Polar Moment’s Payments Perspective: May 2026

May 28, 2026

Welcome to the May edition of Polar Moment’s Payments Perspective. Here’s what’s been happening in the world of payments this month.

AI and Agentic Technologies Are Entering the Payments Mainstream

Visa and Mastercard are both increasingly integrating AI technology in their systems, especially for fraud prevention, risk scoring, and real‑time orchestration across payment rails. According to Ajay Bhalla, president, Cyber & Intelligence at Mastercard, “AI and advanced analytics now sit inside the flow of commerce to help stop fraud before it happens.”

Meanwhile, Visa, working with US issuing and payments platform Highnote, has launched an agentic commerce offering. This enables businesses to provision payment credentials to software agents operating within defined spend rules and real-time decision-making logic.

Elsewhere, “agentic payments” (AI systems that initiate transactions) are moving from pilot to production, raising new requirements for identity verification and transaction governance.

Find out more here:

Cross‑Border Payments: SWIFT vs Stablecoins vs New Rails

SWIFT is adding blockchain-style settlement and shared ledgers, moving beyond messaging into actual value movement. Its new payments scheme, rolling this year aims for:

transparent FX/fees
guaranteed delivery amounts
near‑instant settlement where possible

SWIFT, Ripple, and Visa, will be competing fiercely as they offer faster and cheaper cross‑border payments. Visa is already settling $7B of payments annually in stablecoins.

Find out more here: Ripple vs SWIFT vs Visa: The Quiet Battle Over Cross-Border Payments

New Payment Regulations for the EU and UK

The EU’s PSD3 + Payment Services Regulation (PSR) is moving toward adoption, aiming to:

unify payment rules across EU
strengthen fraud protection (e.g., IBAN/name checks)
reshape licensing for payment firms

Meanwhile, the UK government’s payment‑firm safeguarding rules take effect this month:

mandatory segregation of customer funds
daily reconciliation and audits

Find out more here:

Consumer Spending on Cards in the UK

Three new sets of data have been published this month. Barclays highlighted “heavy declines” in hotels and travel in April, though total spend was little changed from March. UK Finance showed a mixed picture over the last year, with overall spending in the UK down slightly.

A survey by the British Retail Consortium showed a sharp drop in store spending last month, though this was affected by the timing of the Easter holidays.

Find out more here:

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