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The EU’s Instant Payments Regulation (IPR) aims to make instant euro payments ubiquitous, shifting regulatory focus from adoption to operational resilience and compliance enforcement.

The EU is set to reshape Europe’s anti-money laundering (AML) landscape by introducing a central authority and a harmonised rulebook, shifting supervision from national discretion to coordinated EU oversight and increasing operational and compliance expectations across institutions.

Moving into 2026, the European payments industry is monitoring the progress of the Financial Data Access (FiDA) Regulation, which builds on the open banking framework established in the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) to establish a regime for open finance across the EU.

Open banking regulation is set to move forward significantly in the EU during 2026, as regulators shift from refining access rights under the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) to enforcing operational, security and accountability standards across the payments value chain.

Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 (Markets in Crypto-Assets – MiCA) was published on June 9, 2023. It provides specific rules and requirements for crypto-assets, related services and activities that were previously not covered by Union legislative acts on financial services. This Mapping EU Legislation: MiCA page lays out the key dates, transition deadlines for member states, as well as any RTS, ITS, delegated regulation, implementing regulation or guideline issued and published. It will be updated in line with any MiCA update.

The ninth edition of the UK’s Regulatory Initiatives Grid, published in December 2025, sets out the country’s financial services regulatory agenda for the next two years. In this piece, Vixio examines what the regulators have outlined in the multi-sector section of the latest regulatory grid, explains the likely impact of developments on financial institutions and suggests what the regulators’ stated priorities tell us about the direction of travel in the UK.

Africa has seen a boom in its payments industry in recent years, driven by rising demand for digital payments, B2B lending and other financial services for underserved customers. As payments firms have scaled, they have taken on roles that were once the preserve of the public sector and incumbent financial institutions.

In a clear indication that Ukraine is gaining momentum in its fight against financial crime regarding anti-money laundering (AML) failures, the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) announced the issuance of seven enforcement actions in December 2025 against a diverse range of financial institutions.

By granting organisations extra time to adapt to certain elements of the country’s overhauled anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CTF) framework, AUSTRAC is acknowledging the scale and complexity of the reforms.

The G7 Cyber Expert Group (CEG) anticipates a secure transition to post-quantum cryptography beginning as early as 2027, reshaping future compliance, operational resilience and supervisory expectations for payments providers.