The companies will form a new joint venture, the European Network for Payments, which will be based in Madrid and connect national payment systems.
ENP’s founders are Bancomat, Bizum, EPI Company/Wero, SIBS-MB WAY and Vipps MobilePay, which together serve around 130 million users across 13 European countries, covering more than 70% of the population of the EU and Norway. The network will connect existing payment systems through a common technical and operational layer based on European standards and instant account-to-account payments.
The announcement has a bitter-sweet flavor for those who have been following EPI and Wero. Spanish and Italian banks were originally part of EPI, but they left in 2021 and founded European Payments Alliance. The reason was that they wanted to retain their national open banking solutions: Bizum and Bancomat. EPI refused this type of fragmentation and wanted all members to adopt a common solution. As a consequence, any further progress stalled until June 2025, when EPI gave in and accepted the existence of parallel payment solutions.
The recent announcement shows that Bizum and Bancomat will migrate from national open banking solutions to ECB’s open banking API which is also used by Wero. Hence, the migration costs and technological interoperability weren’t the reasons why Spanish and Italian banks refused to join Wero. Rather, they see Bizum and Bancomat brand respectively as a strategic chip that could help them gain market share. Thus, in addition to the announced cooperation, we may also see some competition. Notably, the German branches of Santander, BBVA and HSBC (Unicredit) are among the few German banks that haven’t announced Wero yet. Most likely they plan to bring Bizum and Bancomat to Germany rather than to offer Wero.
The cooperation between EuroPA and EPI was announced over a year go. It was clear back then that new countries will not join Wero but some integration will be done instead. European Network for Payments looks just like formalization of this cooperation.
For many people the limits of Wero were clear from the very beginning. Countries don’t want to implement solutions controlled by German and French banks. They made it clear in 2021 when they left EPI.