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47% of UPI volume is initiated through the PhonePe wallet, part of the Flipkart e-commerce group in India, owned by Walmart in the USA. Another 34% is initiated through the Google Pay wallet.

In the top 10 wallets ranked by volume, there is only one bank wallet, which accounts for 0.7% of UPI volume. The rest are wallets from third party app providers (TPAPs). Overall, there are 47 TPAP wallets accounting for 97.1% of UPI volume and 44 bank wallets accounting for just 2.9% of volume. Figure 3 shows a table of the top wallets, using February 2026 data provided by NPCI, the operator of UPI (and other payment systems).

From: (17) Unstoppable – by Jeremy Light – Agenda: Payments.

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Interchange has always been controversial. Merchants accept that card payments come with costs and that issuers need to be compensated for fraud protection and credit risk. What has changed is the degree of control and visibility merchants have over those costs. Today, interchange is not simply a published rate card. It is a complex web of transaction classifications, data requirements, and exceptions that can turn a routine payment into a downgraded transaction with higher fees and no clear explanation.

Many merchants discover these changes only after the fact, when their monthly statements arrive. A transaction that looks identical at the point of sale can be treated very differently behind the scenes depending on how it was routed or categorized. This creates a system where businesses cannot reliably forecast one of their largest operating expenses.

From: Opaque card interchange fees are a frustration for merchants | American Banker.

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For example, the networks already provision hardware-bound, “perfect” authentication (using tools like Titan M2 or Secure Enclave). But if you eliminate all authentication risk, you eliminate the need for fraud prevention services. This would effectively:

Crush Processor Differentiation: If authentication is perfect and risk is zero, a processor can no longer differentiate based on their superior fraud-detection algorithms or VAS stacks. Device graphs die.
The Incentive Problem: There is a massive misalignment on fees. A 5 bps 3DS fee is insufficient to incentivize an issuer to take on a 100% liability shift while also paying for the infrastructure of perfect authentication. This fee may need to look more like 40-50 bps, which would certainly give some merchants pause.
The industry is stuck: merchants want the risk shift but won’t pay the premium; processors won’t support a tech that commoditizes their value; and banks want to control the credential but lack the reach.

From: Explaining the Death of OpenAI’s Instant Checkout | Noyes Payments Blog.

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GitHub staff celebrated last year when the number of “commits,” or times that users saved new code to their GitHub database, exceeded 1 billion annually for the first time, Daigle said in an interview. Since then, commits have surged to 275 million per week, and the company is on track for 14 billion commits this year. That represents a roughly 14x increase in traffic from a year prior.

From: Microsoft’s GitHub Sees Booming Traffic—and Outages—as AI Agents Flood Platform — The Information.

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The integration also signals a deliberate move away from exclusive reliance on global payment giants such as Visa and Mastercard, as Ghana develops a system that operates within its own digital and financial infrastructure while maintaining international interoperability.

From: Ghana Card Leads Africa With First Payment-Enabled National ID.

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On the other hand, the PIX approach to user data is more centralised than that of UPI, potentially allowing for quicker resolution of payment issues. PIX relies on a central database known as the Transaction Accounts Identifier Directory (DICT) to connect each user’s PIX key with their corresponding transactional account information. In contrast, UPI is decentralised, storing user data by PSPs such as wallet providers PhonePe or Google Pay (Nuclei, 2024).

From: The rise of instant payments: a cross-country comparison | Central European Management Journal | Emerald Publishing.

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The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3.gov) has released their Internet Crime Report for calendar 2025. For the first time, the report covers MORE THAN ONE MILLION received complaints. Congratulations to all of my FBI friends involved in gathering and analyzing this data. Know that I am IN YOUR FAN CLUB!

Our elders are ABSOLUTELY being targeted. Victims over the age of sixty had:
– 49.1% of money stolen from Investment Scams
– 59.4% of money stolen from Tech Suppoort Scams
– 59.6% of money stolen from Government Impersonation Scams
– 48.5% of money stolen from Extortion
– 67.9% of money stolen from Romance Scams

From: (15) Post | LinkedIn.

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Investment Fraud is skyrocketing, powered by an unregulated crypto industry and an army of human trafficked scammers working night and day to steal our money. I shared previously that the 2025 FTC Consumer Sentinel showed that Investment Scams are 4.75 of complaints and 49.8% of dollars stolen. The IC3 data is similar. 7.2% of the complaints and 41.4% of dollars stolen. This is why Intelligence for Good is so focused on hashtag#CryptoInvestmentScams!

For the first time, MOST of the money stolen was in the form of cryptocurrency. 54.4% of the money stolen was crypto – up 22% from the 2024 report.

From: (15) Post | LinkedIn.

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A world that becomes more self-sufficient in defence and energy would also
be a world that holds less USD reserves. The huge strategic importance of the
Middle East to the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency should not be
underestimated. The current conflict may be the perfect storm for the
petrodollar.

From: What Iran means for the dollar: a perfect storm for the petrodollar – Deutsche Bank Research Institute.

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As they should, the card networks are trying to carve out roles in Digital Currency. Stablecoins could erode card volumes where Mastercard has its highest margins: cross-border transactions. Cross-border is a fraction of MasterCard’s volume but a third of its revenue. Cross-border volume outgrows US domestic volume by 3 to 1. If Stablecoins take a material share of this cross-border traffic it has a bigger impact on card network revenue than on card network volume.

From: Can the card networks win in digital currency?.

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