A2A payments overview | the challenge of displacing cards

Throughout this week, industry experts have shared their thoughts on key areas of A2A payments, namely:

1. Where is A2A payments adoption currently accelerating, and where is it still struggling? Why?
2. How does the rise of agentic AI and automated purchasing change the opportunities and risks around A2A?
3. Which regulatory changes are expected to further influence the real-time payments sector? 

The final piece of The Paypers’ series celebrating the anniversary of our ‘Account-to-Account Payments Report’ looks at what’s currently holding A2A payments back from becoming the biggest competitor to cards, as seen by those actively involved in the space. 

Without further ado, we invite you to discover what they have to say below. 

What is the biggest challenge preventing A2A from displacing card payments at scale, and how can it be solved? 

Mark Beresford, Director, Edgar, Dunn & Company: The biggest challenge, based on the advisory work EDC conducts with its clients, is consumer trust at the checkout.  A2A usually lacks the familiar consumer protections, instant reassurance, and easy dispute handling that make cards feel safe, making users and merchants hesitant to rely on it at scale. A little more friction or uncertainty can wipe out the potential savings or value proposition for the consumer and the merchant if conversion drops. Payment cards win not just because of consumer habit, but because they bundle credit, chargebacks, fraud protection, and universal acceptance into a smooth experience, especially when combined with an Apple Pay or Google Pay transaction, regardless of whether online or offline. In contrast, A2A often asks the customer to authenticate via a banking app, and there’s also lower reversibility and trust in the new customer journey, which is a tough sell in high-volume retailing or in an unfamiliar merchant context. 

Gabriel Lucas, Director, Redbridge Debt and Treasury Advisory: The biggest challenge is not tech but experience and incentives. Card payments combine hard-to-match convenience, consumer protection, and global acceptance. For the A2A ecosystem to compete at scale, it needs to replicate that reliability and trust level while providing clear advantages, such as lower costs or faster settlement. Merchants will also play an important role, integrating A2A payments to improve checkout experiences and deliver visible value to consumers. 

Keith Olson, VP of ACH & Open Banking, Nuvei: Card payments set a high bar because they combine convenience, protection, and incentives in a single experience. A2A has a strong cost advantage for merchants, but that alone doesn’t change consumer behaviour, and closing that gap requires a more complete proposition. Consistent dispute frameworks, seamless authentication, and meaningful incentives all need to be part of the experience, while merchant-led rewards and pricing strategies will likely matter more. In the near term, the opportunity is debit use cases where A2A can deliver a clearer advantage. Adoption will follow wherever the payment experience feels equal or better than that of cards. 

Duygu Inanc Koyunpınar, Head of Product, DIMOCO: The biggest challenge is consistency of experience and coverage across the banking ecosystem. Cards benefit from a highly standardised, globally accepted model, while A2A depends heavily on the quality of individual bank implementations. Innovative banks’ customers already experience the simplicity and speed level required for adoption, but traditional banking environments often fall short in delivering streamlined, reliable flows. Solving this requires stronger standardisation, better API performance, and orchestration layers that can smooth out these differences. The objective isn’t to replace cards entirely, but to make A2A equally seamless and dependable in the contexts where it adds the most value. 

Tareq Shaheen, Product Development Director, Payment Solutions, Eastnets: The biggest challenge is not the A2A rail itself, but the fact that cards still deliver a more complete proposition for merchants and consumers. Cards combine broad acceptance, familiar checkout, mature dispute processes, recurring payment support, rewards, and strong consumer trust. A2A will only displace cards at scale if it matches that end-to-end experience, not just cost economics. This means improving checkout UX, refunds and dispute handling, merchant adoption and support for recurring and delegated payments, alongside stronger fraud controls such as payee verification. In parallel, geopolitical fragmentation is increasing the interest in A2A, especially in regions where payment sovereignty and reduced reliance on international card schemes have become strategic priorities.

