As of this week, Europe's payment plumbing is being ripped out and replaced in three places at once. The banks that treat it as a compliance exercise are going to be paying the fintechs that treat it as a growth strategy. Three regulations, one direction of travel If you spent June and July on a beach and are only now catching up, here is the compressed version: PSD3 is on the runway, the UK's commercial Variable Recurring Payments scheme is live, and the EU's Financial Data

PSD3 is signed, cVRP is live, and BaaS deals keep landing. FinanceX unpacks the rewiring of open banking and core systems in July 2026.

The EU is inches from publishing PSD3, Temenos just picked up its second consecutive Euromoney trophy while closing a marquee US bank deal, and Thought Machine crossed a nine-figure revenue threshold. Core banking modernisation is no longer a slide in a boardroom deck, it's the balance sheet. If open banking's first act was regulators forcing banks to open their APIs, the second act now unfolding is banks quietly rebuilding the engine underneath. The last seven days delivered

Spare and Xsquare have partnered to embed account-to-account "Pay by Bank" payments into business workflows in the UAE, giving corporate finance teams a route around the 2 to 3 percent fees and multi-day settlement lags that come with card-based B2B transactions. The tie-up plugs Spare's Open Finance infrastructure into Xsquare's B2B payments platform, targeting payables, receivables, and cross-border flows under the Central Bank of the UAE's Open Finance Framework. What does