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Global Payments Growth Set to Slow to 5% as Investors Demand Proof of Durable Value

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Boston Consulting Group’s 24th Annual Global Payments Report Finds Industry Revenue Will Reach $2.6 Trillion by 2030, with Annual Growth Slowing to 5%, Down from 7% over the Past Five YearsGrowth Is Diverging Sharply by Region, with the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America Expanding Far Faster Than North America and EuropeThe Payments Sector Now Trades Well Below Historic Valuation Levels, a Gap That BCG Estimates at $500 BillionA Wave of Government-Driven Payment Sovereignty Is Fragmenting the Global Rails That Companies Use to Move Money Across Borders

BOSTON, Sept. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Global payments revenue will grow at just 5% annually through 2030, according to Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) latest Global Payments Report, down from 7% over the past five years. On track to reach $2.6 trillion by 2030, the sector remains in expansion, but growth is slowing and shifting. North America and Europe account for approximately 85% of the revenue pool but are expected to grow at 5% through 2030. The corresponding growth numbers for the Middle East and Africa, and Latin America are 8% and 7%, respectively.

These findings come as payments companies face a historic reset in investor sentiment. Many of them now trade roughly 25% below their 10-year average valuations and nearly 50% below their prior peak. Closing this gap would add an estimated $500 billion in market capitalization across the sector. Operating leverage has turned negative as costs, driven by wages, cloud spending, and fragmented technology stacks have outpaced revenue over the past three years.

The report, BCG’s 24th annual analysis of the global payments industry, draws on proprietary revenue models and a survey of nearly 500 large merchants globally.

“For most of the past decade, payments companies could count on broad-based growth almost anywhere they operated,” said Inderpreet Batra, a BCG managing director and senior partner and global head of the firm’s payments and fintech segment, and a coauthor of the report. “That’s no longer true. Growth is real, but it’s concentrating in specific regions and specific business models, and leaders need a much sharper view of where they can actually win.”

AI Is Strengthening the Position of Leading Payments Companies

BCG’s research finds that companies that already perform well are using AI to lower costs, improve products, and deepen customer relationships. That advantage compounds, making it structurally harder for slower-moving competitors to close the distance and raising the cost of falling behind even as AI tools become more widely available across the industry.

Merchants Are Evaluating Acquirers and Preparing for Agentic Commerce

Merchants are professionalizing their payments. According to BCG’s proprietary survey of large merchants, about half of large merchants review their acquirer annually, and 44% have switched or added their provider in the past five years. As AI agents begin initiating and managing purchases on consumers’ behalf, merchants are signaling that acquirer readiness for this shift toward agentic commerce is now a competitive requirement, not a future consideration:

73% of large merchants surveyed say they would switch acquirers for better support preparing for agent-initiated transactions.Acquirers and payment service providers rank as merchants’ second most-preferred partner for this shift, behind only large technology platforms.BCG’s report observes that acquirers who build agent authentication, tokenization, and delegated-consent capabilities can differentiate themselves and capture more of the resulting volume.

AI Is Accelerating Automation in Transaction Banking

BCG’s research finds that AI is closing a long-standing gap in trade finance, where paper-heavy processes have historically limited straight-through processing to between 30% and 70% of transactions. AI-driven document intelligence is now achieving accuracy above 85% for early adopters, allowing banks to automate document review across the trade life cycle, from basic bills of lading to anti-money-laundering checks. The same technology is extending into wire payment repair and sanctions screening, functions that have long resisted automation and account for a disproportionate share of banks’ operating costs.

Sovereignty Is Reshaping the Global Payments Map

Governments worldwide are treating payment infrastructure as a matter of economic sovereignty, increasingly fragmenting what was once a small number of dominant global networks into a patchwork of domestic and regional systems:

137 countries now have 24-7 instant payment systems, and public authorities play a central role in many of these systems—including India’s UPI, which clears more than 20 billion transactions a month, and 36 African systems that move nearly $2 trillion annually.In July 2026, the European Parliament approved opening negotiations on legislation for a digital euro, which the European Central Bank has framed as protection against a payments landscape dominated by non-European card schemes and dollar-linked stablecoins.Newer efforts such as mBridge, which already settles cross-border payments in central bank digital currencies, and BRICS Pay, which targets a 2026 rollout, aim to reduce reliance on dollar-denominated rails. Neither yet rivals the reach of established global networks, however, and BRICS members have not uniformly committed to the initiative.

