European Network for Payments: Europe Links Its Payment Apps

Europe has no shortage of successful payment apps. Spaniards send money with Bizum, Portuguese pay with MB WAY, Italians rely on Bancomat, Norwegians and Danes use Vipps MobilePay, and Wero is replacing a patchwork of national solutions in Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg. What Europe has lacked is a way for these systems to talk to each other. A Spaniard cannot pay a Portuguese shop with Bizum, and a German Wero user cannot send money to a friend in Milan through Bancomat. As soon as a payment crosses a border, Europeans fall back on international card schemes.

That is what the European Network for Payments (ENP), announced on 30 September 2026, is designed to change.

What was announced

The five founding partners — Bancomat (Italy), Bizum (Spain), EPI Company (operator of Wero), SIBS-MB WAY (Portugal) and Vipps MobilePay (Nordics) — have created a jointly owned company, headquartered in Madrid, in which they will be equal shareholders. The ENP will operate the common interoperability hub the partners committed to in a memorandum of understanding signed in February 2026.

Together, the participating solutions serve about 130 million users in 13 European countries, covering more than 70% of the population of the EU and Norway, according to the partners' joint announcement.

How it will work

• A network of networks. The ENP will connect the existing solutions through a common technical and operational layer based on European standards, including instant account-to-account payments (SEPA Instant Credit Transfer).
• Brands stay. Each solution keeps its own brand and user experience. Bizum users keep using Bizum; the network works in the background.
• Phased rollout. Cross-border peer-to-peer payments come first. E-commerce and point-of-sale payments are planned for later phases. No dates have been published yet; the partners are currently preparing the technical implementation.
• Open to others. Further established European payment solutions may join over time, subject to the partners' agreement and the network's technical and operational requirements.

The five partners at a glance

Based on figures published with the announcement:

• Bizum (Spain): more than 32 million users, 120,000 online merchants and 1.6 million physical stores; on average more than 3.4 million instant transfers per day in 2025.
• Bancomat (Italy): more than 2.7 billion transactions a year, worth around €200 billion.
• SIBS-MB WAY (Portugal): more than 70 million transactions per month and over 500,000 points of interaction and merchants.
• Vipps MobilePay (Nordics): about 13 million users and close to 400,000 businesses in Norway, Denmark, Finland and — since 2024 — Sweden.
• Wero (EPI Company): live for peer-to-peer payments in Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg, with online payments live in Germany and in-store payments in Belgium and Luxembourg; the migration from iDEAL is underway in the Netherlands, and a launch in Austria is expected in 2027.

Why it matters: Europe's dependence on international card schemes

The motivation is as much strategic as commercial. According to a European Central Bank report published in February 2025, international card schemes accounted for about 61% of euro area card payments in 2022, 13 euro area countries rely entirely on international card schemes for card transactions, and there are only nine national card schemes active in the EU — each operating in a single member state. Cross-border payments, in particular, almost always run over the international schemes, because national schemes cannot execute them.

The European partners frame the ENP explicitly in terms of sovereignty. EPI's CEO Martina Weimert said Europeans "should be able to use the payment solutions they already trust" when travelling, shopping or doing business abroad; SIBS's CEO João Mello Franco called interoperability "a statement about Europe's capacity to shape its own payments future"; and Vipps MobilePay argued that "Europe needs to move fast in building strong, independent European payment solutions."

The regulatory backdrop helps. The EU's Instant Payments Regulation has made sending and receiving instant euro credit transfers mandatory for payment service providers in the euro area, which gives the ENP a common, fast, account-to-account foundation to build on. In parallel, the ECB is preparing a possible digital euro. The two are complementary rather than competing: the ENP is a private-sector initiative built on commercial bank money, while the digital euro would be central bank money — but both aim at the same gap in pan-European payments.

What it could mean for international payment rails

Peer-to-peer transfers are the easiest place to start, and they are not where Visa and Mastercard earn most of their European revenue. The real test will come in e-commerce and at the point of sale, where success depends on something harder than technology: merchant acceptance. Card schemes are accepted almost everywhere; a new network has to convince acquirers, payment gateways and merchants to integrate it, and give consumers a reason to choose it at checkout. Bizum's and Wero's experience in their home markets shows it can be done domestically. Doing it across 13 countries with different currencies and habits is a much larger undertaking.

Several questions remain open:

• Currencies. Vipps MobilePay operates largely in Norwegian, Danish and Swedish kroner. How non-euro cross-border payments will be handled — and at what foreign-exchange cost — has not been detailed.
• Economics. Merchants will compare costs, and consumers will compare convenience and protection. Pricing and buyer-protection rules for cross-border e-commerce have not been published.
• Coverage. Large markets such as the Netherlands (via Wero) are in transition, and countries without a strong domestic solution are not yet covered.

Even so, the direction is significant. With the ENP, Europe is following the same logic as other regions: instead of building one new scheme to replace everything, it connects the national systems people already use. Africa's PAPSS links central banks and commercial banks across more than 30 countries; Asia's Nexus initiative aims to link domestic instant payment systems; and now Europe is linking its payment apps. Taken together, these regional networks are gradually turning global card schemes and correspondent banking from the default route for cross-border payments into one option among several.

What this means for FinTechs and merchants

• Merchants and PSPs selling across Europe should watch the e-commerce phase closely: once live, a single integration could open checkout to customers of five national solutions.
• FinTechs building on account-to-account payments, open banking and instant payments are well positioned, as the ENP strengthens the case for A2A over cards.
• Companies entering Europe from Asia or elsewhere should not assume that cards are the only way Europeans pay — in Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Nordics and increasingly Germany and France, the local app may matter as much as the card.

Explore our coverage of FinTech in Europe, including Germany, Poland and the Netherlands. Planning to enter a European market? Talk to us.

Sources: EPI Company; Bancomat press release; IT Finanzmagazin; Reuters; ECB, February 2025.