Beyond the hype: what payments leaders are really building

From account-to-account interoperability and stablecoin hype to cross-border infrastructure and B2B card modernisation, executives from PPRO, Mastercard, Thunes, ISX Payments, Lorum, Pismo, Pliant, Brite Payments, and Wallester share where payments are actually heading.

In early Summer, Money20/20 Europe 2026 brought together thousands of payments professionals in Amsterdam, and The Paypers took the opportunity to sit down with executives across the payments stack, from local payment method specialists and Open Banking pioneers to card infrastructure providers and global treasury services players. What emerged was a nuanced picture: an industry navigating the tension between promising new rails and the operational realities of building at scale.

Below, we present their perspectives, organised around the themes that dominated the conversations: account-to-account (A2A) payments, cross-border complexity, stablecoins, AI and modernisation, and B2B infrastructure.

A2A payments: from domestic champions to cross-border ambition

Few topics generated more conversation on the Money20/20 floor than A2A payments. The consensus is cautiously optimistic as adoption is accelerating, particularly in Europe, but real questions remain about cross-border extension and whether domestic champions can truly travel.

Attila Doğan, Chief Product Officer at PPRO, framed the discussion around the increasing sophistication of local payment infrastructure and the industry's push towards cross-border interoperability:

Europe is a very fragmented market for local payment methods. You see a lot of drive and ambition at the moment to build some layer of interoperability. We used to call it LPM roaming; the same way that your phone just connects to a different network, seamlessly,  why shouldn't local payment methods work the same way in other markets?

— Attila Doğan, PPRO

Doğan pointed to Brazil's Pix as a benchmark for what is possible, noting its extraordinary adoption rates and its extension to subscription payments from mid-2025. He also flagged Colombia's up-and-coming Bre-B scheme, developed in direct consultation with the Brazilian central bank, as evidence that successful A2A models are now being exported.

Lena Hackelöer, the Founder and CEO of Brite Payments, offered a ground-level view on European momentum, linking the accelerating narrative around European payment sovereignty to practical growth in A2A adoption:

— Lena Hackelöer, Brite Payments

She identified Germany, the Nordics, the Baltics, France, and the UK as markets experiencing meaningful convergence, and described the merchant-consumer flywheel beginning to turn: more merchants are offering A2A, driving consumer familiarity, which in turn encourages further merchant adoption.

Yet a harder question (whether local A2A champions can go cross-border) drew a more sceptical response. None of Europe's national schemes (iDEAL, Swish, MobilePay, Bizum) have meaningfully expanded beyond their home markets, she noted, because they are built on country-specific infrastructure and identification systems. Aggregation efforts exist, but remain more a joining of local champions under one roof than true cross-border payment flows.

John Karantzis, CEO of ISX Payments, which operates the PaidBy network, was direct about the gap between domestic A2A success and its cross-border potential today:

— John Karantzis, ISX Payments (PaidBy)

Karantzis was explicit that enterprise-grade features such as refund management, dispute management, next-day settlement, and reliability are what will ultimately determine whether A2A graduates from an interesting curiosity to a mainstream commercial rail. The focus must shift from cost to product quality.

If domestic A2A is maturing, cross-border A2A remains a frontier. Mastercard's partnership with PaidBy (ISX Payments) was among the more concrete announcements at Money20/20 Europe, and Ian White, SVP, Open Banking Europe at Mastercard explained the rationale:

— Ian White, Mastercard

White emphasised that this fits squarely within Mastercard's broader multi-rail strategy, enabling cards and non-card rails alike, and that the target market is enterprise merchants managing multi-market complexity. He was unequivocal that Mastercard does not view A2A as a displacement threat to card rails, but as a complementary option for specific use cases.

For ISX Payments, the Mastercard partnership enables settlement in around 100 countries on a next-business-day basis, while integrating Mastercard Send, Mastercard Move, and Mastercard's FX and network capabilities. Karantzis described it as 'a good fusion of networks, product, trust, capability, and operations.'

