Spain and Europe are preparing for a payments revolution in 2026. And Bizumour national solution, will be the key to the changes to come. On the one hand, the platform plans to launch its own digital wallet (“wallet”, according to the term) in Spain. … in English) to pay in physical stores; On the other hand, it will be an essential year for the European interconnection of payment solutions.
The first of these steps is the simplest to launch and the one that can bring the most revenue to the Spanish platform, owned by the banks. They are already preparing the launch of what will be called Pay Bizum and this will serve to completely compete with Google and Apple, which practically monopolize the digital wallet segment.
But what are these so-called “wallets”? These are applications or payment platforms that act as a virtual wallet where you can store the cards and thus be able to pay with them through your mobile phone. This simple act of bringing your cell phone closer to pay at a credit card machine is commonly mediated by digital wallets. Google or Appledepending on the operating system. Likewise, two other American players, Visa and Mastercard, also participate in this mobile transaction in the vast majority of cases, as card payment networks.
Bizum Pay is expected to eliminate all this American intervention since it will be a Spanish “wallet”, thus excluding Google and Apple; and it also bypasses Visa and Mastercard, since Bizum does not use the card for transactions but directly relies on the mobile number and bank account. However, the digital wallet will also allow cards to be incorporated.
This solution would help Spaniards pay directly to physical storessomething that Bizum currently lacks. The expansion planned for this solution is massive, as financial sector sources predict, since the operation would actually be as simple as using the card or the wallets of Google and Apple.
Fernando Rodríguez, deputy general manager of international expansion at Bizum, explains that it is expected to be available in the middle of next year. And he reveals to ABC that they developed the functionality so that you can pay with the “wallet” even if there is no internet connection, such as in the case of “an outage or failure of telecommunications networks”.
The Spanish platform will launch Bizum Pay, a “wallet” that will not require using the card to pay in store
The second step which will revolutionize payments in 2026 takes place at the European level. The EU does not have a European payment system, since most transactions use Google, Apple, Visa and Mastercard. Same problem as in Spain but on a larger scale. Added to this are the difficulties, slowness and higher costs of sending money between European countries.
cross-border operations
These are the money transfers that have already been carried out after interconnecting the solutions of Spain, Portugal and Italy.
Finding a solution to this problem is a task carried out by Bizum, using the EuroPA platform. Bizum is already interconnected with its counterparts in Portugal, Italy and Andorra, enabling instant money transfers between accounts in these countries, each using their own platform. They will gradually join Europe solutions from Poland, Slovakia, the Nordic countries and Greece. “Today, more than 50 million people can now transfer money to each other in seconds, securely and without changing their habits. And more than 50,000 cross-border operations have already been carried out, which is a success if we take into account that we have not carried out any promotional campaigns,” explains Rodríguez.
More and more millions of European users have their payment systems interconnected, but the big change will come when the countries present in EuroPA reach a new agreement with the states that are part of the initiative. EARthis is where the French, Germans, Belgians and Dutch are thanks to their Wero solution. Currently, EuroPA and EPI are studying the feasibility phase of interconnection of all European solutions, each retaining its commercial brand at the local level. After this will come the implementation phase and it will take place at the end of 2026 (or at the latest at the beginning of 2027), so a system of money transfer between individuals and between countries would already be a reality. “This will be orchestrated through a central technical ‘hub’, based on European standards and infrastructure, which will be the driving force behind this interconnection. This ‘hub’ will enable more than 120 million customers of participating solutions to make instant cross-border payments in their daily lives,” explains the Bizum spokesperson.
American dependency
Currently, the vast majority of payments in Europe are intermediated by Google, Apple, Visa and Mastercard, the Old Continent not having its own system. The objective is now to regain sovereignty in this area, after the loss of confidence across the Atlantic.
A Spanish portfolio
Now when you pay with your mobile phone, cards from the Visa and Mastercard network are used and the digital wallet from Google and Apple is used. With Bizum Pay, the “wallet would be Spanish” and cards would not be used since its technology relies on telephone numbers and directly on the bank account.
European Bizum
The EuroPA alliance (Spain, Italy, Portugal) will partner with EPI (Germany, France, Belgium, Holland) to interconnect all platforms in all countries for immediate money transfers between member states and will also enable payments at merchants. A Bizum user, for example, could send money to another user of a platform in another country, or pay directly with Bizum in another country.
The next step would be to introduce the poorly named European Bizum to the world. e-commerce and in physical commerce. This is what is important since thanks to these solutions the Old Continent could close the quasi-monopoly of Visa, Mastercard, Google and Apple.
The objective of all this is to try to reduce the dependence of the European system on American actors, given the distrust generated in recent times on both sides of the Atlantic. This type of initiative is part of the EU’s desire to achieve European sovereignty. Creating systems by Europeans for Europeans.
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