The Payments Association

PAY360 is the flagship conference and exhibition of The Payments Association and runs for two days in London. The organizer counts more than 7,000 senior leaders and more than 250 speakers on six stages, from banks and fintechs to merchants, regulators and technology providers. The 2026 edition took place at ExCeL London, together with Merchant Transact 360 for about 400 merchants and payment professionals.

The PAY360 Awards are a separate evening event every October at the JW Marriott Grosvenor House on Park Lane in London. More than 950 people from the payments industry attend the dinner, where the association presents awards in 21 categories.

Financial Crime 360 is a one-day conference of The Payments Association on fraud, anti-money laundering, customer due diligence, sanctions and crypto risks in payments. The conference takes place in the City of London and builds on the work of the association on financial crime in payments. The association also publishes a report on the state of financial crime, most recently for 2026.

Between the large conferences, members meet at PA@TheCity, an evening networking event in London that is reserved for members and their invited guests. Regional evenings such as PA@Manchester and PA@Birmingham take the format to other British cities. Newcomers to the industry can book the two-day online courses Payments 101 and Regulations 101, and webinars cover subjects such as stablecoins in payments.

The Payments Association runs eight working groups: Merchant Payments, ESG, Inclusion, Regulatory, Financial Crime, Cross-Border, Digital Currencies and Open Banking. Only employees of member organizations can join, either as committee members who spend one to three hours a month on meetings and papers, or as supporter members who attend one meeting per quarter.

The groups publish whitepapers, webinars and consultation responses, for example on crypto and stablecoin regulation in the United Kingdom and on programmable money. The Inclusion group looks at payment products that reduce financial exclusion, and the Open Banking group works on the market conditions for open banking payments.

The Payments Association EU is a non-profit association registered in Luxembourg, with its office at the Luxembourg House of Financial Technology. The association calls itself a business club of decision makers in payments and takes members from all 27 countries of the European Union. Anders la Cour, chief executive of the Banking Circle Group, chairs it, and Thibault de Barsy is vice-chairman and general manager.

The EU association runs PA@Home evenings in cities such as Luxembourg, Brussels, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin and Munich, and a one-day conference called Payments Tomorrow after the summer break. Its Regulator working group meets once a month under the Chatham House rule for the compliance officers of member firms. Together with Deloitte and The Paypers, the association published a 2026 ranking of the leading firms in EU payments by their place in the value chain and their financial figures.

The Payments Association works with the Bank of England, the Financial Conduct Authority, HM Treasury, the Payment Systems Regulator and Pay.UK, and an advisory board of payments chief executives guides its program. Its research platform Payments Intelligence publishes whitepapers, a quarterly regulation roadmap, a regulation roadmap for merchants and the magazine Payments Review.

Recent titles cover the origin of authorized push payment fraud on digital platforms, the safeguarding rules for payment and e-money firms and the state of open banking payments in the United Kingdom. A report on stablecoins across the payment stack looks at their use, adoption and regulatory readiness.

Ben Agnew is chief executive of The Payments Association, and its founder Tony Craddock still belongs to the team. The company behind the association, Emerging Payments Ventures Limited, was incorporated in England on 14 August 2008 under the name Prepaid Awards Limited. Until October 2021 the association was called the Emerging Payments Association, and it chose the new name for the wider range of payment businesses among its members.

In August 2025 The Payments Association partnered with Nineteen Group, a London events and media business backed by the investor Phoenix Equity Partners. The association remains an independent brand within that portfolio and keeps its existing management team.

The office of The Payments Association is at Equitable House, 47 King William Street, London EC4R 9AF, in the City of London. The registered office of Emerging Payments Ventures Limited is in Wimbledon in south-west London. The sister association in the European Union has its address at the LHoFT, 9 Rue du Laboratoire, 1911 Luxembourg.