“System-critical payments infrastructure is becoming an instrument of national policy, not just a utility for moving money,” said Markus Ampenberger, a BCG managing director and partner, and a coauthor of the report. “Winning payment providers will be the ones that can give clients reach across a fragmented system without forcing them to manage that fragmentation themselves.”

Download the articles that make up the report here: Article 1, Article 2, Article 3, and Article 4.

Media Contact:
Bruce Wraight, wraight.bruce@bcg.com

About Boston Consulting Group
Boston Consulting Group bridges the gap between ambition and outcomes for the world’s leading companies and organizations. We are built for this era of unprecedented change—bringing strategic clarity rooted in over 60 years of deep domain knowledge, combined with applied AI shaped by our practitioners. BCG works shoulder-to-shoulder with CEOs across industries and geographies to deliver transformative impact at scale: stronger returns, transferred capabilities, and change that sticks. For more information, visit bcg.com.

 

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SOURCE Boston Consulting Group (BCG)

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A Full Moon for Every Child: STARTRADER’s STARCARES Brings Support to SOS Children’s Village Ho Chi Minh City

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September 23, 2026

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The Mid-Autumn initiative delivered gift sets, household essentials and direct financial support to 213 people at the village in Go Vap.

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam, Sept. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — STARCARES, the corporate social responsibility programme of global multi-asset broker STARTRADER, hosted “A Full Moon for Every Child,” a Mid-Autumn Festival celebration at SOS Children’s Village Ho Chi Minh City in Go Vap. The on-site festival for the 60 children at the village was paired with essential supplies and cash support reaching 213 people, including house mothers and staff.

Every child received a gift set containing a lantern, cookies, a water bottle, a milk pack and a colouring kit. Hygiene, cleaning and pantry supplies were delivered to the village houses, alongside financial support for operating costs.

The village provides long-term, family-based care and education for approximately 160 children, from infants through university students, who have lost or are at risk of losing parental care. Since 2023, cuts to international aid have pressured operations, with remaining funding committed only through 2026. Contributions support tuition, caregiver salaries and the infrastructure that keeps these families together.

SOS Children’s Village plans care in years, not one-off gestures. STARCARES is built the same way, favouring recurring commitments under its Child Welfare & Community Aid pillar.

“The village was already doing the hard part long before we arrived. Our job is to make the practical side steadier, so the people raising these children can plan instead of improvise.” – Peter Karsten, CEO, STARTRADER.

“Support like this reaches our children in two ways. The essentials and funding ease real pressure on our households, and the celebration itself tells every child here that they are seen and thought of. That matters as much as anything we can put on a shelf.” – Mr. Hoang Long, Director, SOS Children’s Village Ho Chi Minh City.

STARCARES intends to extend this work across communities where STARTRADER operates.

About STARTRADER

STARTRADER is a global multi-asset broker empowering retail and institutional partners to access global markets through a range of platforms, including MetaTrader, STARTRADER APP, and STAR Copy. Regulated in five jurisdictions (CMA, ASIC, FSCA, FSA, and FSC), STARTRADER combines strong governance with a client-first approach, serving both retail clients and partners with a commitment to transparency, reliability, and long-term growth.

 

 

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Noma Named a Market Shaper in Gartner® Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Application Security – Startup Vendors

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September 23, 2026

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Recognition places Noma in the quadrant Gartner defines as “Full-Spectrum, Context-Aware Agentic Security,” as enterprises move to secure and govern AI agents at runtime

NEW YORK, Sept. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Noma, the market-leading enterprise AI and agent security platform, today announced it has been recognized as a Market Shaper in the Gartner® Emerging Market Quadrant (EMQ) for AI Application Security – Startup Vendors. Noma was placed in the Market Shapers quadrant, which Gartner characterizes as “Full-Spectrum, Context-Aware Agentic Security.”

According to the report, “Vendors in this quadrant move beyond the mandatory features of AI application security to focus on analyzing the full spectrum of AI agents’ behaviors, such as user requests, user intent, agents’ instructions, intent, memory, skills, tool use, data access, and system modification actions. They compare an agent’s intended instructions and permissions with its real behavior to identify deviations or misuse, and they use comprehensive scanning of code repositories and deployment pipelines to map all connections and potential risks.”

