A payment app that works everywhere at home can become much less useful at the border. Spain has Bizum, Portugal has MB WAY and the Nordics have Vipps MobilePay. Millions use these services at home, yet paying someone in another country can still mean switching to a different system.
Italy's Bancomat, Spain's Bizum, EPI's Wero, Portugal's SIBS–MB WAY and Nordic provider Vipps MobilePay announced the European Network for Payments (ENP) on 30 September. An earlier plan for a single Europe-wide card scheme was scaled back in 2022. As a Madrid-based joint venture, ENP instead aims to connect existing systems through a common hub while preserving their brands.
“Creating a 'bridge' between some of these systems makes sense as a way of overcoming national resistance,” explains Zach Meyers, director of research at the Centre on Regulation in Europe (CERRE). Existing schemes have been reluctant to compromise the domestic models they have already built.
The participating services have around 130 million users across 13 countries, although they cannot yet make payments across the entire network. Connections will be introduced in stages, starting with transfers between individuals before online and in-store payments.
From transfers to tills
Since 2025, the EuroPA alliance has allowed Bizum customers to transfer money to users of Italy's Bancomat Pay and Portugal's MB WAY. These links handled more than 69,400 cross-border transfers worth €5.7m (about £4.8m) in 2025, according to Bizum. Its total transaction count that year was 1.24 billion.
In April, Bancomat, EPI/Wero and MB WAY also demonstrated cross-border shop payments using QR codes. It was a technical test, not a commercial rollout.
“This appears to be why the initial step is to make peer-to-peer payments interoperable, which is significantly easier than doing retail payments,” Meyers says. A checkout brings the additional complications of fraud, refunds, chargebacks and disputes.
A German visiting Portugal could eventually pay with Wero instead of an international card. Banks could keep transactions within their own services, but retailers' costs remain unknown.
Who sets the rules?
According to the European Central Bank, more than two-thirds of euro-area card transactions operate under rules set by non-European companies. Thirteen of the euro area's 21 countries have no domestic card scheme, giving overseas providers influence over payment terms and standards.
Scott Liddle, co-founder of cross-border payments company Capi Money, points to the national barriers financial services providers still encounter despite the promise of a single market.
“The idea of this single market in services in Europe is not actually yet fully complete,” he says, citing IBAN discrimination and other obstacles to cross-border expansion.
But European control need not exclude international networks. Judith Arnal of the Centre for European Policy Studies has argued for a “competitive, multi-rail ecosystem” in which European schemes coexist and compete with global providers. The proposed digital euro is separate.
“As the service will be designed around the initial participants' needs,” Meyers says, “it may prove harder to accommodate other European solutions in the market.” That would limit its claim to be a truly pan-European option.
Liddle believes Europe has the economic and technological capacity to build more independent payment infrastructure.
“The difficult thing is the coordination between the 27 states,” he says. National systems will still need to work together for customers to see the benefits.
Meyers is also concerned about how the partners will recover their development costs. “There is not currently much information about the business model,” he says, “and there are questions about whether pricing would be higher for cross-border transactions.”
Earlier plans envisioned cross-border transfers in 2026 and merchant payments in 2027, but September's announcement gave no exact dates. The UK is not among ENP's initial markets. A Spanish visitor paying with Bizum at a checkout in Copenhagen would be a more persuasive demonstration of ENP's ambitions than another agreement between payment providers.
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