Cards and Pay-by-Bank Rise in Multi-Rail Payments

Global card transactions reached 776 billion in 2024 and are projected to reach 1.1 trillion by 2029. Account-to-account (A2A) transaction volumes are forecast to rise from 60 billion in 2024 to more than 185 billion by 2029. Those figures were discussed at a webinar hosted in association with ACI Worldwide, with Dean Wallace and moderator Jane Cooper on the panel.

Panelists described cards evolving into tokenised, programmable credentials that sit in digital wallets and enable embedded checkout experiences. They noted the growth of agent-initiated payment models, citing examples such as Visa TAP, Mastercard Agent Pay and Google AP2, and said those models raise questions about how infrastructures handle authorisation, fraud detection and consumer dispute rights.

Pay by Bank is expanding beyond a niche option in parts of Europe. Panelists linked that expansion to open banking interfaces, real-time account-to-account rails and changes in reimbursement or interchange arrangements. They said those regulatory and market factors can shift costs and risks across issuer and acquirer profit-and-loss statements.

Panel discussion addressed technical and operational requirements to support multiple rails. Participants outlined the need for platforms that can tokenise, route and reconcile transactions across different networks while applying uniform fraud controls and dispute workflows. They identified orchestration layers that make routing decisions in real time and analytics that detect fraud patterns across rails rather than within single channels.

Speakers pointed to consequences when parts of the payments stack fail: lower authorisation rates, higher acceptance costs and weaker customer experience. They said consistent reconciliation and dispute handling are needed to maintain reliability as merchants offer more checkout options.

Panelists also referenced a decade of predictions that cards would disappear. Current forecasts and the panel discussion describe cards remaining the dominant credential by transaction count while A2A volumes grow from a smaller base. The discussion noted that banks, issuers and acquirers face technical, regulatory and economic challenges in operating across multiple payment rails.