Cards and Pay by Bank Drive Multi-Rail Consumer Payments

Global card payments reached 776 billion transactions in 2024 and are on track to reach 1.1 trillion by 2029, while account-to-account (A2A) Pay by Bank volumes are projected to climb from 60 billion to more than 185 billion over the same period. The figures reflect concurrent growth in both payment rails rather than the replacement of one by the other.

Card credentials are increasingly tokenised and stored in digital wallets. Tokenisation replaces visible primary account numbers with digital tokens that can be reused across online, mobile and in-app checkouts. That change affects how transactions are routed, who carries liability and how interchange and acceptance economics are calculated when a payment uses a token and card network versus a direct A2A transfer.

Pay by Bank started as a niche checkout option in parts of Europe and is expanding into broader markets. A2A payments bypass card networks and settle directly between bank accounts. Merchants can face lower direct acceptance costs for A2A payments, but those transactions require different fraud controls and settlement workflows compared with cards.

Agent-initiated commerce is emerging as a third model. Industry offerings such as Visa TAP, Mastercard Agent Pay and Google AP2 let platforms or agents initiate payments on behalf of consumers under pre-agreed permissions. Agent-initiated flows raise questions about how dispute handling, consumer protections and fraud controls apply when an agent starts the payment instead of the consumer.

Banks, card issuers and acquirers are adapting operations to manage multiple rails. Firms need systems for token management, routing decisions, reconciliation and settlement across card and A2A rails. Real-time decisioning and integrated fraud detection are required to maintain uptime and meet regulatory duties across jurisdictions.

Reimbursement rules and merchant economics are changing issuer and acquirer profit-and-loss profiles. Chargeback and refund allocation affects incentives for merchants and payment providers. Interchange and network fees remain a revenue source for issuers on card transactions. A2A payments can lower cost-to-accept for merchants but shift settlement timing, require different fraud-mitigation measures and alter fee flows.

Tokenisation reduces exposure of plain card numbers and can lower certain types of fraud. At the same time, A2A and agent-initiated models introduce new attack vectors and dispute scenarios where liability allocation is less clear than traditional card chargebacks.

Dean Wallace, director of consumer payments modernization at ACI Worldwide, described cards as becoming “programmable, tokenised credentials in wallets” while A2A grows beyond regional use cases. Jane Cooper, who moderated a recent industry webinar on multi-rail payments, said the discussion should move from a binary ‘cards versus Pay by Bank’ framing to managing multiple payment rails together.

The concurrent expansion of card and A2A volumes through 2029 indicates banks, issuers and acquirers will operate in a multi-rail environment that requires new technical and operational capabilities to route transactions, manage risk and settle payments across different systems.