Five domestic payment schemes incorporate the European Network for Payments in Madrid to run a shared interoperability hub

Bancomat (Italy), Bizum (Spain), EPI Company (operator of Wero), SIBS-MB WAY (Portugal) and Vipps MobilePay (Norway, Denmark, Finland, Sweden) announced on 30 September 2026 that they have set up the European Network for Payments (ENP), a jointly owned company headquartered in Madrid in which the five founding partners hold equal stakes. ENP will operate and scale the common interoperability hub foreseen in the memorandum of understanding the same partners signed in February 2026, connecting their domestic solutions through a shared technical and operational layer built on European standards while each brand stays in place.

The rollout is phased: cross-border peer-to-peer payments first, e-commerce and point-of-sale payments in subsequent phases, with the partners stating only that technical implementation is being prepared. The five solutions together serve around 130 million users across 13 European countries, more than 70% of the population of the EU and Norway.

This is the corporate vehicle behind the European payment sovereignty argument, and it moves that argument from a memorandum to a company with shareholders, a head office and a mandate. Until now the domestic schemes' interoperability work had no entity that could sign, build or be held to a roadmap; ENP gives the EuroPA-style alliance one.

For acceptance specifically, the phasing is the thing to read: P2P is where the hub starts, so nothing reaches a merchant's terminal yet, but a single hub that can later carry e-commerce and POS across 13 markets is the first credible route to pan-European acceptance for account-to-account wallets that today stop at their own borders. That is the scenario in which Visa and Mastercard face a domestic alternative with continental reach rather than five national ones, and it is also the structure acquirers and PSPs would have to integrate once per hub instead of once per scheme.

• Whether ENP publishes a dated roadmap for the e-commerce and POS phases rather than P2P alone
• Who it appoints to run the Madrid entity
• Whether further domestic schemes join as shareholders or connect as participants
• How the hub positions itself against the digital euro's own acceptance rails

• epicompany.eu
• Joint press release, dateline 30 September 2026
• The Paypers, 30 September 2026