The PPRO perspective on cross-border complexity extended to Latin America and Asia-Pacific. Doğan described the challenge in LATAM as less about local payment method fragmentation (as in Europe) and more about card fragmentation across borders, driving the merchant-of-record (MoR) model. He also noted rising flows from APAC, particularly China and Hong Kong, into Latin America, now extending beyond digital merchants into physical retail.

Cross-border interoperability keeps coming up as a talking point at events like this, but it rarely gets broken down into its actual moving parts. Thunes' Chief Marketing Officer, Mathieu Limousi, and Chief Product Officer, Elie Bertha, see it less as one problem and more as several stacked on top of each other:

— Mathieu Limousi, Thunes

Limousi didn't sound convinced that this list gets any shorter as new technology enters the picture. Stack a stablecoin or a tokenised deposit on top of a real-time payment scheme, he said, and you're now solving for interoperability between currency types as well as between ecosystems, not swapping one problem for an easier one.

Bertha, for his part, doesn't see stablecoins and traditional rails as competitors so much as two systems that eventually have to learn to work together:

— Elie Bertha, Thunes

On regulation, Bertha pushed back on the idea that full alignment between central banks is even the right goal. ‘I don't think alignment is necessarily the right term,’ he said; every central bank is protecting its own market, so expecting them to converge fully isn't realistic. What would actually move things forward, in his view, is simpler: clarity on what's possible market by market, rather than waiting for a global standard that may never show up.

Stablecoins were everywhere at Money20/20 Europe; in booth signage, panel discussions, and sideline conversations. But several of the executives we spoke to offered a more measured assessment than the broader market narrative.

George Davis is CEO of Lorum, a treasury services business serving mid-market banks and payment companies. He has seen this question from the other side: he co-founded BVNK, the stablecoin infrastructure firm Mastercard has agreed to acquire. His view was pointed:

Crypto and stablecoins don't really solve the correspondent banking problem. In markets that are genuinely dollar illiquid, somewhere like Nigeria, Egypt, or Argentina, where people have lost faith in the local currency and can't easily buy dollars with it, a stablecoin is a workaround that's attractive right now, and I understand the appeal there. But G20 currencies don't need stablecoins. It's the less efficient path. If you're moving euros to Singapore dollars, you go euro into USDC, sell the USDC for dollars, wait for the transfer, then buy SGD. You've pulled out a high-quality correspondent bank and dropped in a local crypto exchange, and you've paid more to do it. And you still haven't touched the part that was actually slow, which is settlement in the first and last mile. That problem doesn't care whether the money arrived by stablecoin or by SWIFT.'

— George Davis, Lorum

Lorum’s argument is that the real gap is the disappearance of a good banking layer for mid market financial institutions. The service that used to come from, say, Citi's treasury and trade network, direct clearing, FX, fixed income, money market funds, has been pulled back to serve only the largest institutions. Everyone below that line is left with mid-tier banks that are lending businesses at their core, built to gather deposits and write loans, not to clear at high velocity. The institutions now doing the clearing are the ones least designed for it. In Lorum's view that isn't a rails problem, it's a participant problem.

Malte Rau, the Pliant CEO, echoed the cost scepticism from a B2B card infrastructure perspective:

— Malte Rau, Pliant

Leonardo J. Collado, General Manager at Pismo, A Visa Solution, noted that stablecoins will feature in upcoming product announcements from the Visa-owned platform, suggesting institutional adoption is progressing even as the economics for many use cases remain unresolved.

The most forward-looking framing came from Lorum's George Davis, who suggested that where stablecoins will ultimately live is as an interface layer for tokenised assets, deposit tokens from major banks like JPMorgan or Citi, or money market funds. But he cautioned that arrival is still some way off, and that much of the current volume is driven by emerging market flows and, in some cases, high-risk money movement.

