ENP Will Link Bancomat, Bizum and Wero Into One Network Covering 130 Million Users On 30 September 2026, five of Europe's national payment systems announced the creation of the European Network for Payments (ENP), a joint venture designed to link their infrastructures together and offer the continent's first genuinely pan-European alternative to Visa and Mastercard. The founding members are Italy's Bancomat, Spain's Bizum, Portugal's SIBS-MB WAY, Scandinavia's Vipps MobilePay, and EPI Company, the pan-European banking consortium behind the Wero digital wallet. The new entity will be headquartered in Madrid. The scale of the market Visa and Mastercard currently dominate is a central part of the story: according to figures reported by Il Sole 24 Ore, the two American card giants together handle roughly 90% of global card transactions outside China. ENP's backers are betting that combined scale, rather than any single national system trying to compete alone, is what finally makes a credible European alternative possible. The Numbers Behind the Launch Taken together, the companies behind ENP already reach approximately 130 million users across 13 European countries, covering more than 70% of the combined population of the European Union and Norway. That existing user base is the project's biggest asset: rather than building a payment network from scratch, ENP is stitching together systems that are already deeply embedded in their home markets, Bancomat in Italy, Bizum in Spain, MB WAY in Portugal, Vipps MobilePay across Scandinavia, and Wero, which already operates in France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. How It's Actually Supposed to Work Crucially, ENP isn't designed to replace any of these national brands with a single new logo. Each system will keep its own identity, its own features, and the user experience its customers already know. What ENP adds is an interoperability layer underneath: the technical and operational infrastructure needed to let a Bancomat user in Italy pay a Bizum user in Spain, or a Wero user in France send money to someone using Vipps MobilePay in Norway, without either side having to switch systems. Cross-border, interconnected payments are expected to go live starting in 2027. What Italy's Bancomat Is Saying Fabrizio Burlando, CEO of Bancomat, framed the venture in explicitly strategic terms. He described the creation of this European interoperability entity as a concrete step toward a more integrated and autonomous European payments system, and said the initiative reflects a clear strategic priority: contributing to a scalable European model capable of combining innovation, interoperability and resilience, while reinforcing the central role of European banks and infrastructure in the future of digital payments. Part of a Broader European Push for Financial Sovereignty ENP doesn't exist in isolation. It builds directly on groundwork laid in February 2026, when the European Payments Initiative and the EuroPA Alliance, the coalition bringing together Bancomat, Bizum, SIBS-MB WAY and Vipps MobilePay, signed a memorandum of understanding specifically aimed at this kind of cross-border interoperability. That earlier agreement was itself part of a wider European effort to reduce reliance on US-based financial infrastructure, a concern that gained urgency in 2026 amid broader geopolitical anxiety over Europe's dependence on American-controlled payment rails. Wero, EPI's own wallet, has been the most visible piece of that push so far, backed by major European banks including BNP Paribas, Groupe BPCE, Crédit Agricole and Crédit Mutuel, and already live in several EU markets with further rollouts planned across Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Spain through 2027. ENP effectively extends that same sovereignty logic beyond Wero's own footprint, linking it with the national systems Wero hasn't directly absorbed. A Realistic Read on What Comes Next None of this means Visa and Mastercard are about to disappear from European wallets, and none of the companies involved have suggested otherwise. The more realistic goal, as officials involved in similar EPI-led efforts have put it previously, is rebalancing rather than replacement: giving European banks, merchants and consumers a credible, lower-cost, domestically governed alternative for person-to-person transfers, e-commerce and eventually point-of-sale payments, increasing competition in a market two American companies have dominated for decades. Whether ENP's interconnected systems can actually deliver that at scale will become clearer once cross-border payments go live in 2027, but for the first time, Europe's fragmented national payment systems are moving in the same direction at the same time, rather than competing to build their own standalone answer to Visa and Mastercard separately.