Airwallex and Gr4vy Bet on Merchant Control

Hey Payments Fanatic!

Airwallex just added another piece to its enterprise payments strategy.

Airwallex and Gr4vy are joining forces to give enterprise merchants more flexibility over how payments are processed, combining Airwallex's acquiring network and optimization capabilities with Gr4vy's orchestration layer.

The partnership reflects a broader trend across enterprise payments.

Merchants are no longer looking only for payment acceptance. They're looking for more control over how transactions move through their payments stack, from routing and authentication to fraud management and approval rates.

This comes at a time when Airwallex is investing heavily in Europe. The company recently announced a €200 million investment plan for the Netherlands after reporting 199% year-over-year revenue growth in the market.

And speaking of scale, keep scrolling for a closer look at Mastercard's global card footprint. The company now has 3.4 billion cards in circulation worldwide, rising to 3.7 billion when Maestro is included, a reminder of how much global payments infrastructure still matters.

Today's remaining Payments headlines are just below. 👇 See you tomorrow!

Cheers,

Marcel

INSIGHTS

➡️ Checkout.com is accelerating its AI strategy across engineering, operations, and payments. The company says AI is boosting development speed, automating workflows, and enhancing its payment optimization platform, which helps merchants improve acceptance rates and recover revenue.

NEWS

🇺🇸 Gr4vy and Airwallex partner to expand global payment control for enterprise merchants. This integration gives merchants a more direct way to introduce global acquiring, while also helping them improve payment performance through smarter routing, retries, authentication, and tokenization.

🇳🇱 Airwallex sees remarkable growth success in the Netherlands. The company has also committed to investing at least €200 million in the country over the next five years, expanding its Amsterdam team and strengthening its European operations as demand for global payments and financial infrastructure continues to grow.

🇬🇧 Mastercard partners with Aave for agentic payments. This collaboration may enhance user experience and accessibility in decentralized finance, aligning with the increasing demand for innovative payment methods. Continue reading

🇵🇭 PNB enables Google Pay for Mastercard credit cards, allowing customers to make contactless, online, and in-app payments through Android devices. The move supports the bank’s digitalization strategy while enhancing payment security through tokenization.

🇫🇷 Travelsoft Pay partners with Checkout.com to enhance global payment solutions for travel businesses. This collaboration aims to assist travel firms in handling increasingly intricate cross-border payment transactions, various currencies, and a wide array of payment options as they grow their global footprint. 

🇫🇷 PayPal Ads delivers bottom-line growth advertisers can measure. By leveraging transaction data rather than browsing activity, PayPal Ads helps brands target high-intent buyers and measure outcomes such as sales, return on ad spend, and customer acquisition, highlighting the growing convergence of payments, commerce, and advertising.

🇬🇧 Modulr has launched commercial Variable Recurring Payments for business collections through its Collections Hub. The new payment option is aimed at businesses that collect high volumes of recurring payments and want an alternative to Direct Debit. 

🇧🇷 Wise launches an 'allowance' card for children and teenagers in Brazil. The solution allows parents and financial guardians to issue up to five debit cards linked to the account free of charge, set limits, and track spending directly through the app.

🇦🇹 EPI welcomes Erste Bank Oesterreich, Raiffeisen Bank International, and Raiffeisen Landesbanken as new shareholders. With the shareholder support of leading financial institutions, Wero continues to expand its reach and deliver a simple, secure, and real-time payment experience for consumers and merchants alike.

🇨🇳 Tencent tests AI assistant for its super app WeChat in China. Xiaowei can interact through text and voice, leverage WeChat’s ecosystem of mini-apps to complete tasks, and use Tencent’s WeLM model alongside DeepSeek for certain queries.

🇰🇷 Toss Bank pursues global remittance PoC with Solana. The bank aims to verify the potential use of stablecoins in overseas remittances and later broaden cooperation to payments and digital assets. Toss Bank said it signed a strategic memorandum of understanding with the Solana Foundation in Seoul on June 19.