As enterprises move AI agents into production across cloud platforms, SaaS applications, and developer endpoints, security teams face a new class of risk. Agents choose which tools to call, chain actions across long sessions, and operate with permissions that no one continuously verifies against what the agent was asked to do. Security vendors are adapting. Gartner states: “They are refining their mechanisms for determining and enforcing least-privilege principles and intent drift detection, which is a security monitoring capability for agentic AI systems that tracks whether an agent’s actions remain aligned with the user’s original stated goal as the agent operates autonomously over several steps.”

“Securing agents comes down to two questions: what is this agent supposed to do, and what is it actually doing right now,” said Niv Braun, CEO and Co-Founder of Noma. “Answering them takes context that no single-layer tool has: the agent’s posture, what it is connected to, its blast radius, and its intent, compared against its real behavior at runtime. We built Noma so enterprises can define policy for every agent in one place, enforce it across the infrastructure they already run, and let agents work at full speed without acting outside their boundaries.”

We believe Noma’s placement reflects four capabilities that distinguish its agent security and governance platform:

Coverage of every agent, wherever it runs. Noma secures endpoint agents such as Claude Code and Cursor, SaaS agents built in Copilot Studio and Agentforce, and cloud and homegrown agents on Bedrock, Azure, and Databricks, all from one platform. Noma is deployed on more than 2.6 million endpoints.A unified agent control plane. Enterprises define policy once, in Noma’s AI Constitution, and Noma enforces it across every agent type and every category of risk: agents that make mistakes, agents that drift from their instructions, and agents manipulated by an adversary. Policy spans risky behavior and threats, access and identity, and business operations.Context for the right runtime decision. Noma’s Runtime Context Engine combines posture (what an agent is connected to, its permissions, its blast radius, and its baseline behavior) with intent (what the agent was asked to do and what it is actually doing across a session). Runtime response ranges from steering an agent mid-session to masking sensitive data, blocking a single action, or terminating the agent’s operation.Architecture flexibility. Through open enforcement, Noma decouples the security and governance control plane from AI infrastructure. Policy is enforced through native integrations with gateways including Kong, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, LiteLLM, TrueFoundry, and MCP gateways; native hooks inside Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot; SDKs and APIs for homegrown agents; and direct partner integrations with Databricks and Microsoft.

Noma operates under multiyear enterprise license agreements with Fortune 500 and Global 2000 organizations across financial services, pharma, insurance, and technology. Databricks is both a strategic partner and an early investor in the company, and Noma’s direct integrations with Databricks, Microsoft, and AWS extend its enforcement into the AI infrastructure enterprises already run.

This recognition follows Noma’s designation as a Cool Vendor in the Cool Vendors™ in AI Security. Noma has also been named in Gartner research including the Market Guide for Guardian Agents, the Innovation Guide for AI Agents, the Innovation Insight for AI Application Security, the Market Overview for AI Usage Control, Innovation Insight: AI Bills of Materials (AIBOMs) Strengthen AI Governance, Emerging Tech: The Future of AI Security Is in Securing Agent Actions, Not Prompts, and Agent 365: Strong for Microsoft Agents, but Users Still Need Platform-Agnostic Governance and Security.

Gartner recommended actions for Market Shapers is “Deploy these tools for complex, homegrown multiagent applications that require deep runtime monitoring and security testing.” We believe Noma gives those organizations the agent security and governance to run agents at scale, with policy defined once and enforced at runtime across every agent and every environment.

Learn more at noma.security or request a demo.

Gartner Disclaimer

Gartner, Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Application Security – Startup Vendors, Meghan Hollis, Dionisio Zumerle, Dennis Xu, Marissa Schmidt, 16 September 2026.

Gartner, Cool Vendors™ in AI Security, Jeremy D’Hoinne, Bart Willemsen, Dennis Xu, Avivah Litan, 24 September 2025.

Gartner, Market Guide for Guardian Agents, Avivah Litan, Daryl Plummer, Carlton Sapp, Dionisio Zumerle, Tom Coshow,  Max Goss, Lauren Kornutick, 25 February 2026.

Gartner, Innovation Guide for AI Agents, Arun Chandrasekaran, Leinar Ramos, Tom Coshow, 22 January 2026.

