Cards and Pay by Bank reshape multi-rail banking

Finextra and ACI Worldwide will host an online webinar on 17 September 2026 to examine how cards and Pay by Bank are reshaping multi-rail banking and payments infrastructure and what banks, issuers and acquirers must do to run multiple payment rails on a single platform.

The session will review why card payments continue to grow even as account-to-account (A2A) options expand. The panel will explore tokenisation, digital wallets and embedded checkout and how those changes affect payment credentials and acceptance economics.

Organisers point to data showing global card transactions reached 776 billion in 2024 and are forecast to rise to 1.1 trillion by 2029. They also cite forecasts that global A2A volumes could increase from about 60 billion in 2024 to more than 185 billion by 2029.

Speakers will address the technical and operational challenges of operating multiple rails at the same time. The webinar description highlights the need for a unified, resilient and intelligence-led operating model to support cards, Pay by Bank and agent-initiated commerce.

Panelists will discuss how programmable, tokenised card credentials are being used in digital wallets and embedded checkout, and how those credentials will interact with emerging agentic commerce models such as Visa TAP, Mastercard Agent Pay and Google AP2.

The event will cover implications for fraud management, dispute rights and the economics of acceptance. It will also examine the effects of regulation, reimbursement rules and merchant economics on issuer and acquirer profit and loss statements.

Finextra and ACI Worldwide state the industry should move past a binary ‘cards versus Pay by Bank’ debate and treat consumer payments as a multi-rail system to be managed on common operational foundations.

The webinar is scheduled for 15:00 BST / 16:00 CEST / 10:00 EDT on 17 September. Jane Cooper will moderate. Other speakers listed are Dean Wallace, director of consumer payments modernization at ACI Worldwide, and Ramon Villarreal, global payments industry lead for global financial services at Red Hat. Promotional material showed more than 200 registered attendees at the time of publication.

Background material included with the briefing frames cards not as a declining legacy rail but as evolving, programmable and tokenised credentials. At the same time, Pay by Bank options are expanding from niche checkout choices to a larger part of payments in Europe and other regions driven by faster A2A rails and growing merchant and consumer acceptance.

The webinar is presented as a technical and commercial discussion on how to integrate multiple rails, update operating architectures and adapt fraud and dispute strategies as payment methods change.