Payments events & key dates, worldwide

The 14 November 2026 "unstructured addresses rejected" milestone has fragmented by rail. Federal Reserve Financial Services rescheduled the Fedwire Funds Service release to November 2027 (announced 27 August). Swift accepted a community request to extend the CBPR+ migration and deferred all SR2026 payments changes, promising a new date by December; non-payments SR2026 items (T+1 support) go live in Q1 2027. The EPC says its 15 November 2026 end-date for SEPA scheme transactions stands until the Payment Scheme Management Board meets on 9 September. Keep building structured-address support — Swift reports over 60% of traffic still carried unstructured addresses in April.

Arc is a USDC-native Layer 1 aimed at institutional settlement: USDC is the gas token, consensus is the Tendermint-derived Malachite engine with sub-500 ms deterministic finality, and execution is an EVM built on Reth, so existing Solidity tooling ports directly. The eleven founding validators include BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, Global Payments, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo and Visa. For processors it is one more settlement rail to map alongside Tempo and the public chains — watch for USDC/EURC contract addresses on Arc once published.

The EPC's March updates to the VOP scheme become effective on 20 September 2026: rulebook v1.1 (urgent change requests from the December 2025 consultation), inter-PSP API specification 1.1.1 (no empty API fields, character-set, timestamp and HTTP-header clarifications) and API Security Framework v2.1, which becomes mandatory for VOP, SRTP and SPAA participants using APIs. The v2.0 change-request consultation closed on 30 June; v2.0 is expected around November.

EMVCo published the draft "EMV Agentic Payments — Framework for Specifications" on 1 September and is taking feedback until 30 September. The core idea is "Intent Services": a shared, interoperable layer where participants register, reference and manage consumer-authorised intent across a transaction lifecycle — complementing cryptographic schemes such as AP2 mandates and Mastercard Verifiable Intent. EMVCo also flags future Know-Your-Agent capabilities and agentic transaction indicators, which would eventually surface in authorization data.

Two PCI SSC consolidations land this autumn. Software-based PIN Entry on COTS (SPoC) and Contactless Payments on COTS (CPoC) are being retired in favour of Mobile Payments on COTS (MPoC), which covers both PIN entry and contactless acceptance on off-the-shelf devices. Separately, the PCI 3-D Secure SDK Security Standard has a formal sunset from 1 May to 31 October 2026 and becomes a module of the PCI Secure Software Standard. New SoftPOS and 3DS SDK evaluations should target the successor standards.

The EPC says its timeline stands until further notice and that the Payment Scheme Management Board will decide on 9 September 2026 in light of the Swift extension.

Treasury's notice of proposed rulemaking (Federal Register, 18 August 2026) implements Section 3 of the GENIUS Act — who may issue, offer and sell payment stablecoins in the US — with a 60-day comment period. The statutory timeline stands: from 18 January 2027 only permitted payment stablecoin issuers (or OCC-registered foreign issuers) may issue for the US market, and from 18 July 2028 digital-asset service providers may not offer non-permitted stablecoins to US persons. A separate FinCEN rule (22 June) sets customer-identification requirements for permitted issuers.

The November 2026 release was rescheduled to November 2027 on 27 Aug 2026; release scope is due in autumn 2026. Fedwire itself has run natively on ISO 20022 since 14 Jul 2025.