Payments Technology

W3C/FIDO Alliance

W3C: An international public-interest non-profit organization that develops standards and guidelines to help everyone build a web-based on the principles of accessibility, internationalization, privacy, and security. FIDO: An open industry association with a focused mission: reduce the world’s reliance on passwords.

The W3C Web Authentication (WebAuthn) standard was developed in coordination with the FIDO Alliance and is a core component of the FIDO2 Project along with FIDO’s Client to Authenticator Protocol (CTAP specification).

• The Web Payments Working Group continues to explore options for avoiding Secure Payment Confirmation (SPC) double step-ups.
• An SPC Capabilities Explainer was also posted to github here.

X9/ISO

X9: An open body that develops and maintains voluntary consensus standards for the U.S. financial services industry. ISO: A network of national standards bodies that develops and publishes international standards on everything from screw threads to quantum key distribution.

X9 represents the United States on two ISO technical committees related to financial services and their subcommittees.

• The X9A subcommittee ballot for the X9.150 QR Code standard passed. The standard is now in Consensus Body balloting, which runs through April 23.
• The US Payments Study Group is developing a ‘Handbook of US Payment Types and Uses’ and is currently refining the table of contents and initial content. The study group is open to non-X9 participants.

USPF/IAF

USPF: A cross-industry body that enables open exchange of expertise and information to solve problems and help realize innovations that make payments more efficient, simple, and secure. IAF: A cross-industry body dedicated to the development, advancement, and adoption of secure identity technologies, including physical and logical access.

Both organizations operate within the Secure Technology Alliance, an association that encompasses all aspects of secure digital technologies.

• The Identity & Payments Summit was held March 2-4, which included a USPF member meeting and general sessions that included Token Lifecycle Management, the Forum’s Work on Agentic Commerce and mDL. In addition, the MAG moderated a panel on Agentic Commerce with panelists from CHS, Bank of America and Mastercard.
• The USPF published the fourth and final 3DS brief on ‘Advanced EMV 3DS Products and Emerging Use Cases’, which can be found on the USPF 3DS Mini-Series page.

EMVCo

A global technical body that creates and manages the EMV® Specifications to enable interoperable and secure card-based payments.

• The Board of Advisors meeting was held virtually on March 10-11 and 17. Topics included the evolution of SRC, the development of a ‘Digital Payment Credential Schema Framework’, and a new Agentic Payment Task Force that will investigate how agentic commerce and AI agents interact with EMV® technologies.
• An EMV Resilience to Quantum Special Interest Meeting was held on March 24, where the current state of quantum computing was reviewed, and the milestones that will indicate that a workable quantum computer is getting closer to reality were discussed.
• The EMVCo Technical Meeting is the week of 4/13.

FDX

The Financial Data Exchange (FDX) is a non-profit industry standards body operating in the U.S. and Canada dedicated to unifying the financial services ecosystem around a common, interoperable, and royalty-free technical standard for user-permissioned financial data sharing.

• FDX holds its Global Summit March 16-19, 2026, with topics on APIs, consent, security, risk management, and emerging use cases. There was a strong focus on AI.