The Silent Card Killer
The phrase “card killer” has been attached to many payment innovations that ultimately did not kill cards. Cryptocurrency, QR wallets, biometric payments, super-app wallets — each was positioned at various points as the technology that would end the card network era. Cards survived all of them because the card network effects — universal merchant acceptance, consumer rewards programmes, chargeback protection, issuance infrastructure — were too entrenched to displace.
Account-to-account payments, or A2A, is a different kind of threat. It is not a new consumer product competing on features. It is an infrastructure shift — the direct movement of funds between bank accounts, enabled by open banking APIs, real-time payment rails, and, increasingly, regulatory mandates. It does not need consumers to adopt a new habit (they already bank online). It does not require merchant terminal replacement (it runs on existing POS and e-commerce integration layers). And its cost structure is categorically different: while card interchange fees average 1.5–2.5% per transaction, A2A transaction costs are typically a fraction of a percent or a flat fee.
In markets where A2A rails exist at scale, the adoption pattern is consistent and rapid. Brazil’s Pix, launched in November 2020, reached 750 million monthly transactions within two years — growing from 12% to 24% of e-commerce transaction value in a single year. Thailand’s PromptPay accounts for 42% of e-commerce transaction value. In the Netherlands, Finland, and Poland, A2A is already the primary online payment method by transaction volume.
The global numbers now reflect what these market-level patterns were forecasting. A2A e-commerce payments, valued at $525 billion in 2022, are projected to approach $850 billion by 2026 — a 13% CAGR. Looking to the end of the decade, Juniper Research projects total A2A payment value at $5.7 trillion by 2029, up from $1.7 trillion in 2024. Nearly 70 real-time payment schemes globally are now active, providing the infrastructure layer that A2A requires.
Three Forces Driving the A2A Acceleration in 2026
1. Regulatory mandates are converting optionality into obligation
The most significant A2A catalyst in 2026 is regulatory. The EU’s PSD3/PSR framework, provisionally agreed in November 2025, mandates that banks provide open banking APIs with performance parity to their own consumer interfaces. The fallback model — where banks could offer inferior “scraping” alternatives — is eliminated. This creates a structural improvement in A2A technical reliability that directly addresses the primary merchant objection: “open banking APIs fail too often to trust for high-value transactions.”
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority is advancing Variable Recurring Payments (VRP) — a form of A2A payment where consumers pre-authorise recurring pulls from their accounts — as a mandated product for the UK’s nine largest banks. VRP is the technological underpinning for A2A in subscription commerce, utility billing, and insurance: markets where direct debit has dominated for decades and where the card network has historically had no structural role.
In the US, the Federal Reserve’s FedNow instant payment service has now been live for over two years, with over 1,000 participating financial institutions as of early 2026. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) Section 1033 open banking rules, finalised in October 2024, began taking effect for larger banks in April 2026. Taken together, the US regulatory posture has shifted from permissive experimentation to structured implementation — creating the rail infrastructure that A2A adoption requires.
2. Merchant economics make A2A compelling at the CFO level, not just the CTO level
The A2A merchant value proposition is unambiguous in its economics. Where a merchant paying card interchange fees on €10 million in monthly sales might incur €150,000–€250,000 in processing costs at 1.5–2.5%, the same volume processed via A2A at flat-fee or sub-0.5% pricing saves €100,000–€225,000 per month. At scale, this is a nine-figure annual cost line — the kind of number that gets onto CFO agendas, not just engineering roadmaps.
McKinsey analysis projected that A2A could handle approximately $200 billion in US consumer-to-business transactions by 2026, particularly for high-value and recurring payments where the merchant economics are most compelling. In the EU, the 17% e-commerce A2A share in 2024 is concentrated in categories where transaction values are high: utilities, insurance, travel, government services — precisely the categories where interchange cost is most visible on income statements.
The merchant sector that is furthest along in A2A adoption outside Europe is Brazilian e-commerce post-Pix: Pix’s e-commerce share growth from 12% to 24% in a single year (2021–2022) was not led by consumer campaigns — it was led by merchant-side incentives where checkout flows were redesigned to present Pix as the cost-saving default.
3. The fraud and dispute dynamic is improving, but not yet resolved
The primary consumer-level objection to A2A payments — compared to cards — has historically been the absence of chargeback protection. When a card transaction goes wrong, the consumer can dispute it with the card issuer and receive a refund while the dispute is investigated. A2A payments, as bank transfers, have traditionally offered no equivalent mechanism: a fraudulent or erroneous transfer was irrecoverable.
PSD3/PSR’s Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud reimbursement framework directly addresses this gap for the EU market. Mandatory reimbursement for APP fraud victims — combined with payee-name/IBAN verification to prevent misdirected payments — brings consumer protection for A2A closer to the card chargeback standard. The UK has gone further: the Payment Systems Regulator mandated mandatory APP fraud reimbursement from October 2023, with a £415,000 maximum per claim.
