PayLens Radar: Advent and Stripe walk away from PayPal, girocard hits 1.4m terminals

PayLens Radar · Tuesday 1 September

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Advent and Stripe walk away from PayPal

The Advent International and Stripe consortium has dropped its pursuit of PayPal, Bloomberg reported on 28 August. The group had bid USD 60.50 a share, valuing PayPal at more than USD 53bn; the board judged that inadequate, cited regulatory and financing hurdles, and never formally answered.

PayPal stays independent, so its checkout button, its merchant contracts and the Zettle terminal estate stay with a competitor instead of moving inside Stripe's stack. The antitrust question a Stripe-PayPal combination would have put to European e-commerce acceptance for two years disappears with it.

RTÉ · Read the article

• girocard hits 1.4m terminals as the average basket falls

  girocard-accepting terminals rose 11.1% to 1.397 million in the first half of 2026 while turnover grew just 0.8% to EUR 151.9bn and the average payment fell from EUR 37.28 to EUR 36.12: the rail is spreading into small-ticket places that used to take cash only.

  DEFinancial

• Flatpay tripled revenue to EUR 39m and lost EUR 70m doing it

  The Danish direct-sales terminal provider tripled 2025 revenue from EUR 12m to EUR 39m while its operating loss widened from EUR 20m to EUR 70m, and it guides to a EUR 140-150m loss in 2026. Germany is its largest foreign market at EUR 15m.

  DKFinancial

• Revolut distributes a euro stablecoin that Stripe's Bridge issues

  Revolut began distributing EURR in Denmark, Poland and Portugal on 26 August, with the rest of the EEA to follow in 2026. The issuer is Bridge Building, the MiCA-registered Luxembourg entity of Bridge, which Stripe bought in 2025: distribution and issuance now sit with two competing payment companies. No merchant acceptance is announced.

  EUProduct

• The Bank of England gets a statutory duty to weigh payments innovation

  The Treasury will amend the Financial Services and Markets Bill so the Bank of England carries a statutory secondary objective for payments and digital finance, reporting on it annually; the Lords debate it next month. The Bank supervises the recognised payment systems UK acceptance runs on, and its caution has been the binding constraint on sterling stablecoins.

  UKRegulatory

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