Welcome to your Tuesday brain-espresso. We sifted the last five days of global payments news (15 – 20 May) so you can stride into your morning call sounding like you main-line ISO 20022 for breakfast.
1 | Headlines
ECB circles a launchpad for the digital euro. Board member Piero Cipollone told reporters the Bank wants a political deal in place “by early 2026,” clearing the runway for a retail CBDC two-to-three years later. A legislative green-light would give the Eurosystem a head-start over the Fed and pressure private wallets to plug into central-bank rails.
PayPal turns Singapore into its APAC sandbox. Complete Payments—a one-stop checkout stack bundling cards, wallets, BNPL and fraud tools – went live for all SG-registered merchants on 15 May. Stripe, Adyen and GrabPay suddenly face a full-stack rival that already owns the consumer PayPal button.
NPCI tweaks UPI to kill fat-finger fails. New rules force apps (GPay, PhonePe, Paytm) to show the beneficiary’s legal name and a four-second “review” timer on every push payment. The guard-rail aims to slash wrong-credit disputes that clogged NPCI’s grievance portal by 23 % last quarter.
Vietnam unveils its first NAPAS × Mastercard co-badged card. Six banks launched dual-logo plastic that rides NAPAS domestically and Mastercard abroad. Issuers keep <0.2 % local interchange while cardholders skip FX fees overseas – expect Visa to court VietinBank fast. As the payments landscape evolves, the concept of a dual logo system is becoming increasingly significant in enhancing brand visibility and consumer trust.
XTransfer joins FXC’s “Top 100 Cross-Border Firms.” The Hong-Kong B2B pay-tech snagged the accolade on 20 May. So what? Cross-border SMEs finally have a China-grown alternative to Stripe Treasury and Revolut Business—watch mainland exporters switch.
Klarna’s U-turn on AI-only support. After a 15% Q1 revenue pop, the BNPL giant admitted its chatbot-first service hurt quality and is rehiring humans. So what? Even AI poster-kids concede that people close chargebacks faster—bad optics for pure-bot checkout dreams.
Revolut pledges €1 bn for a French growth-spurt. The challenger will triple Paris headcount and launch local credit this year. A banking-licence push in the euro-zone complicates incumbents’ interchange defence just as the digital euro looms.
PBoC slices loan-prime rates another 10 bps. One-year LPR at 3 % and five-year at 3.5 % mark fresh lows since 2019. So what? Cheaper yuan funding amps outbound tourist spend—handy tail-wind for China-ASEAN QR corridors lighting up this summer.
2 | Deep dive — Vietnam’s first co-badged card: why six logos beat one
Vietnam already runs a thriving two-rail world: NAPAS for cheap domestic debits (0.1 % caps) and the US giants for cross-border swipes. Until last Thursday, consumers needed two bits of plastic.
What changed?
On 15 May, NAPAS and Mastercard launched a dual-logo card whose PAN lives in both schemes’ bins. A coffee in Hanoi routes via NAPAS; a hotel in Seoul clears over Mastercard. Six banks: Agribank, BIDV, TPBank, Nam A, PVComBank and Vikki, are first movers.
Why now?
- Interchange economics. Local regulators cap NAPAS fees at ~0.2 %; merchants cheer. Issuers keep foreign revenue via Mastercard’s cross-border tables, best of both.
- Tourism bounce-back. Vietnam welcomed 4.6 m Chinese and Korean tourists pre-Covid. Dual cards promise seamless refunds and chargebacks to lure them back.
- Domestic-scheme moat. By riding the card giants abroad instead of ceding traffic to UnionPay QR, NAPAS stays inside the traveller’s wallet.
The friction to watch
- Routing roulette. POS terminals must choose the right rail; get it wrong and merchants pay Mastercard on a $3 bowl of phở.
- BIN inventory. Dual embossing devours six-digit ranges fast; smaller issuers may wait for ISO/IEC 7812 extensions.
- Network parity. Visa will lobby hard to join the party – three logos on one card tests both chip memory and consumer sanity.
Bottom line: Co-badging is Vietnam’s middle path: protect local fee caps and hand cardholders a single piece of plastic for every border they cross – an elegant answer to the “one-scheme-too-many” problem haunting Asia’s fragmenting payment scene.
3 | Word of the week — Co-badged or Co-branded card
A single physical or virtual card that carries two payment networks: one typically domestic (cheap, regulatory-favoured), the other international (global acceptance). The chip decides which logo wakes up when you tap. Think France’s CB + Visa or Brazil’s Elo + Mastercard – Vietnam just joined the club.
Why payments folk care
- Interchange arbitrage: issuers maximise fee yield abroad, merchants minimise it at home.
- Regulatory détente: local schemes win volume; global brands stay in the wallet.
- Routing chess: terminal prefs and scheme incentives will decide who really earns the swipe.
4 | Payment fact of the week — How France’s carte bleue + Visa mash-up invented the playbook for co-badging
The pre-history
By the mid-1970s France already had Carte Bleue – a domestic card created in 1967 by six big banks – but the plastic was useless once you crossed the border. Travellers carried a second piece of foreign-scheme plastic, merchants juggled two terminals, and the fledgling BankAmericard network (soon to be re-branded “Visa”) wanted French volume. The compromise landed in 1976: emboss a tiny Visa flag next to the blue dove and let the chip decide which rail to wake up. Carte Bleue Internationale was born.
How it actually worked
- Dual BINs in one chip. The card stored two BIN ranges: CB for domestic francs, Visa for anything abroad, long before ISO 7816 smart-cards existed.
- Dynamic routing. When a Paris café POS asked for authorisation the card responded “CB”; a Milan boutique got “Visa.”
- Fee diplomacy. CB interchange stayed dirt-cheap (<0.3%), keeping French merchants happy, while issuers still earned Visa’s richer cross-border fees.
Scale & staying power
The French liked the two-for-one deal: by 1980 more than 90% of cards carried both logos; today ~76 million CB cards are in circulation and “more than 95% are co-branded with Visa or Mastercard.”
Technological ripple effects
- Chip-and-PIN standardisation. CB demanded offline smart-card security in 1992 and pushed EMV to adopt similar cryptograms; the world’s “insert + PIN” habit owes a debt to Paris.
- Interchange diplomacy. EU regulators later pointed to CB-Visa as proof domestic-scheme fee caps can coexist with global acceptance – a model Brazil (Elo + Mastercard) and now Vietnam (NAPAS + Mastercard) follow.
- Consumer UX blueprint. One card, two rails became the norm from France’s boulangeries to Rio’s botecos, pre-conditioning shoppers for today’s Apple-Pay-selects-network prompt.
Modern echo
Vietnam’s six-bank NAPAS-Mastercard launch last Thursday almost carbon-copies the 1976 French hack: cheap local fees at home, global clout abroad, single piece of plastic in pocket. Not bad for a half-century-old logo soup.
Takeaway: every time you tap a co-badged card, you’re replaying a French experiment that turned fee politics into smart silicon—and taught the rest of the world how to route swipes without riling merchants.
Liked the sip? Forward it to three payments nerds and earn mythical “dual-logo karma.” Still not legal tender—give the ECB a few years.