A new agreement between two European payment coalitions has outlined a route toward a cross-border alternative to card networks operated outside the region. The European Payments Initiative, or EPI, and the EuroPA Alliance signed a memorandum on February 2 to connect services that together reach about 130 million people in 13 countries.
EPI operates Wero, a digital wallet built on instant bank transfers. The EuroPA Alliance brings together national services including Bizum in Spain, Bancomat in Italy, MB WAY in Portugal and Vipps MobilePay in the Nordic countries. By linking existing systems, the groups aim to overcome a longstanding problem in European payments: widely used domestic tools often stop working at national borders.
The first planned function is cross-border person-to-person transfers during 2026. Online shopping and in-store payments are expected to follow in 2027. If implemented as described, a customer of one participating system could pay a person or merchant served by another without routing the transaction through Visa or Mastercard.
Wero launched in July 2024 and is available in Belgium, France and Germany. The source report says it has more than 47 million registered users and has processed over €7.5 billion in transfers. Retail payments began in Germany near the end of 2025, with expansion in France and Belgium planned during 2026. The larger alliance is intended to give merchants a broader base of potential customers than any one national product could provide.
The initiative forms part of a wider push for European control over strategically important payment infrastructure. EPI chief executive Martina Weimert described payment sovereignty as something already taking shape rather than a distant ambition. European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde has separately argued that Europe urgently needs payment options under its own control.
That political support does not remove the commercial challenge. Visa and Mastercard benefit from deeply established networks: merchants accept them because customers carry their cards, while customers rely on them because acceptance is broad. Earlier European consolidation efforts, including the Monnet Project, failed, and EPI itself narrowed its original scope after participating banks withdrew.
The latest plan attempts to address that weakness by joining services with existing users instead of building an entirely new network. Its impact will depend on technical interoperability, merchant adoption and whether the partners meet their staged launch dates. The agreement sets a significant scale, but the transition from connected wallets to a dependable continent-wide payment option remains an execution test. Meeting that test will require reliable links among different banking systems and a consistent experience for customers and merchants.
