On May 5, 2026, the European Parliament’s ECON Committee approved the final text of the Payment Services Regulation (PSR) — 50 votes in favour, 2 against, 2 abstentions. The Parliament plenary vote follows later this month. PSR is the regulation that sits alongside PSD3 and rewrites how recurring card billing works in the EU.

Three M&A waves crashed through the merchant payments stack over the last 12 months: Global Payments closed its $24.25B acquisition of Worldpay on January 12, 2026; the orchestration vendor base consolidated (Worldline/PaymentIQ €160M, PayRetailers/Celeris, TokenEx/IXOPAY); and Global Payments separately swallowed takepayments in the UK. The post-Worldpay Global Payments now sits across 6 million merchant locations, $3.7 trillion in volume, and 175 countries. Counterparty concentration just rose at every layer of the merchant payments stack. For subscription companies, single-PSP architecture is no longer a sourcing decision — it’s a bet on the M&A activity of one private-sector counterparty. Orchestration absorbs the bet.

Visa rolled out three subscription-billing-relevant rule changes between April 1 and April 25, 2026: the VAMP “Excessive” dispute threshold dropped from 2.20% to 1.50%, Level 2 commercial-card interchange incentives sunset under CEDP, and the international “Issuer Will Never Approve” reattempt fee was revised. The compound effect for subscription companies: dumb retries cost more, disputes count more, and B2B commercial-card cohorts drift to higher-cost tiers without enriched data. The durable answer is cascading PSP routing across multiple acquirers, decline-code-aware retry logic, and a multi-MID volume strategy — not a denser dunning loop.