PSD3 oversight on banking APIs, ECB's Pontes platform, and AI agent payments

Banking APIs as a regulated surface under PSD3

According to an analysis on Finextra, the upcoming PSD3 framework will place banking application programming interfaces (APIs) under strict regulatory supervision. The new rules aim to establish enforceable uptime and performance benchmarks to solve longstanding reliability bottlenecks across open banking. For online businesses, tighter technical oversight promises fewer transaction drops and reduced checkout friction during account-to-account payments using open banking.

ECB unveils Pontes to settle wholesale tokenised assets

Europa Press reports that the European Central Bank has launched Pontes, a wholesale mechanism engineered to settle tokenised financial assets in central bank money. The move aligns with wider institutional preparations for a digital euro and bridges central bank reserves with distributed ledger environments. While built for financial institutions, these settlement rails define how securely and promptly wholesale funds transfer through each payment gateway into merchant accounts.

Danske Bank and Mastercard test automated payments with AI agents

Mastercard and Danske Bank have completed a live purchase where an artificial intelligence agent autonomously selected the item and completed the transaction on behalf of a consumer, according to Finextra. The sequence was executed without manual checkout steps, guided solely by user-defined delegation criteria. This milestone indicates that online checkout architectures must prepare to process and authenticate requests submitted by software agents rather than human shoppers.

Santander recruits conversational payments specialist for AI unit

Europa Press reports that Banco Santander has hired Luis Cantero for its global data and artificial intelligence unit. Cantero previously served as managing director at Silbo Money, a fintech initiative designed to facilitate conversational payments through WhatsApp. The hire highlights major banking interest in conversational commerce and indicates that messaging-based collection methods are increasingly supplementing web storefronts.

ECB deploys Pontes for its own investment portfolio

The European Central Bank announced it will invest a portion of its own funds in tokenised debt securities, executing wholesale settlement directly via Pontes. By using internal capital, the authority is actively testing the operational resilience of its infrastructure under live conditions. These institutional pilots strengthen the technical standards and legal certainty supporting future tokenised transaction processing across Europe.

What to watch tomorrow

Attention shifts to operational standards for delegating payment credentials to AI agents, alongside technical benchmarks expected for European banking APIs. Follow our ongoing industry coverage in our news section.