Thunes' Elie Bertha pointed to two places where stablecoins are already earning their keep rather than waiting on the next hype cycle. The first is retail savings in markets where the local currency isn't trusted:

— Elie Bertha, Thunes

The second use case had less to do with consumers and more to do with treasury teams trying to move money on their own schedule instead of the bank's:

— Elie Bertha, Thunes

‘It's a very similar story to mobile wallets and RTP schemes,’ Bertha said, tying it back to the interoperability discussion. In his view, stablecoins, tokenised deposits, and central bank digital currencies aren't rival bets on the future. Rather, they're new rails that need to be integrated into an existing offering wherever they genuinely help, not rolled out as a wholesale replacement for what's already working.

AI, core banking, and the platform play

The Pismo General Manager provided one of the clearest articulations of where generative AI creates concrete value in financial services, not as a headline feature, but as an enabler of contextual, personalised experiences built on unified data.

— Leonardo J. Collado, Pismo (A Visa Company)

The broader Pismo story post-Visa acquisition is one of growth trajectory and enterprise penetration. The platform has moved from a handful of clients in one or two regions to major institutions across all global regions, one of the top 4 banks in the US. Collado described the Visa wrapper as adding security, reliability, and scalability to what was already a cloud-native, API-first, event-driven platform.

On real-time payments specifically, the Pismo perspective was pragmatic:

— General Manager, Pismo (a Visa company)

Two interviewees, Pliant and Wallester, offered distinct perspectives on the infrastructure layer of corporate card issuance, both reflecting a similar moment: traditional banks are recognising they need to modernise, and specialist providers are positioning to serve them.

Pliant's Rau described founding the company six years ago to fill an infrastructure gap in a market dominated by consumer-focused processing:

— Malte Rau, Pliant

Pliant's recent US expansion is instructive. The CEO noted that European companies entering the US often make the mistake of over-resourcing too early. For Pliant, the US card technology market, despite being the world's largest, turned out to be surprisingly accessible precisely because legacy card infrastructure is older than in Europe.

Julian Brand, Wallester UK CEO described a similar thesis through the lens of the UK EMI licence recently obtained after a ten-month process with the FCA. The licence enables Wallester to offer its white-label card issuing solution and Wallace Business expense management platform to UK corporates, initially targeting underserved verticals like logistics rather than going head-to-head with established travel-sector players. Brand noted that Brex's acquisition by Capital One in the US signals an important market dynamic:

— Julian Brand, Wallester

Brite Payments' Lena Hackelöer offered the most detailed regulatory commentary, welcoming the Instant Payments Directive as a significant structural positive for A2A:

— Lena Hackelöer, Brite Payments

On PSD3, the view was broadly positive, addressing gaps in PSD2, putting requirements on banks around service levels, and improving bank API stability, which she described as still a pain point years into Open Banking. Her key concern was regulatory harmonisation: different licensing regimes across European jurisdictions create an uneven playing field, with A2A businesses operating under Swedish, German, Spanish, or Lithuanian licences competing for the same customers under materially different compliance burdens.

What is striking across all conversations is the combination of genuine optimism and operational seriousness. There is broad agreement that new payment rails (A2A, real-time, potentially tokenised assets) represent durable infrastructure shifts, not passing trends. But there is also a consistent thread of caution about hype cycles, particularly around stablecoins, AI, and the pace of cross-border A2A adoption.

The executives who stood out were those translating structural opportunities into concrete product decisions: enterprise-grade refunds and dispute management on A2A rails; AI as a data orchestration layer rather than a feature; treasury services as a replacement for the mid-market banking gap; card infrastructure as a platform rather than a processor.

As PPRO's Attila Doğan put it, connecting a bank account or a card to reach customers wherever their preference lies, whether that is a local payment method, an A2A rail, or eventually a stablecoin-backed wallet, is the actual work. The payments industry seems to be doing that work.