These regulatory protections, applied to the largest A2A markets in the world, remove what has been the structural floor under card network retention of high-value consumer transactions. As consumer awareness of A2A fraud protection improves in 2026–2027, the hesitation premium that has kept consumers on cards for high-value purchases will diminish.
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What This Means for Fintechs, Merchants, and Card Networks
1. The fintech opportunity is in the A2A orchestration layer, not the rail itself
The real-time payment rails are built by central banks and regulators. The commercial opportunity is in building the orchestration layer above the rails: smart routing that selects A2A or card based on transaction type and merchant economics; reconciliation and reporting for merchants managing multi-rail payment acceptance; fraud scoring for A2A transactions; and working capital products (lending, insurance) that sit on top of verified transaction history. The equivalent layer in the card world is occupied by Stripe, Adyen, and Checkout.com — all of which are now building A2A capabilities at speed. In emerging markets where A2A infrastructure is earlier-stage, the orchestration opportunity is structurally larger and less contested.
2. Merchants should treat A2A checkout as a strategic priority for 2026, not a 2027 backlog item
The competitive dynamics in e-commerce are shifting in favour of merchants that offer A2A checkout at a lower cost to themselves and a lower friction experience to consumers who already use mobile banking. The payment providers that are most aggressively promoting A2A are offering merchants implementation support, co-funded consumer incentives, and guaranteed uptime SLAs — terms that will be harder to negotiate once A2A market share has consolidated. The window to integrate A2A on the most favourable commercial terms is 2026.
3. Card networks are not dying — they are reconfiguring their value proposition toward credit
Cards will remain dominant in credit-enabled transactions — where the consumer explicitly wants to borrow money to make a purchase, receive rewards points, or access purchase protection for high-value goods. The A2A displacement pressure falls hardest on debit card volume and recurring payment volume, not credit card volume. Card networks have been repositioning toward credit, premium rewards, and B2B card products for several years — a strategic shift visible in Visa and Mastercard’s acquisition activity. The narrative of total card network obsolescence overstates the case. The accurate narrative is structural migration of specific transaction categories from card to A2A rails over a 5–7 year horizon.
The Bigger Picture: Infrastructure Pluralism
The global payment system is entering a period of structural pluralism that it has not experienced since before Visa and Mastercard achieved global scale in the 1980s. Real-time A2A rails (Pix, UPI, FedNow, SEPA Instant), card networks (Visa, Mastercard, UnionPay, RuPay), digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Alipay), and emerging stablecoin payment rails are all growing simultaneously — not replacing each other, but occupying different transaction categories, geographies, and consumer segments.
For payment strategists, the pluralism era requires a different analytical framework than the one that served during the card-dominance era. The question is no longer “which rail wins?” — it is “which transaction category migrates to which rail, on what timeline, driven by which combination of regulatory mandate, merchant economics, and consumer trust?” A2A is winning utility, government, recurring, and high-value e-commerce transactions. Cards are retaining credit, rewards, and cross-border consumer segments. Real-time rails are winning P2P, P2M in mobile-first markets, and disbursement use cases.
The $5.7 trillion A2A forecast by 2029 is not the total displacement of a $10+ trillion card market. It is the most significant structural reallocation within the global payment system in 40 years.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is A2A payment and how does it differ from card payment?
Account-to-account (A2A) payment moves funds directly between bank accounts via real-time payment rails, bypassing card networks entirely. Unlike card payments where the transaction routes through an issuer bank, card network (Visa/Mastercard), and acquirer bank — each taking a fee — A2A payments settle directly between sender and receiver accounts, typically at flat fees or sub-0.5% cost versus the 1.5–2.5% interchange on cards.
Why is A2A growing now rather than 10 years ago?
Three simultaneous forces converged in 2024–2026: real-time payment rail infrastructure reached critical scale (FedNow in the US, SEPA Instant in Europe, 70+ schemes globally); PSD3/PSR mandated open banking API performance parity removing the technical reliability objection; and APP fraud reimbursement frameworks removed the consumer protection objection. None of these existed at the required scale a decade ago.
Can Algerian merchants or fintechs participate in A2A payment growth today?
Domestically, BaridiMob and CIB provide basic A2A transfer capability but not merchant-facing checkout APIs. For Algerian fintechs targeting the EU diaspora corridor, PSD3 creates the regulatory pathway to offer A2A payment products to Algerian-origin customers in France — but this requires EMI or payment institution licensing in an EU jurisdiction, a 12–24 month compliance project.
Sources & Further Reading
- Consumer A2A Payments Valued at $5.7 Trillion Globally by 2029 — Juniper Research
- The Dramatic Global Rise of A2A Payments — FIS Global
- A2A Payments Overview: Adoption and Challenges — The Paypers
- Europe’s Pay-by-Bank Revolution — The Silent Card Killer — European Business Magazine
- The Account-to-Account Push: Reshaping UK Payments — The Payments Association
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