Help Your Business Save on Network Costs and Approve More Payments 

Help Your Business Save on Network Costs and Approve More Payments 

Every time a customer clicks “pay now” on a website, a tiny tax flows invisibly from the merchant to the card network. It is called interchange, and for most businesses, it is simply the cost of doing business online. But a new program from Visa is rewriting that arrangement, and the numbers are already turning heads.

Visa recently launched the Digital Commerce Authentication Program (DCAP), a new global framework designed to reduce fraud and increase authorization rates for card-not-present transactions. In plain terms: share more data about who is buying, and Visa rewards you with lower fees. 

What Sharing Your Customer’s Data Actually Means

The idea behind the Visa Digital Commerce Authentication Program is deceptively simple. The program rewards businesses in the US for sharing richer transaction data with issuers during authentication, such as device ID, billing address, IP address, and customer email. Qualifying transactions receive a net interchange reduction of five basis points.

Five basis points sounds small. But for a business processing millions of dollars in card payments each month, that fraction of a percentage point compounds into something very real, very fast.

This is not just a technical upgrade. It is a fundamental shift in how trust gets priced into a transaction. The more a merchant can prove about who is on the other end of a purchase, the less risk the issuer carries, and the more they are willing to give back in fees.

The Problem That Almost Killed the Opportunity

Here is where it gets complicated, and where most businesses would have quietly walked away.

New network programs create opportunity, but they also introduce complexity. Businesses need to understand which transactions qualify, ensure their integration passes the required data, and determine whether participating will improve their end-to-end transaction economics or have unintended consequences, such as hurting authorization rates.

That last part is the quiet danger no one talks about. A business could chase a five-basis-point saving and accidentally lower their approval rate in the process. A declined card is not just a lost sale, it is a customer who may never come back.

To participate in DCAP, businesses need to share required cardholder data with issuers via frictionless authentication in their checkout. This might introduce latency and uncertainty around how issuers interpret these newer signals.

So the question became: how do you capture the upside without triggering the downside?

How Stripe Solved It, and What $18.4 Million Looks Like

Stripe did not simply flip a switch. Before rolling out DCAP, they worked with Visa to run readiness testing and identify the right implementation approach. This collaborative testing underscored the need for transaction-level intelligence.

The answer was Stripe Authorization Boost, a tool that evaluates each transaction individually rather than applying the same rule to every purchase. Rather than applying static rules, Authorization Boost evaluates cost savings, conversion impact, and fraud risk at the individual transaction level to determine when to apply Data Only 3DS. This allows businesses to capture DCAP savings while limiting the impact to the customer experience and optimizing authorization rates. 

The results are striking. Since April 18, Stripe has helped businesses capture $18.4 million in annualized network cost savings from DCAP. By helping businesses collect and pass the required data, there was an 8x increase in the number of DCAP-eligible transactions. stripe

That is not a projection. That is money already being saved, automatically, in the background, while merchants focus on their actual businesses.

What This Means If You Are a Stripe User Right Now

The practical upside here is significant, and the barrier to entry is lower than most people realize.

If you use Authorization Boost and are collecting the required data points, you are already automatically benefiting from DCAP optimizations. No new integration needed. No forms to fill out. The savings are arriving without anyone lifting a finger.

For businesses using standalone 3DS, they can participate by setting flow_preference[type] to data_share on authentication requests and ensuring required fields are populated. Stripe’s full documentation on Authorization Boost walks through the exact steps. 

The Visa Digital Commerce Authentication Program represents something bigger than a fee discount. It is evidence that the payment networks are willing to price in trust, and that the businesses willing to invest in better authentication infrastructure will be systematically rewarded for it. That gap between businesses that optimize their payments stack and those that do not is only going to widen.

The real question worth sitting with is this: if Stripe can generate $18.4 million in savings for its merchants in weeks, what are other payment processors waiting for, and what is it costing their customers right now?

Your Bank Is Losing Ground, Fintech Revenues Are Growing Four Times Faster and the Gap Is Only Getting Wider

Think about the last time you walked into a bank branch. Now think about how many times in the past month you’ve sent money, split a bill, or topped up savings, all on your phone, in seconds, without speaking to a single human being.

That quiet shift in daily habit is now showing up as an earthquake in global financial data.

Global fintech revenues surpassed $500 billion in 2025, growing four times faster than traditional financial institutions as profitability, funding, and dealmaking all strengthened, according to the Global Fintech Report 2026: From Recovery to Resurgence, published by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and FT Partners. The number isn’t just impressive, it’s a statement about who is winning the future of finance.

