Five European Payment Networks Launch Madrid-Based Joint Venture to Challenge Visa and Mastercard Across 13 Countries
Five European Payment Networks Launch Madrid-Based Joint Venture to Challenge Visa and Mastercard Across 13 Countries #
Five European domestic payment networks announced the formation of the European Network for Payments (ENP) on 30 September 2026, creating a shared infrastructure company to compete with Visa and Mastercard. The founding members are Italy’s Bancomat, Spain’s Bizum, Belgium-based EPI Company (operator of Wero), Portugal’s SIBS (operator of MB WAY), and Norway’s Vipps MobilePay. The company will be headquartered in Madrid and owned equally by all five partners.
ENP will run an interoperability hub connecting each partner’s account-to-account payment system, allowing users of one platform to transact with users of another across borders. The venture formalizes a memorandum of understanding signed between the EuroPA alliance and EPI Company in February 2026.
The five platforms together serve approximately 130 million registered users across 13 European countries, covering more than 70% of the combined population of the EU and Norway. Services are scheduled to launch progressively from 2027, starting with cross-border person-to-person transfers and later expanding to e-commerce checkouts and point-of-sale merchant payments.
Visa and Mastercard together process close to two-thirds of EU card payments. Concerns have grown over potential disruption to European access to US-based payment infrastructure under the current US administration, and European policymakers and the Eurosystem have repeatedly stressed the need to reduce reliance on foreign networks. ENP’s founders have described their initiative as a direct commercial response.
The private-sector alliance runs parallel to, but separately from, the European Central Bank’s digital euro project, which targets a 2029 introduction as a retail central bank digital currency run by private firms. Some cross-border interoperability is already in place: Bancomat, Bizum, and MB WAY currently support instant mobile transfers among users in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Andorra. ENP’s founders say they intend to build on that existing infrastructure rather than wait for the ECB project to reach consumers.
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