Five of Europe’s biggest national payment apps announced on September 30 that they are forming a new entity called the European Network for Payments (ENP), unveiled simultaneously in Madrid, Brussels, Lisbon, Oslo and Rome.
The goal is to let users of each app pay each other across borders without switching services. Combined, the five already reach roughly 130 million people in 13 countries, well over two-thirds of everyone living in the EU and Norway.
Italy’s Bancomat handles 2.7 billion transactions worth about €200 billion a year, Spain’s Bizum counts 32 million users across 120,000 online retailers, the EPI-run wallet Wero operates in Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg, Portugal’s MB WAY processes more than 70 million transactions a month, and Vipps MobilePay covers roughly 400,000 businesses across Norway, Denmark, Finland and Sweden.
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Madrid will serve as the entity’s headquarters, where the five partners hold equal shares and jointly handle technical coordination as it expands. The rollout begins by letting users send each other money across borders, before extending to online shopping and in-store card payments, though the companies haven’t set dates for either step.
Bizum’s Fernando Rodríguez called the entity “a sovereign, efficient and innovative payments system that serves citizens.”
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More than 60% of Europe’s card transactions still run through US-based payment rails, and 13 of the eurozone’s 21 member states have no domestic card network of their own, leaning entirely on international schemes.
Bizum, Bancomat and MB WAY already linked their networks in March 2025, letting more than 50 million people move money between Spain, Italy, Portugal and Andorra, before the five companies signed a memorandum of understanding in February 2026 to formalize the wider entity.
Brian Riley, co-head of payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, traced the ambition back to the European Union’s first Payment Services Directive in 2007, arguing that political unification hasn’t made the harder task of aligning banks and payment habits across dozens of markets any easier.
The European Central Bank is separately building a digital euro, with a pilot planned for the second half of 2027 and mandatory bank and merchant acceptance required by 2029, at a projected development cost of €1.3 billion. Reaching even that pilot stage has taken six years of work.
“There is likely a decade before something is viable in the EU market,” Riley said. By then, he added, payments may look nothing like they do today.
