Cards Win the Count. Bank Rails Win the Value. Acquirers Need Both.

Key takeaways

• In the United States, cards account for more than three-quarters of noncash payments by number, while ACH carries almost three-quarters by value (Federal Reserve, 2026).
• In Canada, credit and debit cards make up 63 percent of payment volume, while electronic funds transfer (EFT) makes up 63 percent of payment value (Payments Canada, 2025).
• Software platforms now own the merchant's financial workflow. McKinsey estimates US payment-processing revenue through ISVs reached about $16 billion in 2025, roughly 60 percent of SME acquiring revenue (McKinsey, 2026).
• Acquirers that add embedded payments, including bank-to-bank collections, payouts, ledgers and reconciliation, under their own brand keep the merchant. Those that do not drift toward wholesale processing.

Every acquirer I meet, in Toronto, Atlanta or Montreal, can tell me its authorization rate to the decimal. Far fewer can tell me how much money their merchants move over bank rails each month. That second number is the size of the relationship they are not in.

I want to make the case that it is the most important number on an acquirer's 2027 roadmap.

What does the 2026 payments data say about cards and bank rails?

The same pattern shows up on both sides of the border. Cards win the count. Bank rails win the value.

The scale behind those shares is large. The US ACH Network carried 35.2 billion payments worth $93 trillion in 2025, with business-to-business volume up almost 10 percent to about 8.1 billion payments and Same Day ACH reaching 1.4 billion payments worth $3.9 trillion (Nacha). In Canada, EFT moved $7.2 trillion across 3.2 billion transactions in 2024, and online transfers, mostly Interac e-Transfer, moved another $568.6 billion (Payments Canada).

Instant rails are compounding the shift. The RTP network processed 142 million transactions worth $576 billion in the second quarter of 2026 (The Clearing House). FedNow settled almost 5 million payments worth $274.7 billion in the same quarter, up 83 percent in volume year over year (Federal Reserve Financial Services).

Most acquirers are engineered, priced and staffed for the count. The value runs somewhere else.

Why does this matter to acquirers now?

Because the merchant's operating layer has moved into software, and software buys the whole workflow.

McKinsey's 2025 merchant survey found that roughly 90 percent of US merchants use an ISV solution for payments or business management, up from 48 percent in 2022. It classifies both the US and Canada as stage-three ISV markets, where the leading platforms consolidate, maximize lifetime value and move to the PayFac model. The firm estimates that a PayFac keeps 70 to 90 percent of processing revenue, against 30 to 50 percent in a traditional ISV partnership, and it sizes the US market for SME financial management services at $120 billion, far more than acquiring transaction income (McKinsey).

Its conclusion for incumbents is blunt. Acquirers that keep selling stand-alone acquiring will lose share to software-led bundles.

The public numbers agree. In its fiscal 2025 annual report, Global Payments reported that its integrated and embedded service line grew 6.6 percent while its core payments line declined 1.7 percent (Global Payments 10-K). Growth is where the software is.

There is also an opening. The EY-Parthenon embedded payments survey found that 40 percent of non-financial platforms serving merchants had never integrated payments, and 41 percent named scarce resources as the main barrier to changing their payments strategy (EY). Those platforms are not looking for another vendor. They are looking for someone to take the infrastructure burden off them. Acquirers already sit in that seat.

What does the merchant actually need beyond acceptance?

Merchants and their software platforms expect a connected workflow: accept, fund, manage balances, pay out and reconcile, without leaving the partner's ecosystem. Card acceptance is step one. It is also the only step most acquirers offer.

Steps two through five are where a merchant decides who its financial partner really is. When the acquirer cannot fund an account over EFT or ACH, hold a seller's balance on a ledger, pay a contractor over RTP or Interac, or push a clean journal to the merchant's ERP, the ISV signs a second payments contract. The second contract rarely stays small.

Where do merchant acquirers get stuck?

The gap is never card acquiring. It is everything around it.

What does beyond card acceptance look like in production?

The architecture that works keeps the acquirer as the operator of the program, not a reseller of someone else's product. In practice, that means five things.

