Cards and Pay by Bank reshape multi-rail banking

Finextra and ACI Worldwide will host an online webinar on Sept. 17, 2026 at 15:00 BST / 16:00 CEST / 10:00 EDT to examine how card payments and Pay by Bank are affecting multi-rail banking. The event will be held virtually and will bring together payments industry figures to discuss operational and technical responses from banks, issuers and acquirers.

Global card transaction volumes reached 776 billion in 2024 and are forecast to reach about 1.1 trillion by 2029. Account-to-account (A2A) transactions are projected to grow from roughly 60 billion in 2024 to more than 185 billion by 2029. The webinar will address how those volume trends interact with changes in payment credentials and checkout experiences.

Speakers include Dean Wallace, director of consumer payments modernization at ACI Worldwide, and Ramon Villarreal, global payments industry lead for Red Hat. Finextra contributor Jane Cooper will moderate the session. Organisers plan to focus on where each rail delivers economic value and how firms operate multiple rails in parallel.

Panel topics will include why card transactions continue to grow even as real-time bank-to-bank options expand; how tokenisation and digital wallets change consumer payment credentials; and how Pay by Bank is moving from a niche checkout option to broader use in Europe and other markets. The discussion will also cover agent-initiated commerce models, including Visa TAP, Mastercard Agent Pay and Google AP2, and the implications for infrastructure, fraud control and disputes.

The webinar will consider technical and operational requirements for supporting card rails, account-to-account rails and agentic commerce. That includes integrated platforms and orchestration across front-end credentials, back-end settlement flows, and fraud and dispute systems, along with architectural approaches that allow tokenised credentials to live in digital wallets and embedded checkouts while supporting direct bank debits and instant A2A settlement where appropriate.

The session will also examine how regulation, reimbursement rules and merchant economics affect issuer and acquirer profit and loss statements and what operating models can combine multiple rails with transaction intelligence and resilience.