Gartner, Innovation Insight for AI Application Security, Dionisio Zumerle, Jeremy D’Hoinne, Meghan Hollis, 08 January 2026.

Gartner, Market Overview for AI Usage Control, Ashish Suraj Bhan, Peter Firstbrook, John Watts, 20 August 2026.

Gartner, Innovation Insight: AI Bills of Materials (AIBOMs) Strengthen AI Governance, Manjunath Bhat, Angela Zhao, Aaron Lord, 27 May 2026.

Gartner, Emerging Tech: The Future of AI Security Is in Securing Agent Actions, Not Prompts, Mark Wah, David Senf, 20 February 2026.

Gartner, Agent 365: Strong for Microsoft Agents, but Users Still Need Platform-Agnostic Governance and Security, Avivah Litan, Dan Wilson, Dionisio Zumerle, Sarah Davies, 28 May 2026.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About Noma

Noma is an AI security platform that helps enterprises discover, govern, and protect AI agents across every environment where they run. Noma covers homegrown applications on AWS Bedrock and Azure, SaaS agent platforms like Microsoft Copilot Studio and Salesforce AgentForce, and coding assistants and MCP servers on developer machines. Four products in one platform: discovery and posture (AI-SPM), access control, adversarial testing (Red Teaming), and runtime detection and response (AI-DR). Backed by $130M+ in funding. AWS, Microsoft, and Databricks are strategic partners. Trusted by Fortune 500 companies across financial services, pharma, insurance, and technology. Learn more at https://noma.security/ and follow us on LinkedIn.

Media Contact

ICR for Noma
Noma@icrinc.com 

 

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SOURCE Noma Security

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Tegene Robot Introduces 3D Sorter Portfolio for Warehouse and Parcel Operations

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September 23, 2026

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Configurations for standard parcels, high-throughput operations, complex items and future expansion

BEIJING, Sept. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Beijing Tegene Robots Co., Ltd. (Tegene Robot) has introduced a 3D Sorter portfolio for warehouse and parcel operations. The portfolio covers standard parcel sorting, high-throughput operations, complex-item handling and modular expansion. Tegene designs each configuration around parcel characteristics, throughput, the number of destinations, available space, system interfaces and future expansion requirements. The company provides solution design, equipment delivery, on-site commissioning and ongoing operational and after-sales support for parcel and express logistics, cross-border e-commerce, retail and third-party logistics (3PL) customers.

The 3D Sorter Series includes the 3D Sorter for standard parcels and multi-destination sorting; 3D Sorter M for high-throughput, multi-layer operations; 3D Sorter E for non-conveyable (NC) items, flat parcels, envelopes and complex destination flows; and 3D Sorter X for modular chute expansion. Published maximum mechanical throughput and configuration specifications include 24,500 pph and up to 1,000 chutes for the 3D Sorter, 40,000 pph for the 3D Sorter M, and 31,000 pph with up to 1,500 configurable chutes for the 3D Sorter E. Actual configurations depend on parcel size, weight, packaging condition, the number of destinations, site layout, induction method, system interfaces and project design.

In operations where cross-belt sorters process standard parcels, the 3D Sorter E is positioned as a complement rather than a replacement. Its multi-cart vertical structure, three-dimensional chute layout and multi-item design support complex items and destination flows in a coordinated sorting system. Under suitable parcel and project conditions, this can reduce re-induction, manual transfers and intermediate buffering.

Tegene has served customers including SHEIN, CIDER, SF Express, Watsons, Shopee and Temu across cross-border e-commerce, parcel logistics, retail and 3PL operations. The company supports projects in China, the United States, Europe and other Asian markets through regional teams and partners. Its global service network provides 24/7 remote diagnostics, original spare-parts support and local technical coordination for overseas warehousing, cross-border fulfillment, parcel sorting and system integration projects.

About Tegene Robot

Founded in 2022, Tegene Robot develops intelligent sorting solutions for logistics and warehousing. It operates its own intelligent manufacturing base of more than 20,000 square meters. Its services include site and workflow assessment, equipment configuration, system interfaces, delivery, commissioning, operational support and after-sales service.

Company website: https://www.tegene.com/

3D Sorter E product page: https://www.tegene.com/products/3d-sorter-nc/

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SOURCE Beijing Tegene Robots Co., Ltd.

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