1. A partner account above every merchant account. Partner credentials create and manage merchant and ISV accounts, nested as deep as the channel needs: acquirer, then ISV, then sub-merchant.
2. Every non-card rail on one API, in both countries. EFT with T+1, T+2 and T+3 settlement, Interac e-Transfer and VoPay Instant in Canada; ACH including same-day, RTP, FedNow and Fedwire in the US; cross-border to more than 100 countries.
3. A ledger at every level. Each program, merchant, end client and virtual account keeps settled, pending and reserved funds apart and exposes one spendable figure. Funds move between ledgers on-platform, instantly, and touch a bank rail only when they enter or leave.
4. The acquirer's brand everywhere. Onboarding, portal, payment links, verification, emails and statements carry the acquirer's identity.
5. The acquirer's economics. The platform bills the acquirer wholesale; the acquirer prices the merchant and keeps the spread.

None of this touches card acceptance and settlement. It sits beside them. For the technical view of how funds move between ledgers, see Inside the Ledger: How On-Platform Money Movement Works for Acquirer Programs

Should acquirers build, buy or partner?

Building means rail connectivity, a ledger, return handling, reconciliation and two regulatory regimes. In Canada, payment service providers now operate under the Retail Payment Activities Act, whose safeguarding and operational risk requirements took effect on September 8, 2025, and the Bank of Canada began publishing notices of violation in June 2026 (DLA Piper). In the US, Nacha's fraud monitoring rules extended to all remaining non-consumer originators, third-party service providers and third-party senders in June 2026 (Nacha). Each is a program, not a project.

Partnering does not have to mean giving up control. The models run from a referral, which is the fastest market test, through a white-label reseller model, to a PayFac-style model for non-card rails, and finally a technology license where the acquirer holds the flow of funds under its own licenses. Most acquirers should start lean and go deeper once the numbers prove out.

Three questions for your product team this quarter

1. What share of our merchants' bank-rail volume, in both countries, runs through us today?
2. How many of our ISVs have signed a second payments contract for payouts, A2A or wallets?
3. If a merchant operates in Canada and the US, can we serve both entities from one program and one reconciliation?

If the answers are "we don't know," "more than we'd like," and "no," the conversation about 2027 has already started without you.

Card acceptance got acquirers into the merchant relationship. Money movement beyond the card is what keeps them there.

Want to see where your portfolio leaks volume? Book a 30-minute portfolio gap assessment with our partnerships team. Speak to a Fintech Advisor today. 

About the author

Hamed Arbabi is the CEO and Founder of VoPay, the embedded finance platform behind acquirer and processor programs in Canada and the United States. LinkedIn Profile. 

About VoPay

VoPay is a leading Fintech-as-a-Service platform built for enterprise acquirers and processors that want to embed payments and financial services directly into their core products, without the burden of building or maintaining complex infrastructure. VoPay delivers robust, compliant, fully white-labeled payment capabilities through a single API — so your acquiring relationships get stronger, not disrupted.

Frequently asked questions

What does "beyond card acceptance" mean for an acquirer?

It means offering merchants the money movement around the card: bank-to-bank collections, real-time payouts, ledgers and wallets, treasury and reconciliation, under the acquirer's brand. Card acceptance stays the entry point; the rest of the workflow keeps the merchant.

Why do bank rails matter more than cards to acquirers?

Cards lead by count, but bank rails lead by value. In the United States, ACH carries almost 75 percent of noncash payments by value, and in Canada, EFT makes up 63 percent of payment value. Most acquirers are built for the count, so the value moves through someone else.

Does adding bank-to-bank payments cannibalize card revenue?

The opportunity sits mostly in flows cards do not serve well: high-value B2B collections, recurring debits, payouts, refunds and fund transfers between parties. Those flows already move on bank rails, usually through someone else. Capturing them adds volume the acquirer does not see today.

How do acquirers make money on non-card payments?

Through per-transaction pricing by rail, platform and module fees, and value-added services such as instant payouts and ledgers. In a white-label model, the provider bills the acquirer wholesale, and the acquirer sets merchant pricing.

How long does it take to launch?

For a scoped pilot with two or three ISVs, VoPay's partner path runs 60 days from discovery to launch readiness. The integration surface for the acquirer's engineers is one REST API and a webhook endpoint.

How is VoPay regulated?

In Canada, VoPay operates under the Retail Payment Activities Act supervised by the Bank of Canada and is a FINTRAC-registered money services business. In the United States, VoPay holds no money-transmitter licences of its own and operates under the licences and charters of its US banking partners.