A pattern ties this week’s scatter of headlines together: payment value is sliding back onto home-built, regulator-approved, or single-purpose rails. Japan’s surge in cash-free shopping is pushing the Bank of Japan toward a domestic CBDC; Brussels is sharpening its antitrust knife for Visa and Mastercard’s cross-border fees; Washington is racing to wrap stablecoins in a U.S. flag; Thailand is welding PromptPay to India’s UPI; Shopify is nudging British merchants onto local pay-by-bank. The question behind every story is no longer “Visa or Mastercard?” but “Whose rail, whose rules, whose currency?”
1 | Headlines
Japan races past its own cashless target. Cash-free payments hit 42.8 % of consumer spend in 2024, a full year ahead of Tokyo’s goal, prompting Bank of Japan officials to talk up a digital-yen blueprint and warn that foreign stablecoins could erode the yen’s role if the BOJ fails to modernise.
So what? A CBDC pilot that once felt academic is sliding toward policy-must.
Brussels reloads its antitrust probe into Visa and Mastercard. Fresh questionnaires landed on 3 June asking PSPs whether the schemes’ “inter-regional” fee bundles strangle competition.
So what? A formal Statement of Objections could lop another 40 bps off cross-border swipe fees and dull one of the open-banking lobby’s sharpest selling points.
The GENIUS Act heads for a Senate showdown with 122 amendments. A floor vote set for 11 June could deliver America’s first federal stablecoin law, complete with 1-for-1 reserve rules and a path for state-chartered issuers.
So what? Tokenised dollars may enter the banking mainstream before a U.S. CBDC is even on the table.
FedNow tops 1,500 participating banks and lands its first ADP payroll pilot. A 9 June roster update shows 1,526 live FIs, and ADP confirmed its maiden instant-salary credits on 31 May.
So what? When pay-day hits in seconds, ACH-only employers look positively analog.
Thailand and India sign off on a PromptPay ↔ UPI QR corridor. The Bank of Thailand and NPCI inked an MoU on 2 June; tourist pilots go live in October.
So what? Two of Asia’s biggest wallet ecosystems—together worth 1.7 billion users—just gave card schemes something new to worry about.
Shopify flips the “Pay by Bank” switch in the UK. A 30 May release lets Shopify Plus merchants embed TrueLayer’s open-banking checkout.
So what? Debit-heavy British e-commerce finally gets an account-to-account button native to the cart, not bolted on as an afterthought.
2 | Deep dive — The GENIUS Act: can Washington’s “home-grown dollar” out-run a Fed-issued CBDC?
Two years of congressional skirmish over stablecoins reached endgame last week: the Guiding the Evolution of Numismatics In the United States Act—mercifully shortened to GENIUS—hit the Senate floor. The bill would yank low-risk, dollar-backed stablecoins out of securities limbo and hand supervisory keys to the Fed for megascale issuers and to state regulators for wallets under US $10 billion. Reserve assets must sit in T-bills or Fed balances; redemptions must complete inside 24 hours.
Why does it matter?
- Tokenised deposits at bank scale. JPMorgan’s Onyx and Citi’s Regulated Liability Network suddenly have a federal playbook instead of no-action letters.
- Cross-border leapfrog. A compliant, on-chain dollar that settles in 30 seconds gives U.S. regulators a weapon against China’s e-CNY without touching the quagmire of retail CBDC politics.
- Fraud and KYC heat. Parallel amendments would compel monthly attestations and empower FinCEN to freeze non-compliant tokens—turning the wild west into something closer to a bank branch.
If the bill passes, circle your calendar for Q1 2026: that’s when early-bird issuers must finish audits and hit the “go” button—or redeem every last token. Either way, the private stablecoin world will switch overnight from regulatory twilight to bright-light oversight.
3 | Word of the week — Rail re-shoring
When a country, bloc or ecosystem deliberately shifts payment volume off global networks (cards, SWIFT, dollar wires) onto local, government-blessed rails—be that a CBDC, a domestic QR scheme or a stablecoin ring-fenced by national rules.
Why it matters: lower fees, tighter AML visibility and political leverage at home; fragmentation headaches abroad.
4 | Payment fact of the week — How India’s RuPay card turned “rail re-shoring” from slogan into daily swipe
When the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) switched on RuPay in March 2012, the country’s debit market was almost entirely fenced by Visa and Mastercard. Domestic purchases—more than 90% of all card transactions—still detoured through foreign switches, and Indian banks paid annual affiliation fees that were little more than the cost of routing bytes across an ocean. RuPay’s pitch was blunt: keep the traffic, the data and the price-setting power at home. (en.wikipedia.org)
The early traction was slow, but two tail-winds changed the math. First came the Jan Dhan financial-inclusion drive, which distributed millions of zero-balance bank accounts—each with a RuPay debit card—across India’s rural districts. By late 2024 RuPay accounted for about 65% of all debit cards issued in the country, flipping the market share Visa and Mastercard once took for granted. (linkedin.com)
Then, on the first day of 2020, New Delhi executed a fee gambit no international network would dare: it slashed the merchant-discount rate on every RuPay debit swipe to 0% for transactions under ₹2,000 and barred banks from passing any MDR on to small shops. The same order zeroed MDR on UPI, but only RuPay could promise card acceptance without a rupee in fees—an unanswerable selling point for micro-merchants tired of the 1–1.5% they sent to foreign schemes. (pwc.in)
Today more than 750 million RuPay cards ride a fully domestic switch, earning NPCI pennies instead of dollars—but pennies that stay within India’s borders and feed back into local innovation such as RuPay-on-UPI “credit lines” and National Common Mobility transit cards. Visa and Mastercard still dominate cross-border spend, yet on home soil the rail has been re-shored: every grocery swipe in Goa or metro tap in Mumbai settles without ever leaving the country, a live-fire proof that national payment sovereignty can move from policy memo to plastic in just over a decade.
Pass the newsletter to three friends and rack up some rail-re-shoring karma. It won’t slash interchange—yet—but neither will another webinar.