Martín Azcue López, Business Development Director, Bizum: The main driver for A2A payments is not replacing cards but offering a simple, fast, and secure alternative, allowing businesses and users to choose what suits them best. This is increasingly important under the current geopolitical context, due to the need for European payment alternatives. There are two main challenges:

• Collaboration between European solutions, like EuroPA and EPI Company members, must deliver beyond initial cross-border P2P results.
• The lack of European payment terminal infrastructure supporting A2A payments, caused by terminal manufacturer dependencies. European institutions' support for guaranteeing payment components, particularly a European kernel, in payment terminals could accelerate A2A adoption.

Tarik Zerkti, CEO, MyBank: Beyond being payment methods, cards are a complete commercial and risk infrastructure, whereas most people see A2A primarily as a payment rail. Cards combine seamless UX, global acceptance, and embedded incentives like rewards and credit, making it difficult to compete in high-conversion environments like subscriptions, one-click flows, or physical POI. A2A can gain ground when organised and standardised around a scheme approach with either a trusted brand, solution manager, contractual framework, operational guidelines, dispute resolution mechanism, and monetisation framework, ensuring fair value distribution. 

Magnus Bergaplass, Head of Mobile Payments, Merchant Acquiring/PF&I, Worldline:  A2A isn’t poised to replace cards at scale; it coexists with cards in the short–to–mid-term, best for targeted use cases like bill payments. The challenge is to build scale and versatile use cases with seamless UX when there are cross-border currency and bank UX variances. This can be addressed by focusing on high-value, repetitive bill-pay segments, providing end-to-end A2A with currency conversion, unified reconciliation, and strong onboarding. Moreover, to accelerate adoption without forcing card displacement, merchant incentives, bank remuneration, and transparent pricing should be aligned.

Dylan Massey, Co-Founder & CEO, Interchecks:  A2A isn’t fully competing with cards because of three main friction points:

1. The linking experience: connecting a bank account is still harder than entering a card number.
2. Dispute workflows: when something goes wrong with card transactions, there's an established evidence chain and chargeback process. With A2A, that infrastructure is largely non-existent and for disputed transactions, the merchant often carries the full loss. 
3. Settlement certainty: with cards, merchants know the money is coming, but with A2A, there's inherent delay and uncertainty around funds’ settlement. Addressing that last point is built directly into our Pay by Bank product — our risk team does the modelling upfront so merchants are confident the money will settle. It is a kind of structural problem-solving that we believe the industry needs more of.

Cameron Flood, Head of Product - UK & Europe, Yaspa: A2A technology is strong: real-time, secure, and increasingly well-distributed. However, displacing cards at scale requires more than good rails, as fragmented terminology and low consumer awareness are slowing checkout conversion. Consumer protection is the bigger, structural challenge, as users are accustomed to cards’ chargeback rights, fraud liability, and rewards programmes. Until A2A has a clear, widely adopted protection framework that comes with the payment method, it'll remain an alternative rather than the default. Once the industry unites behind such a framework, it shifts from challenger to standard.

Roy Prayikulam, SVP Risk and Fraud Division, INFORM: The main challenge is market structure, not technology. Card networks benefit from global scale, strong network effects, and unified acceptance, while A2A remains fragmented across countries and providers. Without a critical mass of users and merchants, alternatives struggle to gain traction. Solving this requires a coordinated, pan-European approach that ensures interoperability and ubiquity. Concomitantly, A2A payments must match cards’ convenience and UX, while offering merchants a clear cost advantage. Only when A2A becomes the simplest, most seamless, and most cost-efficient option for both consumers and merchants is large-scale displacement realistic.

Be a part of this conversation

As you read this, we are hard at work on the third edition of the A2A Payments Report, set to launch this summer. If you’re a solution or technology provider willing to share your expertise with other professionals in this space, we’d love to hear from you! Reach out to sales@thepaypers.com