Foreword

For merchant payments leaders, the regulation that matters is the regulation you feel at the till. This roadmap is built around that one test. For too long, merchant guidance has read like a memo written for payment firms, leaving the merchant to work out what, if anything, actually lands on them. As the lead of the merchant working group at The Payments Association, we have turned that around. Every entry tells you first whether the obligation sits on you, on your provider, or nowhere yet, and only then explains the mechanism.

The direction of travel is clear enough. Cost of acceptance is under real scrutiny, with the regulator committed in principle to capping cross-border interchange while scheme and processing fees keep climbing, and a genuine lower-cost account-to-account alternative is finally arriving through commercial variable recurring payments. Crypto and stablecoins are moving into a regulated perimeter across the UK, EU and US at once, which turns stablecoin acceptance from a curiosity into something worth planning for. A business remains responsible for complying with consumer law when it deploys an AI agent, while payment-specific authentication, consent, and liability rules for agentic payments are still being developed.

None of this rewards sitting still. Read this roadmap merchant-first—act on the few things that land on you now, prepare for what is reaching you through your providers, and monitor the rest. Where a consultation is still open, put your view in, because the merchant voice is the one most often missing from the room. Closing that gap is exactly why The Payments Association does this work.

—Andrew Doukanaris, TPA Ambassador, Merchant working group lead.