From Startup Energy to Sector Maturity

Not long ago, fintech was dismissed as flashy but fragile, startups burning venture capital to acquire customers they couldn’t profitably serve. That era is over.

The world’s largest fintechs are now more profitable than at any point in the sector’s history, with 74% of the biggest public players turning a profit and average EBITDA margins rising 400 basis points to 20% in 2025. This is no longer a story about potential. It is a story about performance.

Incumbent bank global revenue grew by just 5% year over year in 2025, while fintech revenue grew four times faster at 22%. That gap, sustained and widening, is precisely what makes this moment a turning point. American Banker

As BCG’s Inderpreet Batra put it, fintech has come out of its reset years as a fundamentally more mature industry, one where the firms leading today are profitable, disciplined, and expanding into new products and geographies with a seriousness that wasn’t always present during the boom.

The Numbers That Should Make Banks Nervous

Fintech initial public offerings increased by 50 percent to 42 deals in 2025, and mergers and acquisitions reached $251 billion, up from $184 billion the previous year. Fintechs are not just growing, they are consolidating, acquiring, and building moats.

For the first time on record outside of 2023, scaled fintech companies acquired more businesses than banks did. Read that again: fintech firms, which didn’t meaningfully exist two decades ago, are now out-buying the institutions that have dominated global finance for centuries.

Payments remains the dominant segment at $222 billion, 44% of global total fintech revenue for 2025, while trading and investments, along with deposits, were the fastest growing subsectors at 38% and 30% year-over-year increases respectively.

AI Is the Dividing Line

The report draws a sharp line between fintechs that have made AI genuinely central to how they operate, and those simply experimenting at the edges.

BCG data shows fintechs effectively deploying AI are achieving up to five times greater developer productivity, with the strongest near-term gains coming in engineering, underwriting, compliance, and customer support.

FT Partners CEO Steve McLaughlin was blunt in the report: a real divide is emerging between fintech companies that have made AI foundational, embedded across finance, accounting, customer service, and fraud, and those still using it for coding help and a handful of disconnected workflows. The difference, he said, comes down to management, engineering talent, and the willingness to actually rewire the organization. Capital alone hasn’t produced breakout capability.

This is a signal for African and emerging-market fintechs in particular. The competitive window to build AI-native operations is open, but it won’t stay open forever.

Neobanks Are Becoming Full Financial Platforms

The report identifies a structural shift in how neobanks are positioning themselves. They are no longer just frictionless alternatives to legacy accounts. They are building out lending, investing, insurance, cross-border transfers, and wealth management, evolving from single-product challengers into comprehensive financial platforms.

Europe was a standout performer on the global stage with an average of 24 percent growth, but much of this was anchored in a strong UK performance that soared ahead at 30 percent. Leading UK neobanks have moved into mortgage products and mass-affluent wealth offerings, deepening the competitive threat to traditional banks.

The US, notably, is a harder market. Crowded incumbents, high digital acquisition costs, and a fragmented regulatory environment mean international neobank entrants are likely to find niche rather than broad-based success there. But that leaves the rest of the world, including Africa’s largely underserved population, as contested, high-growth territory.

This isn’t an abstract industry story. Fintech revenues growing faster than traditional banks directly reflects where people are choosing to put their money, their trust, and their daily financial lives.

When a market trader in Lagos uses a mobile wallet to pay suppliers instead of queuing at a bank, that is a fintech revenue event. When a young professional in Nairobi invests spare change through an app, that is fintech capturing a slice of what banks once owned entirely.

BCG’s Deepak Goyal noted that four percent of global financial services revenue is a remarkable milestone for a sector that barely existed two decades ago, but also signals how much of the opportunity still lies ahead. The fintechs that will capture that white space, he argued, are the ones building with discipline on regulation, profitability, and trust.

The Verdict

The evidence in this report is decisive: fintech revenues are growing faster than traditional banks not because of hype, but because the underlying products are better, cheaper, faster, and more accessible for more people.

Traditional banks that treat this as a temporary disruption rather than a permanent structural shift are making a very expensive mistake.

The next phase of fintech growth won’t be about survival, it will be about which companies build the platforms that define how billions of people save, borrow, invest, and pay for the next 20 years.

The question is: will the institutions and regulators shaping Africa’s financial future be building toward that world, or scrambling to catch up with it?