Cards, Pay by Bank and the rise of multi-rail banks

ACI Worldwide and partners will host an online webinar on 17 September 2026 at 15:00 BST / 16:00 CEST / 10:00 EDT to examine how cards, tokenisation and Pay by Bank are reshaping consumer payments and multi-rail bank architecture.

The panel includes Dean Wallace, director of consumer payments modernization at ACI Worldwide; Ramon Villarreal, global payments industry lead for Red Hat’s financial services group; and moderator Jane Cooper. About 240 people had registered for the event listing.

Speakers will present data showing global card transactions reached 776 billion in 2024 and are projected to reach about 1.1 trillion by 2029. Account-to-account (A2A) volumes are forecast to rise from roughly 60 billion in 2024 to more than 185 billion by 2029.

The webinar agenda covers how cards are evolving into tokenised, programmable credentials used inside digital wallets, embedded checkout flows and agent-initiated commerce, and how bank-to-bank payments are scaling in Europe and other markets.

Discussion will include how tokenisation and digital wallets change the way payment credentials are stored and used, and how Pay by Bank is expanding beyond niche checkout options into a wider role in payment mixes.

Panelists will examine technical and operational effects on payment acceptance economics, including changes to merchant acceptance costs and settlement flows when credentials or rails change.

The session will address agent-initiated commerce models such as Visa TAP, Mastercard Agent Pay and Google AP2, with a focus on consumer protection, fraud risk and dispute handling. Regulators and merchants have adjusted rules on reimbursement and liability; speakers will consider the impact on issuer and acquirer profit and loss and on dispute resolution processes.

Organisers will outline the architecture needed to run multiple rails together: a single operating model that supports real-time payments, card networks and embedded services, with capabilities for tokenisation, cross-rail orchestration, fraud detection and resiliency.

Background material for the event notes that earlier forecasts predicting the end of the card have not materialised. Payments infrastructure is becoming multi-rail, with cards, A2A and agent-based flows coexisting and intersecting within wallets and embedded commerce.

The webinar is online; further event details and registration are available through the organiser’s event page.