Europe wants to have its own instant payments system. That would allow the dependence of the great market leaders, Visa and Mastercard, and strengthened the European financial ecosystem. And the plan begins to take shape with Bizum as a great protagonist.
Bizum is looking for allies. As they point out In Electomistthe idea is to unify the payment systems that are currently working in the various countries of the European Union. Bizum, protagonist in Spain, has its twin schemes with Bancomat Pay in Italy and Sibs in Portugal. All of them now pose to be interconnected with a specially relevant reference.
Wero, the German Bizum. The Instant Payment System It has been since summer 2024 being the great alternative in France (where they used Paylib), Germany (Giropay), Belgium and Luxembourg (Payconiq) and Holland (ideal). This project of the European Payments Initiative (EPI) is taking shape, and it can precisely be the other great component of that fusion of instant payment systems in Europe.
The ECB wants a European bizum. Sources close to negotiations indicate that the project is on the table. To get ahead, we would have that giant of the instant payments that for years has tried to boost the European Central Bank (ECB).
A long -sought project. Five years ago the European Commission He started looking that “European bizum” with the launch of the aforementioned EPI. In the project 16 great banks of Spain, Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands participated. A year later the figure amounted to 31 entities. The objective, offer a unified payment solution with a payment card and a digital purse.
But that has gone through problems. The initiative was promising, but the slowness of its implementation and the excessive budget necessary to achieve this caused several banks to withdraw from the project. As indicated in the economist, the Spanish bank had to contribute 300 million to the initiative, something debatable if we consider that Bizum has existed since 2015 and has a massive acceptance.
Spain, Portugal and Italy teach the way. Last year Bizum, Sibs and Bancomat Pay began working on connecting their platforms and making possible instant payments between these countries in the same conditions as to the national scale. It was also the result of the Bizum Union to the European Association of Mobile Payment Systems (EMPSA), which was the consortium of southern Europe. That alliance brings together 43 million users, of which 28 belong to the Spanish system.
Germany, France and Belgium were looking for something similar. Something similar happened with the EPI and Wero, which interconnected the mobile payment systems of Germany, France or Belgium and wanted to become the European Payment System. Now both consortiums have approached positions and according to the sources mentioned there are options to end working on an interconnection of all systems.
This looks good. It is not clear if the conversations will end with a single European system – will Bizum be called? Wero? – Or if at the moment we will work on that interconnection of all these applications separately, but of course these efforts can be the principle of something great and important for the European panorama of instant payments. It is already known. Union is strength.
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