Cards, Pay by Bank and the Rise of Multi-Rail Banking

Finextra and ACI Worldwide will host an online webinar on 17 September 2026 to examine why payment cards remain widely used even as Pay by Bank adoption grows, and to discuss how banks can operate multiple payment rails on a single platform. The session is scheduled for 15:00 BST / 16:00 CEST / 10:00 EDT and had 297 registrants at the time of publication. Panelists include Dean Wallace, director of consumer payments modernization at ACI Worldwide; Ramon Villarreal, global payments industry lead at Red Hat; and Norah Coelho, managing director of merchant services, eCommerce payments products & solutions at J.P. Morgan Payments. Jane Cooper will moderate. The webinar will set out recent transaction data and forecasts. Global card transactions reached about 776 billion in 2024 and are projected to reach roughly 1.1 trillion by 2029. Account-to-account transaction volumes, which include Pay by Bank flows, were around 60 billion in 2024 and are forecast to exceed 185 billion by 2029. Speakers will address how cards are evolving as tokenised, programmable credentials used in digital wallets, embedded checkout and agent-initiated payments. The programme will also cover technical and operational issues banks face when supporting cards, A2A rails and agent-initiated options on one infrastructure. Topics listed for discussion include transaction routing, risk management, tokenisation, digital wallets, and the impact of agent-initiated commerce on fraud controls and disputes. Examples of agent-initiated models cited on the agenda include Visa TAP, Mastercard Agent Pay and Google’s AP2. The webinar will examine how regulatory rules, reimbursement arrangements and merchant economics affect issuer and acquirer settlement timing, revenue allocation and loss exposure. Registration for the online session remains open to industry participants.