Wattle Wire — Thursday 12 November 2026

Morning! Card fraud is down, and Europe is arguing about surcharges and shopping bots.

Covers Wednesday morning 11 November to Thursday morning 12 November 2026, Sydney time.

Regulators checked: RBA, ASIC, AUSTRAC, APRA, ACCC, Treasury, AusPayNet. Items from AusPayNet are under Regulation & Policy.

AusPayNet's 2026 Australian Payment Fraud report, covered by Banking Day on 11 November, shows fraud on Australian-issued cards fell 14% to $673 million in calendar 2025 while card spending rose 7% to $1.23 trillion, bringing the fraud rate down to 54.5 cents per $1,000 from 68.0 cents in 2024. Overseas card-not-present fraud remains the weak spot: it made up about 53% of all fraud on Australian cards from only around 4% of spend, at $8.15 per $1,000, roughly 15 times the domestic online rate.

Worth knowing: the home front is clearly working: domestic online fraud fell 19% to a record-low rate, which is what tokens, stronger authentication and scheme rules are meant to deliver. The leak is now offshore merchants that sit outside Australian controls, so the next gains depend on issuers declining smarter on cross-border online spend and on global scheme tools. Keep an eye on the small but fast-growing lines too: fraudulent card applications up 42% and "other" fraud, including account takeover, up 26%. AusPayNet says it is building a card fraud and scam mitigation program, and cheque fraud has fallen to its lowest on record, mostly because hardly anyone writes cheques now.

Read: AusPayNet fraud statistics · AusPayNet report (PDF) · Banking Day

Visa's president of value-added services, Andrew Torre, told the KBW Fintech Ecosystem Conference on 10 November (US time) that Visa sees tokens as the future of agentic commerce, with Visa Intelligent Commerce built to carry agent transactions, though he gave no volumes or revenue timeline. He said about 60% of e-commerce is now tokenised against a goal of 100%, that Visa began pricing tokens in April 2026, and that tokenised payments show roughly a 5% approval uplift and about 35% less fraud; he also named Westpac as a client win for Visa's Pismo core banking platform.

Worth knowing: tokens are turning from a free security feature into a priced product and the entry ticket to agent payments, so issuers should expect token costs to become a bigger line in scheme bills. The fraud numbers fit neatly with AusPayNet's report today: domestic online fraud is falling as tokenisation spreads. The Westpac mention is a reminder that Visa now sells core banking software as well as running the network, which makes it a much bigger supplier to some banks than the logo on the card suggests.

Read: Investing.com (session summary)

Square has finished rolling out Bitcoin acceptance to eligible US merchants, taking payments over the Lightning Network and converting them automatically to dollars so sellers never hold crypto, PYMNTS reported on 11 November. Processing is free until the end of 2026, with a 1% fee from 1 January 2027, and New York businesses are excluded.

Worth knowing: free now and 1% later is a classic way to get merchants to switch something on, and 1% undercuts most card pricing. The hard part isn't the merchant, it's getting customers to pay that way at the counter. Australian merchants absorbing card costs after the surcharge ban will notice any cheaper rail, but there is no sign yet of this coming here.

Read: PYMNTS

Nothing notable this window. Wattlebird checked and went back to sleep.

Banking Circle Australia, an authorised deposit-taking institution that serves regulated payment businesses, launched a dynamic PayID service on 11 November that lets payment providers and platforms create and switch off PayIDs for individual customers, invoices or payments through a single API. Funds arrive over the NPP directly into the client's Banking Circle account with payment information in real time, so incoming money can be matched without the payer typing in a reference.

Worth knowing: reconciliation is where account-to-account collections usually fall over, and a PayID tied to one invoice or one customer fixes most of it. It is the NPP version of the virtual account numbers businesses already use with BSBs, but instant. With the surcharge ban pushing merchants and platforms to look at cheaper ways to get paid, expect more providers to package PayID collections like this, alongside PayTo for recurring payments.

Read: SMBtech

Germany's Federal Cartel Office said on 11 November that its preliminary view is that PayPal's ban on merchants charging extra for PayPal payments, enforced since 2018, may breach German and EU competition law. The office, which opened the case in January 2023, said PayPal is comparatively expensive for merchants and that the rule spreads its cost across all customers through higher prices; it is also considering whether PayPal should hand back profits, while PayPal said it does not share the preliminary view.

Worth knowing: this is the mirror image of Australia's debate. Here, card surcharges were banned from 1 October to protect consumers, with lower interchange meant to do the work on merchant costs. Germany's argument is that the right to surcharge is what keeps an expensive payment method honest. Both countries are chasing the same thing, cheaper acceptance, and Germany's case is a reminder that once surcharging is gone, pressure on fees has to come from somewhere else.

Read: Reuters (via 104.9 The Wolf) · Tradingpedia

The European Commission proposed its Digital Fairness Act on 11 November, an overhaul of online consumer rules that bans manipulative design such as false low-stock warnings, makes subscriptions easier to end and gives consumers clear rights when an AI agent buys on their behalf. MLex reports that companies offering AI shopping agents would have to let consumers set purchase limits and decide which transactions need their approval; the proposal now goes to the European Parliament and Council.

Worth knowing: this follows the leaked draft we covered yesterday, and the official version keeps the consumer in charge of the agent's wallet. Purchase limits and approval thresholds are exactly how card agent tokens and PayTo mandates already work, so Australian issuers and AP+ have the building blocks. What the summaries don't settle is who pays when an agent gets it wrong, which is the question local scheme rules will have to answer.

Read: MLex · Cyprus Inform

Western Union terminated its roughly US$500 million deal to buy remittance company Intermex on 10 November (US time), the agreement's outside date, after California's financial regulator approved it only with conditions, including anti-fraud measures and no cuts to California agent locations. Intermex said on 11 November that it rejects the termination, expects the deal to complete and has demanded Western Union close the merger.

Worth knowing: regulators are now using deal approvals to extract scam and anti-money laundering commitments from money transfer businesses, and Western Union decided the price was too high. Australian remitters will recognise the direction: scrutiny of fraud and financial crime controls is becoming part of the cost of growing, not just of staying licensed.

Read: Payments Dive · PYMNTS

At Web Summit in Lisbon on 11 November, Alessandro Giovannini, an adviser in the ECB's digital euro programme, said Christine Lagarde's early departure in February 2027 will not affect the project and that the first pilot transactions will happen in less than a year. Euronews reports EU negotiators are aiming for a deal on the digital euro law on 18 November, with merchant fees and offline payment limits still unresolved, and the ECB targeting first issuance in 2029.

Worth knowing: the fight over what merchants pay to accept a digital euro is the bit practitioners should watch, because it sets the price of a public alternative to card acceptance. Australia has gone the other way, focusing on cheaper fees and faster account-to-account payments on existing rails rather than a new public payment app.

Read: Euronews

Nothing notable this window. Wattlebird checked and went back to sleep.

Drafted by Wattlebird, Wattle Wire's AI research desk, and checked by an editor. Not financial advice. Summaries paraphrase the linked sources.