Ahead of Telemedia Marbella, the news is already providing a pretty good indication of what everyone will be talking about when the industry descends on Spain early next month. Payments are fragmenting, browsers are changing the rules, traffic quality matters more than traffic volume and the old divisions between DCB, wallets, cards and bank payments are rapidly disappearing. Welcome (again!) to the great mobile reset.
There is always a slight danger when putting together a conference agenda months in advance that the world will have moved on by the time everyone arrives.
Not this year.
If anything, the news running up to Telemedia Marbella on 4-6 October has made the agenda look increasingly prescient. The industry is being forced to rethink almost every part of the mobile value chain simultaneously: where traffic comes from, how users are identified, how they move through increasingly fragile mobile journeys, how they pay and, ultimately, how those users can be turned into sustainable, long-term customers.
And perhaps the biggest change is that none of these things can really be considered separately anymore.
Payments underpin everything
Take payments. Boku’s first-half results offer an interesting snapshot of where the market is heading. Its DCB revenues increased 3% to $35.3m, so anyone predicting the demise of carrier billing may want to hold their horses. Yet its digital wallet and account-to-account revenues grew 15% on an underlying basis to $22m, while bundling jumped 39%.
Together, wallets, A2A and bundling now account for 47% of Boku’s group revenue.
That is a useful real-world illustration of what we have been saying for some time: the future isn’t DCB or cards or wallets or A2A, it is all of them.
That is why the Payments Reset strand in Marbella matters. Nisha Suwali of NextGen Payments will look at the growing pressure created by changing Visa and Mastercard rules, while Dr Simon Lichte of Mobile Business Engine will explore where DCB and cards sit alongside Open Banking as Europe develops new payment rails.
The important word here is alongside.
DCB remains extraordinarily useful. Juniper Research data cited in our recent NextGen Payments webinar puts DCB transaction value at $51bn this year, rising to more than $87bn by 2030. It reaches customers that cards cannot, works particularly well in mobile-first markets and remains an elegantly simple way of buying digital content.
But it can no longer be expected to do everything. Consumers increasingly have wallets, bank payment apps, cards and carrier accounts sitting side-by-side on the same handset. Merchants consequently need to think less about their preferred payment method and more about which rail works best for this particular consumer, buying this particular product, in this particular market, at this particular moment.
The news from Peru illustrates this beautifully. Kunfupay and EBANX have introduced a tokenised one-click version of the Yape wallet for creators selling digital services. Within four months, Yape On-File generated a 46% revenue uplift for Kunfupay in Peru and accounted for 67% of its processed volume there, with a 95% approval rate.
Why? Because 77% of Peruvian adults use Yape while only 4% hold an international credit card.
Trying to force those consumers onto cards would be rather like opening a shop and insisting customers pay in a currency they don’t possess.
This feeds directly into another Marbella discussion: LATAM’s transition from entertainment towards digital utility. Matias De la Cruz of Media Digital Group and Oton Zevallos of Renxo will look at how services in the region are moving beyond music, games and video towards products that solve everyday problems.
But the Yape example suggests something broader. Localisation isn’t just about translating the content. The payment is part of the product. A service only really becomes local when acquisition, experience, pricing and payment all reflect how people in that market actually behave.
Which brings us back up the funnel. Before anyone gets to choose how to pay, they first have to arrive – and successfully make it through the journey. However, that is becoming considerably more complicated. Chrome’s move towards HTTPS-by-default threatens the header-enrichment mechanisms behind some of DCB’s slickest two-click journeys. Research from Digital Virgo cited in our recent webinar suggests around 90% of two-click flows could be affected, with Chrome responsible for roughly three-quarters of mobile browser traffic.
This is not the death of DCB. Far from it. But it does mean that the industry’s historic obsession with shaving clicks from the payment journey now has to be accompanied by a rather less glamorous obsession with identity, testing and resilience.
Directing traffic in an HTTPS world
Hence Marbella starting not with payments, but traffic. Christopher Henseler and Alessio Matteucci of Mesh Ads, alongside Google’s Francesco Beninato, will look at why cheap traffic can become remarkably expensive when it brings weak users, disputes and unstable economics. Stephen Levenson of Global Telecom Testing then takes that argument into real-device testing before Joost Goeree, Frank-J Arnold, Frode Andre Alvad, Amine Ennajih and others tackle what happens when Chrome starts breaking established journeys.
The solutions are interesting too. Telenor Linx’s Alvad will look at Firebase Authentication as a replacement identity layer, while Arnold will demonstrate DCB over RCS – essentially moving the payment journey into a verified messaging environment that doesn’t depend on those increasingly unreliable browser signals.
Again, the interesting thing isn’t any one technology. It is the emerging connection between traffic, identity and payment.
Kristina Nevorotova of Golden Goose – attending Marbella this year – makes much the same point in our interview. The company works across carrier billing and eWallets, but Nevorotova argues that billing alone is never enough. Creative, landing page, proposition, subscription flow and payment all have to work together.
And, crucially, traffic has to be measured by the value it ultimately produces, not simply by how cheaply it can be acquired.
Ramp up the VAMP
That becomes even more important as regulation and fraud controls tighten. Visa’s VAMP regime and Mastercard’s newer merchant-monitoring rules mean merchants cannot simply bolt cards onto an existing DCB business and assume the job is done. Refunds, chargebacks, approval rates, retries, subscription transparency and merchant behaviour are becoming part of an ongoing data operation.
Which explains the final piece of Day One in Marbella: intelligence. Frode Andre Alvad, Geoffrey Cleaves of MCP and Manon Raoult of Media Digital Group will explore how identity, device information, behavioural signals and AI increasingly sit beneath fraud prevention and routing decisions.
AI, in this context, isn’t the product. It is the connective tissue. As Nevorotova puts it, AI is already useful for spotting falling conversion rates, unusual GEO performance and traffic anomalies that humans might take hours to find.
That is likely to become increasingly important when the payment stack itself contains DCB, cards, wallets, A2A and local methods and someone – or something – has to decide which combination offers the best balance of conversion, margin, security and compliance.
Where the infrastructure makes a difference
And that, really, is what Marbella 2026 is about. On Day Two we move into what all this infrastructure is actually for: reducing subscription churn, improving lifetime value, finding the content that works in different regions and exploring growth across LATAM, gaming and Africa with speakers including Kilian Espana of Overdrive Digital, Laurent Baquiast of Wister, Leon Dijksman of SAM Media, Robert Schmiedl of TuuT and an Africa panel spanning Orange Middle East & Africa, Digital Virgo, SMADEX, Penrose Systems and Wister.
But those commercial opportunities increasingly depend on getting everything underneath them right. There is no single winning traffic source. No universal payment rail. No content category that works everywhere. And increasingly there isn’t even one dependable mobile journey.
The winners will instead be the businesses that can connect the pieces: quality traffic feeding resilient journeys; strong identity enabling intelligent decisions; multiple payment rails selected according to customer and market; and compliance and fraud controls built into the whole thing rather than added afterwards.
The news this month suggests that reset isn’t something we need to prepare for in 2027. It has already started. See you in Marbella.
