This week, we cover Capital One's acquisition of Discover, Visa’s upcoming AI-driven product announcements, ACH’s record-breaking growth, and new Worldpay data showing how digital payments are fueling global economic expansion.
Welcome to Today in Payments, I’m your host, Patti Murphy, here with your weekly dose of payments notes.
Well, it’s official: Capital One has received the go-ahead from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve to purchase Discover. This follows news reported last week that the DOJ didn’t see any problems with the combination. Plans are to close the deal on May 18.
Both companies will operate under their existing names, for the time being. But, as you and I discussed last week, this combination will result in heightened competition in the payments business. In a video accompanying the press release announcing the deal, Rich Fairbank made it pretty clear:
"This deal accelerates our long-standing journey to work directly with merchants, to leverage our customer base and data to drive more sales for merchants and greater deals for consumers and small businesses."
You could read this to suggest they want to get more aggressive about merchant acquiring, but my take is that the prize Fairbank has his eye on is direct competition with Visa and Mastercard.
Visa plans to unveil its 2025 roadmap for transforming the way consumers shop and buy with AI. The show-and-tell is scheduled for next week, April 30.
At the event, Visa CEO Ryan McInerney and Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell will take the stage to unveil new products, solutions, and technology partners poised to transform the next generation of commerce.
“Last year we rolled out a suite of new solutions to reinvent the way consumers interact with their cards,” said Jack Forestell. “We’re building on that this year — and will dive into the world of AI-driven commerce.”
The ACH Network began 2025 with a bang, moving 326 million same-day payments valued at nearly $1 trillion. That’s a 19.1% increase over Q1 2024.
In all, the ACH handled 8.5 billion transactions valued at $22.1 trillion, representing a 4.2% increase in transaction volume and a 24.8% increase in value compared to Q1 2024.
B2B payments showed strong growth of 9% to total 1.9 billion transactions. Of these, 125 million were healthcare claims from insurers — an 8.1% gain.
P2P payments passed the 100-million mark for the first time, charting 109 million payments — a better than 20% increase over the same period last year.
The only category that didn’t show growth was Direct Deposit. Those transactions fell 0.3% to 2.2 billion, which could account for some of the increase in same-day ACH, as more workers — especially gig workers — opt for earned wage access.
Worldpay has, for the past decade, collected payment data from around the world — information I often use in my reporting. Recently, executives took their data — the past 10 years’ worth — to Washington, presumably to help educate policymakers. I thought it worthwhile to share some highlights with you today:
Globally, ecommerce spend more than tripled in the 10 years ending in 2024. In 2014, consumers spent $1.2 trillion online. In 2024, they spent $6.8 trillion.
The share of global ecommerce spending done using smartphones also tripled, from 19% in 2014 to 57% in 2024.
Digital wallet use grew even more dramatically during that 10-year span, amounting to $3.6 trillion in online spending and $12 trillion in-store.
Digital wallets accounted for 53% of ecommerce spend in 2024 and 32% of point-of-sale spending.
Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) saw rapid market acceptance, with online use ballooning from $2.2 billion in 2014 to $342 billion in 2024.
Global account-to-account spending is projected to balloon to $936 billion in 2030, compared to $152 billion in 2014.
The bottom line Worldpay presented in Washington — and which I present today — is this: digital payments hold the key to unlocking global growth.
That’s all for Today in Payments. Stay tuned for your weekly dose of payments notes.