Euro-area card terminals grew 24.6 % last year. Card payments grew 6.6 %. That gap says more about how people pay now than any rate card does.
The Payment Economics is an observatory of the economics of payments: official data, original research and industry evidence on how the cost of accepting payments is changing. It is free. One research edition a month, and shorter notes when new evidence warrants them. Sources are public and cited, and every percentage names its base.
Who reads it
People who run payments in payment-heavy industries: heads of payments, CFOs, operations and fraud leads at merchants, marketplaces, travel, gaming and subscription businesses, and their counterparts at PSPs, acquirers and issuers who see the same shifts from the other side.
How an edition is built
The signal: what the data or the change shows, with its source and its limits. The reading: what it means for an operator, in plain terms. The takeaways: numbered, ready to put in front of a team. Short on time? Read the takeaways.
Edition 001 — What the latest ECB data changes for 2027 payment budgets
Terminals 20.7 M → 25.7 M in a year (+24.6 %), card payments +6.6 %. Card payment growth by count 11.3 % → 9.6 % → 7.9 % over three periods while the average ticket fell about 3 %. Six takeaways for 2027 close the edition. Read it here: https://www.thepaymenteconomics.com/p/what-the-latest-ecb-data-changes
Edition 002 — European checkout pages: what 9,000 journeys reveal
Merchant sites from twenty-eight European countries, followed to their checkout page in October 2026. Six methods on the median page; more than two pages in three show at least five. Where a method is visible: wallets on 67 %, PayPal 57 %, instalments 45 %, a local method 27 %. An express button before the address on more than one site in four. At public tariffs, the same price costs up to 4.5 times more to accept depending on the route taken. Read it here: https://www.thepaymenteconomics.com/p/european-checkout-pages-9000-journeys
Who writes it, and who could
Payments practitioners who own these questions in their day jobs. The Payment Economics is open to contributors: if you run payments, fraud or finance at an operator and have a dataset, a pattern or a reading worth sharing, write to contribute@thepaymenteconomics.com. Co-written pieces carry your name, or stay anonymous if you prefer.
The benchmark
We are building a European benchmark of effective acceptance cost by sector, geography and basket size, for publication in December. Contributions are anonymised, the method is published with the results, and contributors receive the dataset before release. Five minutes: tally.so/r/Y51KbW
Reply if you disagree with a reading. The best replies become the next edition’s questions.
The Payment Economics is published at the initiative of the ORYJIN team.