Cards and Pay by Bank Reshape Payment Rails

Global card transactions reached 776 billion in 2024 and are forecast to reach 1.1 trillion by 2029. Account-to-account (A2A) Pay by Bank volumes are projected to grow from 60 billion in 2024 to more than 185 billion by 2029. At the same time, card credentials are increasingly tokenised and used inside digital wallets and embedded checkouts.

Tokenisation places card credentials inside software containers that can be updated, restricted or routed differently than a physical card. Tokenised cards support contactless and in-app payments and are being used in agent-initiated commerce such as Visa TAP, Mastercard Agent Pay and Google AP2, where a third party can initiate a payment on behalf of a consumer.

Pay by Bank A2A payments move funds directly between bank accounts and bypass some card rails. Proponents point to lower interchange costs and different settlement mechanics. Some merchants and platforms view A2A as an alternative acceptance method for specific merchant categories.

The parallel growth of tokenised cards and A2A is affecting payments operations. Banks, issuers and acquirers are integrating card tokenisation, wallet orchestration, A2A rails and agentic flows. Industry participants argue that a unified, resilient and intelligence-led operating model is required to manage routing, reconciliation, fraud detection and customer support across multiple rails.

Security and consumer protection vary by rail. Tokenised cards can reduce fraud tied to exposed card numbers. Agent-initiated models raise new questions about authorization, dispute rights and liability. A2A payments rely on bank authentication methods that differ by market and can change how disputes are handled compared with card chargebacks.

Regulation, reimbursement rules and merchant economics also shape which rails are used. Those factors affect issuer and acquirer profit and loss statements and influence merchant incentives to accept one payment method over another.

A webinar hosted with ACI Worldwide will address these trends. Speakers include Dean Wallace, director of consumer payments modernization at ACI Worldwide, with Jane Cooper as moderator. Webinar materials state: “In 2026, the ‘cards versus Pay by Bank’ binary is outdated – the conversation needs to turn to consumer payments as a whole.”