European payments enter execution mode: PSD3, Wero, DORA, with Andréa Toucinho

European payments have moved from ambition to execution: #

For most of the past decade, the discussion around European payments was structured around two registers: political aspiration on one hand, regulatory accumulation on the other. The two often ran in parallel without intersecting. As discussed in this episode with Andréa Toucinho of Partelya Consulting, that gap is now closing. Legislation is being designed with operational outcomes in mind, sovereignty initiatives are moving from white papers into deployment, and infrastructure projects are converging rather than competing. The shift is structural, not cosmetic, and it changes what fintech operators need to be paying attention to.

Three evolutions are running in parallel: #

Andréa identifies three concurrent forces reshaping the European payments landscape. The first is technological — AI, stablecoins, tokenization, and the modernization of underlying rails. The second is regulatory — PSD3, GDPR, AML6, MiCA, and eIDAS2, no longer treated as siloed compliance burdens but as interlocking pieces of a single market design. The third is sovereignty — EPI’s Wero wallet, the EuroPA alliance in southern Europe, and the public-sector digital euro project from the ECB. Each of these is consequential on its own. The strategic question is how they will converge, and what role legacy systems and new entrants will play once they do.

Tokenization is no longer just a Visa and Mastercard story: #

Tokenization in cards has been broadly framed as an international scheme initiative, but the conversation makes clear that local players are now central to the strategy. In France, Cartes Bancaires has developed its own tokenization approach with the same dual objective: simplifying the e-commerce experience and reinforcing security. Apple Pay is the most visible consumer-facing implementation — every transaction passes through a token rather than the actual card credentials. Beyond the immediate fraud benefit, tokenization gives users a layer of control that the underlying card never offered, including the ability to revoke permission for specific merchants without canceling the card itself.

Instant payments are being repositioned as the new default: #

The European Commission’s instant payments regulation is explicit about its goal: making instant payments the new normal across the bloc. Adoption patterns vary significantly by country. France, with its deep card tradition, has historically been slower; Spain and Italy moved faster. Wero, the EPI wallet, is built on instant payment rails, which means its rollout is also a structural push for instant payment adoption in countries where uptake has lagged. The security architecture around this — verification of payee mechanisms, centralization of high-risk IBANs in France from May 7 — is what makes the scale possible.

Wallets are becoming Europe’s strategic payment surface: #

The conversation positions wallets as the layer where the European sovereignty agenda becomes visible to end users. Wero (EPI) and the EuroPA alliance follow different strategies: Wero is building a new pan-European brand, EuroPA is federating existing successful local solutions like Bizum in Spain, MB WAY in Portugal, and Bancomat Pay in Italy. Both approaches address the same underlying gap — Europe’s historic dependence on non-European card schemes for digital commerce. The collaboration recently announced between EPI and EuroPA is one of the more meaningful infrastructure stories of the year, and it will define how cross-border digital payments work for the next decade.

Operational resilience is now a product question: #

DORA has often been treated by payment players as a compliance project. The conversation reframes it as a strategic and operational one. The April 2024 Iberian blackout made the resilience case unavoidable: when entire countries lose power, what happens to electronic payments? National working groups in Portugal (Fórum para os Sistemas de Pagamentos) and France (under Banque de France and Cartes Bancaires) are now actively designing for crisis scenarios — geopolitical, climate-driven, and infrastructural. The answer is not a single fallback. It is a diversity of options, including offline card transactions with later reconciliation, maintained access to cash, and redundancy across rails. Resilience is becoming a product capability, not just a regulatory checkbox.

The fraud vector has moved from systems to people: #

Until recently, payments fraud was largely a technical problem. Today, the dominant vector is manipulation. The patterns differ sharply by country. France has seen an explosion of fake-bank-employee calls — fraudsters pose as bank staff and convince victims to move funds for “security reasons.” Portugal sees high volumes of WhatsApp impersonation scams and fake employment offers. AI is set to accelerate both, with personalization that will make traditional pattern detection significantly harder. National campaigns from the French Banking Federation and Banco de Portugal show that the response is now framed as a public-private effort, with consumer education at the center.

PSD3 is an evolution, not a revolution: #

PSD3 should not be read as a reset of European payments regulation. It is a refinement of PSD2, addressing the gaps that became visible during implementation. The most operationally significant elements are the reinforcement of security frameworks (building on the lessons of SCA), the harmonization of open banking across jurisdictions, and the standardization of API quality. Today, some countries operate centralized open banking APIs while others maintain bank-by-bank approaches; PSD3 aims to close that gap. The longer-term horizon, already being discussed in national markets, is open finance — and the foundation for it is being laid now.

Diversity is Europe’s underrated infrastructure advantage: #

A recurring theme in the conversation is that European payments resilience comes not from any single dominant solution, but from the diversity of solutions available to consumers. Cash, cards, instant payments, wallets, direct debit, and the emerging digital euro all coexist for a reason. Different countries weigh them differently based on culture, regulation, and trust. What looks fragmented from the outside is, in operational terms, a hedge — and the policy direction now is to preserve choice rather than force convergence. For founders and operators, this means designing for plurality rather than picking a winner.

Why listen: #

This episode is a structured map of where European payments are today, told by one of the practitioners closest to the policy and infrastructure conversation. It covers what’s actually being deployed — Wero, EuroPA, digital euro, tokenization, DORA — and what each means for the operators building products on top of these rails. For fintech founders, payments product teams, and infrastructure leaders, it provides a grounded view of the regulatory, technical, and sovereignty layers that will shape the European market through the rest of the decade.