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

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 about 60 billion in 2024 to more than 185 billion by 2029. Tokenisation and digital wallets are changing how card credentials are stored and used in merchant checkouts and device-initiated flows.

Card use remains larger by raw volume and acceptance footprint, while Pay by Bank is expanding from niche checkouts into a structural part of payments, notably in Europe. Forecasts to 2029 show parallel growth in both card and A2A transaction counts.

Tokenisation converts card details into digital credentials that can be stored in wallets and invoked by embedded checkout experiences or third-party agents. Agent-initiated commerce models such as Visa TAP, Mastercard Agent Pay and Google AP2 allow a third party to trigger a payment on a consumer’s behalf, creating different fraud patterns and altering dispute and reimbursement pathways.

Banks, issuers and acquirers face technical and commercial challenges from a multi-rail environment. Firms must route transactions across multiple rails, manage token lifecycles, and apply routing and risk decisioning. Delivering these functions requires resilient operating models that bridge legacy processing stacks with API-first rails while meeting uptime, latency and security requirements.

Commercial rules also affect where revenue and costs fall. Reimbursement rules, interchange, merchant fees and regulatory requirements influence issuer and acquirer profit and loss as routing shifts. Lower-cost A2A rails can reduce acceptance fees for merchants, which may change where value accrues in the payments chain.

Operational and legal questions are active areas of industry work. When an agent triggers a tokenised card payment or a bank-initiated transfer, firms are assessing how fraud liability, consumer protections and chargeback rights apply under existing rules and where rule changes are needed.

A webinar organised with ACI Worldwide will bring payments practitioners together to discuss why cards continue to grow, how tokenised credentials are used across channels, and what architectural responses banks and processors need for a multi-rail environment. Speakers include Dean Wallace, director of Consumer Payments Modernization at ACI Worldwide, with Jane Cooper as moderator.

Background: the forecasts cited reflect industry modelling of payment volumes through 2029. Tokenisation, digital wallets and agent-initiated mechanisms are already in commercial use and are being integrated into merchant checkouts, mobile wallets and bank APIs, prompting changes to operating models and risk controls.