A blue wallet with bitcoin and dollar labelled coins

29 October 2026

Polar Moment’s Payments Perspective: October 2026

Payments news from October 2026: The continuing popularity of digital wallets; FCA guidance published on AI practice for financial businesses; the continuing convergence of identity and payments; and the EPC anti-fraud initiative.

New Worldpay Report Shows Continuing Popularity of Digital Wallets

UK citizens used digital wallets (ApplePay, GooglePay, PayPal etc.) for 40% of their online purchases in 2025, according to Worldpay’s Global Payments Report 2026. Worldpay forecasts this will rise to 50% by the end of this decade. That’s at the expense of credit and debit cards. They were used for 35% of online spending last year, but this is predicted to fall to 25% in 2030. Ultimately, however, 90% of users fund their wallets using debit cards. So, these are not really falling in popularity. The total value of transactions via debit cards isn’t greatly affected. They’re just not being used directly at the online checkouts.

The use of open banking for buying online increased by 45% last year. However, Worldpay expects its share of online payments to decline from 6% to 5% in 2030. Meanwhile, BNPL is anticipated to creep up 8% last year to 9% over those five years.

FCA Publishes Guidance on AI Practice for Financial Businesses

The guidance was announced on 19 October 2026 in a speech by an FCA official at the Bloomberg UK Policy Series. It is based on the regulator’s observations from testing during 2026.

The advice covers three areas:

consumer centricity,
accountability and governance, and
operational resilience.

The guidance will be updated as the technology evolves.

The employment of AI by the financial sector is moving from experimentation to serious use. 86% of financial businesses now use AI, according to a joint survey conducted by the FCA and Bank of England.

A pixelated picture of a woman in a blue top

Digital Identity Moves Closer to Payments

On 19 October 2026, the European Payments Council (EPC) announced the snappily titled Strong Customer Authentication [SCA] Acceptance Rulebook and Liability Framework for EUDIW Transactions initiative. Thankfully, we can refer to it by its considerably less unwieldy acronym, SCARLET.

The point of SCARLET is to allow EU citizens to identify and verify themselves digitally. It should reduce the risk of multiple non-interoperable) approaches competing across Europe.

The EPC plans to develop:

A business and contractual framework defining scheme actors, eligibility requirements, rights, and obligations of the legal entities participating in the scheme.
Common functional and operational rules.
Technical specifications.

EPC Anti-Fraud Initiative

The EPC is developing the FRIDA (Fraud Information Distribution Arrangement) initiative to facilitate fraud-data sharing across European payments systems.

Data will be exchanged through a central platform. Late last month, the EPC published a request for proposals to develop and operate this platform.

The EPC hosted a FRIDA webinar in mid-October with more than 500 participants attending. The webinar covered the proposed operating model, its relationship with the upcoming Payment Services Regulation, the implementation roadmap, and the ongoing public consultation on the draft FRIDA rulebook.

You can watch the recording on YouTube here. (opens in a new tab)

https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/news-insights/news/united-defence-against-payment-fraud-key-takeaways-epcs-frida-october-2026 (opens in a new tab)