Bizum, Wero and three other European wallets set up European Network for Payments in Madrid

Five of Europe's domestic mobile payment schemes have set up a jointly owned company to connect their services across borders. Bancomat (Italy), Bizum (Spain), EPI Company, which runs Wero, SIBS, which runs MB WAY in Portugal, and Vipps MobilePay announced European Network for Payments on 30 September 2026. The company is based in Madrid, and the five founders will own it in equal parts.

The new entity will run the interoperability hub the partners agreed to build when they signed a memorandum of understanding in February 2026. The hub relies on European standards, with instant account-to-account transfers among them. Between them, the five schemes count roughly 130 million users in 13 countries, and the partners say that reaches over seven in ten people in the EU and Norway.

What changes

• Phased rollout. Cross-border payments between individuals come first. Online and in-store payments are planned for later phases. No launch dates have been published for any phase.
• Brands stay. Each scheme keeps its own brand and app experience. The hub connects the schemes rather than replacing them.
• Lean set-up. El Español reports that the company is meant to stay light on staff and costs. According to Reuters, EPI chief executive Martina Weimert said shareholders will carry operating costs in the early years, until the network has the scale to earn its own fees.
• Room to grow. Other established European schemes may join later, if the founders agree and the newcomer meets the network's technical and operational requirements.

Why it matters for buyers

Reuters places the network within Europe's wider push to depend less on Visa and Mastercard. For now, it changes nothing at the checkout or the till: the first phase covers payments between individuals only. Merchants, PSPs and platforms planning account-to-account acceptance should treat cross-border e-commerce and in-store coverage as a roadmap item, not a current feature.

Questions worth putting to an acquirer, payment orchestrator or wallet provider:

• Which of the five schemes do you support today, and in which countries?
• Do you plan to connect to the shared hub once e-commerce payments go live, and on what timeline?
• How will refunds, disputes and settlement work when the payer's wallet comes from a different country than the merchant?
• Will pricing for a cross-border wallet payment differ from a domestic one?

Buyers signing multi-year acquiring or orchestration contracts may also want terms that let new European wallet methods be added without a full renegotiation.