🇬🇧 PPRO names Jigyasa Mathur as VP of software engineering. Mathur brings nearly two decades of software experience to the firm, having begun her career in 2007. Continue reading

🇺🇸 Eileen O'Mara named Vice Chair of Stripe; Tyler Bryson appointed Chief Revenue Officer. As vice chair, Eileen will engage with policymakers, officials, and executives at Stripe's customers and partners to ensure those decisions advance entrepreneurship and increase economic dynamism globally.

🇮🇩 Lion Group invests up to $12M in an Indonesian stablecoin firm, PT Nusantara Bumi Sangkara. The deal expands Lion Group’s exposure to digital payments, tokenized assets, and AI-powered financial infrastructure, strengthening its strategy around stablecoins, digital asset treasury management, and AI-driven finance.

🇺🇸 MoneyGram becomes a Solana validator and expands its blockchain payments strategy. Operating a validator allows MoneyGram to stake SOL tokens, process transaction blocks, and contribute to the security and performance of the Solana network.

🇺🇸  MoonPay Acquires Entendre, an AI-enabled finance operations platform built for companies moving, settling, or holding value on-chain. The deal extends MoonPay's infrastructure into the financial operations layer, bringing AI agents to the reconciliation, treasury, and close workflows that sit behind every digital asset transaction.

🇰🇷 Danal FinTech and BNK Busan Bank complete full lifecycle technical validation for Korean Won Stablecoin. Using Danal’s IEUM infrastructure, the partners reduced payment processing times from around two seconds to 0.3 seconds and improved transaction efficiency.

🇺🇸 Nuvion partners with Visa Direct to enable real-time cross-border payouts for global businesses. Through this collaboration, Nuvion will integrate Visa Direct’s global payout network into its financial infrastructure platform, giving businesses faster ways to send funds to cards, bank accounts, and digital wallets worldwide.

🇬🇧 Bank of England launches policy statement and draft rules on regulating systemic stablecoins. The regime aims to support innovation while ensuring stability, with requirements for backing assets, prompt redemptions, and strong consumer protections, paving the way for stablecoins to become a trusted form of digital money.

GOLDEN NUGGET

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐄𝐱𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐀𝐫𝐞 𝐀𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐏𝐚𝐲𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬? — 𝐛𝐲 Noah 👇Created by Arthur Bedel 💳 ♻️

Everyone is watching the agents.

The real play is in the infrastructure.

Agentic payments are software agents that pay, route, and settle on behalf of users and businesses — at machine speed, within explicit rules.

By 2030, agentic transaction volume is projected to exceed $1 trillion. Execution time: 10 milliseconds. 24/7. Sub-cent microtransactions. No traditional bank login required.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝟑 𝐩𝐡𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐟𝐭

→ Agent Assisted: human-led, AI helps route and validate

→ Agent Directed: AI prepares, human approves

→ Agent Autonomous: AI decides and pays within hard-coded rules

Think of it like issuing a trusted employee a corporate card with carefully defined limits.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦 𝐧𝐨𝐛𝐨𝐝𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭

Legacy API keys give AI a "blank check." No spending limits. No merchant filters. Binary all-or-nothing access.

That is not a payment system. That is a liability.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 — 𝐕𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭

Cryptographic guardrails enforce rules at the protocol level:

→ Identity — verify the agent

→ Intent — hard-code caps and vendor whitelists

→ Action — execute only within defined parameters

An un-hackable, mathematically enforced corporate expense policy.

𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐥𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐠𝐚𝐩

Agents operate natively in stablecoins. The real economy still runs on local fiat.

That gap is where most agentic commerce will break.

Noah is building the infrastructure that closes it — instantly translating stablecoin payments into compliant local fiat payouts via ACH, SEPA, FPS, PIX, M-Pesa, and more.

The agents are ready. The legacy financial system is not.

The companies that win the next decade will not be the ones building the smartest AI agents. They will be the ones building the rails underneath them.

Are you watching the agents — or the infrastructure?

Source: Noah

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