European payment alternatives

The author, works in business development at BLIK Slovakia and built the Poland–Slovakia payment corridor mentioned below. 

Visa and Mastercard are not payment systems in the way most people think. They are messaging networks that sit between your bank and the shop's bank, and they charge a fee for every message. Europe sends roughly 60 billion card transactions a year through these two American networks. Pricing, rules, data and routing decisions are all controlled from outside Europe. That is a strategic dependency.

Why the dependency matters

On 1 June 2018 a single faulty switch in Visa's UK data centre took down card payments across Europe for ten hours. 5.2 million transactions failed. People stood at tills on a Friday evening and could not pay for groceries. The Bank of England had to take supervisory action against Visa Europe.

In March 2022 Visa and Mastercard suspended operations in Russia. 144 million people lost international card payments overnight. Russia deserved the sanctions. That is not the point. The point is that the switch exists, and two companies in California and New York control it. Russia had a fallback. Europe does not have one at scale yet. That is what EuroPA is building.

And then the fees. Interchange is capped in the EU, but scheme fees on top are not, and they keep rising. Every time you tap, a small slice goes to San Francisco. Multiply by 60 billion. Account-to-account schemes like BLIK, Bizum or Wero skip the card network entirely. The money moves bank to bank.

What Europe is building

Not one app. Interoperability. Think of it as roaming for payments. You do not install a European phone app when you cross a border. Your local SIM just works. Same logic here: you keep your local app, and it works when you travel or shop abroad.

The glue is EuroPA, the European Payments Alliance. It is not a consumer app. It is the hub underneath that connects the national schemes to each other. In February 2026 EPI (Wero), Bancomat, Bizum, MB WAY and Vipps MobilePay signed a memorandum to build it as a central entity. Together the connected schemes reach about 130 million users in 13 countries, roughly 72% of the EU plus Norway.

One thing to stress: these are not startups or fintechs. They are bank-owned, regulator-backed national infrastructures. That is why they are credible.

What already works

Since March 2025, Bizum, Bancomat and MB WAY users send money to each other by phone number across Spain, Italy, Portugal and Andorra. No IBAN needed. Greece's IRIS joined that network in June 2026. In April 2026 the first cross-border A2A corridor in Central Europe went live: Slovak users pay at Polish merchants through BLIK. No new app, no registration, no friction. I built that one. Wero handles online checkout in Germany, France and Belgium with merchants like Lidl, Decathlon and Air France. And in April 2026 Bancomat, MB WAY and Wero proved that in-store QR payments work across schemes.

How it will feel for you

Marta from Warsaw buys sunglasses in a Spanish web shop. At checkout she picks "Pay with BLIK". The EuroPA hub routes the request to Poland. Her banking app opens, shows the amount in EUR and PLN, and she confirms with her fingerprint. The shop receives euros within seconds via SEPA Instant. Marta's account is debited in PLN. No card network in between. She never installed Bizum.

A realistic timeline

Today: cross-border P2P in Southern Europe, BLIK in Slovakia, Wero e-commerce in three countries, a BLIK euro transfer pilot with MB WAY. 2027: cross-border shopping and in-store payments through the EuroPA hub, Wero tap-to-pay, BLIK as a payment option in EuroPA markets. 2028 to 2030: your local app works at most merchants across Europe.

You do not need the euro to join. The hub connects schemes, not currencies. Bulgaria's blink joined in May 2026. So yes, BLIK and MobilePay should eventually show up at checkout on Kaufland.de. The rails are being laid now. Just do not expect to delete your card app next month.

Below: the European schemes that are actually connecting.Revised draft is above. Say the word and I'll paste it into the Content field on the page.