The week's largest moves came from one event. Brazil's presidential runoff was held on Sunday, October 25, and Lula won a fourth term with about 52% of the vote. On Monday, October 26, every Brazil-exposed payments name in the universe repriced: StoneCo fell 27% in that single session, PagSeguro 25%, Nu Holdings 17%, MercadoLibre 8% and dLocal 4%. Over the week, Friday to Friday, StoneCo was down 32%, PagSeguro 31%, Nu Holdings 23%, dLocal 14% and MercadoLibre 10%. Citi downgraded PagSeguro on Tuesday, and Itaú BBA cut its Nu Holdings price target on Friday. The common timing and the size of the Monday moves make the election the most plausible driver; the channels behind it — the expected path of the Selic rate, the real, and policy risk — are hypotheses rather than established mechanisms. A higher benchmark rate does not mechanically compress every lender's margin: the effect depends on how quickly assets reprice, how funding is structured and hedged, and on credit losses, none of which this week's evidence shows. Most of the declines after Monday have no company-specific explanation in our sources. The card networks moved the other way, and on reported results rather than sentiment. Visa reported fiscal fourth-quarter results after the close on Tuesday, October 27: net revenue rose 13% to $12.1 billion, payments volume grew 9% in constant dollars, and cross-border volume excluding intra-Europe rose 14%. Mastercard reported third-quarter results on Thursday, October 29, with net revenue up 14% and adjusted earnings per share of $5.31, and its shares rose 4% on Thursday. Over the week Visa gained 1.4% and Mastercard 2.3% while the broad market fell. Agentic commerce was the other headline: Shopify's Shop Pay now uses agentic tokens from Visa and Mastercard, with American Express to follow, and Visa signed an exploratory memorandum with Tencent covering cross-border payments, remittances and agentic commerce, with no launch dates or terms. How agent-initiated transactions will be priced — tokenisation, authentication, liability and routing — has not been disclosed, so the economic effect on the networks remains a thesis, not an established result. Crypto-linked names fell together on Friday. Coinbase dropped 11% in Friday's session, its first after third-quarter results released on Thursday evening. Subscription and services revenue was $570 million, down 20% from $717 million a year earlier; its share of net revenue rose to 49% from 41% because other revenue fell faster, so the share rose while the dollar line shrank. Robinhood, whose third-quarter crypto revenue fell 55% year on year to $120 million, fell a further 7% on Friday. Circle fell 9% on Friday despite a partnership announcement. On Thursday, October 29, Binance had disclosed a hack it estimated at about $6.3 billion — the largest crypto theft on record — of which about $3 billion was frozen; by Saturday it said 90% of affected assets were backed again and withdrawals had resumed. Post-earnings selling and the hack's effect on sentiment arrived together, and the available data can't separate them. In processing, the Financial Times reported on Friday that CD&R is working with GTCR, Global Payments' largest shareholder, on a possible joint bid. The talks may not lead to a deal, no price or offer has been reported, and the roughly $40 billion figure is an enterprise value including debt. Global Payments rose 13% on Friday and 17% over the week. Separately, Fair Isaac fell 13% on Monday, October 26, with no confirmed company-specific catalyst in our sources. **The Transmission** Treasury yields fell across the curve. Friday to Friday, the 2-year yield fell 13 basis points to 4.56% and the 10-year 6 basis points to 4.94%, so the curve steepened by 7 basis points while both yields declined. Lower yields ease the benchmark for new fixed-rate funding at the margin, but what any lender pays depends on its own spreads, deposit mix and hedges — a Treasury move is not a funding-cost move. **The ruling.** On October 26 the Eighth Circuit, in Corner Post v. Board of Governors, upheld the vacatur of the Federal Reserve's 21-cent debit interchange cap and sent the rule back to the Fed. The court read the Durbin Amendment's "incremental cost" as the cost of a single transaction, excluding fixed authorisation, clearing and settlement costs, network processing fees and fraud costs that the Fed had counted. Fewer allowable costs point to a lower cap — less debit revenue for covered issuers and lower acceptance costs for merchants. Nothing has changed yet: the court's mandate has not issued, the 21-cent cap stays in force until the Fed sets a new standard, and rehearing or a Supreme Court petition is still possible. The Fed's 2023 proposal to cut the cap to 14.4 cents is also still pending. **Week Ahead** Twenty-three payments names report between Monday and Thursday. Large processors report before the open on Tuesday and Wednesday; for the category, watch whether software and cloud revenue are offsetting pricing pressure in core processing. Shopify also reports before the open on Tuesday, and Block reports after the close — Square's merchant margins and Cash App's volumes are the read on merchant and consumer money movement. On Wednesday, Circle, MercadoLibre and Fair Isaac report; MercadoLibre's results are the first chance to see whether the Brazil repricing shows up in volumes or credit. On Thursday, Global Payments reports before the open, its first scheduled opportunity to address the reported talks, and Affirm reports after the close, where funding costs and credit performance are the signals for buy-now-pay-later. The other names reporting are PAY, FLYW, JKHY, MQ, TOST, UPST, CHYM, CPAY, RELY, SEZL, WU, ACIW, FOUR and GDOT.