, compliance and liquidity challenges that the partners contend has left small banks on the sidelines.
"Our clients can access and initiate foreign currency wires from the same digital platform they use every day," Ron Zimmerman, a senior vice president at FirstBank, said in a release.
Wells Fargo and Derivative Path have said they are not competing with the community and regional banks that use their partnership since the cross-border payment automation service is an expansion of existing relationships that do not intersect with the smaller banks' lines of business. Other large banks have also collaborated with digital-payment technology firms to scale their cross-border payment options for corporate clients. Morgan Stanley, for example, has
Ant lays out its AI strategy
With
Ant, which recently opened an office in Hong Kong to focus on digital finance, is affiliated with Alipay, a Chinese payment app that has built an international merchant and consumer network through a
Ant demoed its AI tools at the IDC CIO Summit ASEAN 2020 on March 30. The company unveiled what it calls the Ling-1T model, which supports code generation and models for specific cognitive tasks involved in financial-app development.
A second platform, Agentar, is aimed at businesses that are interested in building AI agents for technology development. Ant said local banks including Ningbo Bank and Shanghai Bank are using AI agents to build "AI brains" to help with IT work.
A third service covers "mobile payments as a service," a mobile-development application that uses Alipay's technology and AI as a base to build payments and other financial products that serve a "super app," or the consolidation of multiple financial services on a single site. There's also a risk-management service that covers know-your-customer and other vetting for fraud and compliance.
Ant's AI "stack" will initially focus on banks in Asia, though banks globally are considering how to deploy AI. —John Adams
Visa, BofA partner with FIFA for community development
Visa, Bank of America and nonprofit foundation Street Soccer USA are teaming up to create more public-access soccer facilities in the 11 cities hosting matches for the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
Visa Street Soccer Parks are custom designed parks that house two professional-grade Bank of America-sponsored fields, lighting, learning centers and other gathering spaces for programming developed by community partners.
"Communities are built on accessible opportunities for connection, healthy activity and growth," said David Tyrie, Bank of America's president of marketing, digital and specialized consumer client solutions, in a statement. "These are more than just places to play; they are spaces where people of all ages can find common ground through the game of soccer, develop essential life skills and forge lasting bonds that strengthen our community fabric."
The first park was built in San Francisco in June of last year, followed by parks in New York City, Kansas City and Denver. Parks in Atlanta and Nashville are currently under development, and new parks will be developed in the remaining host cities, including Boston, the Dallas/Fort Worth metro area, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia and the Seattle/Tacoma metro area.
Visa has long used major global sporting events to both
Revolut to push presence in India
Revolut is making a push to increase its presence in India for its global capabilities center housed in the country, which serves as a major operations and technology center in the region.
The fintech company reportedly wants to have about 40% of its global workforce based in the country,
About one-third of the company's processes are run in India.
Revolut is also in the process of building out its Indian business, with hopes to offer a full suite of banking services.
Revolut currently offers a prepaid wallet that works on the country's Unified Payments Interface, and hopes to have 20 million customers onboarded in the country by 2030. —Joey Pizzolato
Spade lands $40 million in fresh powder
Spade, a data and AI platform fintech that specializes in transactional data enrichment, has secured $40 million in Series B funding.
Venture and growth equity firm Oak HC/FT led the round, with participation from Y Combinator, National Bank of Canada's corporate venture arm NAventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Flourish, and Gradient.
Spade will use the funds to hire and expand its platform with new capabilities, the company said. Founded in 2021, Spade uses artificial intelligence to fill in metadata gaps in payment transactions, including geolocation and verified merchant categories that are not reliant on traditional Merchant Category Codes.
"This funding allows us to become the default data and intelligence layer for financial services, and we're thrilled to be backed by investors who deeply understand the value of transaction data," said Oban MacTavish, cofounder and CEO of Spade, in a statement. "As AI adoption accelerates, banks can only move toward fully automated, agentic workflows if those systems are built on detailed, verified and structured consumer behavior powered by enriched transaction data." —Joey Pizzolato
Standard Chartered's VC wing hunts for digital asset startups
SC Ventures, Standard Carter's investment division, has made an undisclosed investment in Keyrock, a Brussels-based investment group designed for digital-asset companies and other distributed-finance firms.
The blockchain firm and long-time digital payment company Ripple, an existing Keyrock banker, also participated in the new round, which values Keyrock at $1.1 billion, according to a release.
Keyrock acts as a technology bridge between traditional financial firms that are looking for opportunities in the digital-asset market.
Standard Chartered is betting on blockchain, digital assets and related innovation, as well as demand for technology companies that can support digital assets.
"Our investment in Keyrock reflects our conviction that sophisticated liquidity infrastructure is foundational to the evolution of digital asset markets. As tokenized assets scale, we believe full-service providers, like Keyrock, will play an important role for SC Ventures' digital asset ventures," Alex Manson, CEO of SC Ventures, said in a release. —John Adams
Elavon expands small-business lending in Canada
U.S. Bancorp's payment processor Elavon has upgraded its collaboration with London-based embedded-finance firm Liberis to offer revenue-based financing to small businesses in Canada.
The expansion follows an earlier rollout of a similar product from Liberis and Elavon in the U.S. to offer revenue-based lending, or loans that are paid down through a portion of payment flows. It's a model
"Every market we enter tells a similar story – a lack of quick and easy access to funding solutions is holding small businesses back," said Rob Fairfield, CEO of Liberis, in a release. "After launching in the U.S., extending our Elavon partnership to Canada was the obvious next step."
Elavon and Liberis say the funding can address challenges in managing inventory, tax payments, marketing, expansion and cash flow. Eligible businesses in health care, retail, services and restaurants will receive tailored offers through direct email and in-platform messaging.
"We're providing small business owners with an efficient, straightforward path to funding, and flexible solutions that complement their cash flow patterns - particularly valuable when unexpected opportunities or obstacles arise," said
