“Wow, but if it gives me the option to pay with Bizum, how cool.” That was my expression a few months ago when in an online purchase the online store offered me to pay directly like this. No debit or credit card, no Google Pay. With a Bizum.
The instant payment system that is triumphing in Spain is so good that What we want is for it to work further. And that is precisely what the banking entities of the European Union want, who saw a “European Bizum” as a great idea. There’s just one problem.
Who will control it.
The European Bizum is approaching
The European Central Bank he has been fighting for five years for that application that does the same as Bizum but throughout Europe. There was a major power struggle here with two large factions. On the one hand, the consortium Spain-Italy-Portugal. On the other, that of France-Germany-Belgium-Holland, who wanted to impose its own Bizum, called Wero.
Fortunately, in recent months we have seen how the positions of both consortiums have become closer and the unification now seems almost definitive.
This is what they indicate in five dayswhere they quote “market sources” who talk about the agreement being signed in early 2026. The European Bizum should start operating at the end of next year if everything goes as expected.
This system may not be a new application, as requested by the French and German entities, but rather a system that interconnects existing ones. It is a somewhat more confusing solution but also more practical, because users will not have to change apps. For example, a Spanish user will be able to send a Bizum to a German at no cost, and the German will receive that money in his Wero app in a way that is transparent to him.
The European banks participating in the negotiations have reached an agreement to establish a new company that will be the owner of this interconnection technology. There was talk of applying certain commissions, “but it was finally rejected in favor of a multilateral network.”
Power distribution
And there is the new challenge: Who is in charge in this new society? The distribution of power is now the great unknown, and there are several options. On the one hand, each national platform receives practically the same participation. On the other hand, the distribution should be made based on the volume of each country and then corrected.
The Bizum model seems like it can also be applied to that pan-European solution. It is interesting to realize that as explained in the economic newspaper, the owners of Bizum are 22 Spanish banks, among which the participation varies:
- Caixabank: 25%
- Santander: 21%
- BBVA: 18%
- Sabadell: 12%
Other minority banks such as Unicaja, Bankinter or Cajamar have lower participations, but Bizum’s statutes establish that no bank can have more than 25% participation.
Do we need a digital euro?
Europe has been looking for a solution for some time that would allow it to mitigate its dependence on the two great giants of electronic payments: Visa and Mastercard. The European Payments Initiativecreated in 2020 by 16 banking entities, had precisely the objective of creating a European interbank network that competed with these platforms and with others such as PayPal.
And little by little it has been proven that Bizum was precisely a great candidate to achieve this. The application, with more than 30 million users in Spain, has not stopped growing in benefits and alliances like the one a year ago they signed with Revolut.
There are still other obstacles in the creation of this European Bizum. For example, building a common deposit guarantee fund to deal with large US entities. It does not seem that this is going to be a major impediment to the implementation of the pan-European alternative, and that makes us wonder what happens now with the digital euro.
The European Central Bank (ECB) has been designing the design of this digital asset for years. There have also been important movements in that sense, and if the European regulations are approved in 2026, there will be a pilot starting in 2027. The EU seems to want to be ready for a possible first broadcast in 2029.
However, that European Bizum will theoretically solve part of what the digital euro wants to achieve, so does it make sense? It is very likelyespecially since the digital euro is a legal tender issued by the ECB.
It is not just a way to transfer money, but a digital form of official money itself. Both alternatives can coexist, and this European Bizum may be the best way to promote the use of the digital euro.
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