PayLens Radar: Germany moves to make digital acceptance a duty, Wero lands its first French merchants

PayLens Radar · Tuesday 15 September

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Germany moves to make digital acceptance compulsory

Berlin circulated an Eckpunktepapier that would oblige every shop, restaurant and service business to offer at least one digital payment method alongside cash from 2027, and at least one of them must be European. No surcharge, no minimum basket, no turnover threshold.

For the first time the German state would mandate acceptance rather than encourage it, in the last large European market with a meaningful cash-only tail. The European-method clause points at girocard and Wero, not at Visa and Mastercard. The HDE calls it needless bureaucracy and wants the right to pass fees on.

ZDFheute · Read the article

• Wero signs its first tier-one French merchants

  Air France, Decathlon and Fnac Darty are preparing Wero checkouts with BNP Paribas as acquiring bank, joining Orange, live since 2 September. EPI counts 57 million users and 15 million more still to migrate from Payconiq and iDEAL. Fnac Darty switches on in early 2027.

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• Mastercard turns itself into a switch for wallets

  Wallet Pay lets wallet providers reach Mastercard acceptance over NFC, QR and online checkout without new infrastructure, with Alipay+ as anchor partner. Mastercard cites 4.3 billion wallet users today and 6 billion projected by 2030 against 3.7 billion of its own credentials.

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• Agent Connect routes AI shoppers via acquirers

  Merchants reach AI shopping agents through one integration, with Nexi, Global Payments and Planet in the launch network, so European portfolios get wired in by their existing acquirer. Appetite is still thin: only 31 percent of merchants plan automated-checkout spend inside a year.

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• A passkey answers the SCA question for AI agents

  An AI agent placed a real order on a French Revolut Visa card, authenticated by a Visa Payment Passkey bound to an instruction given in advance rather than by a one-time code. It is the first live test of whether agent-initiated payments can satisfy Strong Customer Authentication.

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• BLIK brings agentic checkout to an A2A scheme

  An AI agent bought a PLN 19.99 item on its own inside consent granted earlier in the banking app. Agentic commerce has so far been shown on card rails; BLIK puts it on account-to-account, the model most European domestic schemes and Wero share.

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