Europe continues to advance toward the creation of a pan-European payments market that facilitates interconnection and interoperability. In this regard, EPI Company (European Payments Initiative) and EuroPA (European Payments Alliance) have announced the start of a collaboration that seeks to enable European citizens to send and receive frictionless payments in Europe, including cross-border transactions. In the agreement, the EuroPA (European Payments Alliance) initiative is represented by Bancomat, Bizum, MB WAY (SIBS), and Vipps MobilePay. A joint interconnected solution To successfully address this challenge, EPI and EuroPA will build on their existing digital payment solutions and strong adoption to develop a joint interconnected solution. Its goal is to cover all use cases (person-to-person payments and commercial payments, both online and in-person) in the markets where the participating solutions operate. To this end, a study phase has begun, the results of which are expected by the end of summer 2025. According to both entities, the alliance will initially cover 15 European countries, with a combined total of more than 382 million people. The project will allow these European citizens to use their preferred digital payment solutions both locally and across the continent to make or receive payments. "Interconnecting existing solutions is a fast track to European sovereignty and independence, a goal shared by both the European Commission and the Eurosystem. This approach, based on first-class European solutions and diversity, will continue to drive innovation, convenience, and efficiency for consumers and merchants," states a statement issued by Bizum. EuroPA has already enabled interoperability between Andorra, Spain, Italy, and Portugal. The payment solutions Bizum, Bancomat, and MB WAY/SIBS founded the EuroPA alliance and have already implemented interoperability between their services. This way, more than 50 million users in Andorra, Spain, Italy, and Portugal can send and receive mobile payments instantly and across borders. Recently, the Blik (Poland), IRIS (Greece), and Vipps MobilePay (Nordic countries) solutions have become part of EuroPA, and it has been announced that they will be gradually integrated into operations. EPI relies on Wero, the integrated solution for Central European banks. EPI, for its part, is owned by 16 European banks and payment service providers and is developing Wero, a unified mobile payment solution to cover all types of transactions. Wero is currently present in Germany, Belgium, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, and had more than 40 million registered users as of April 2025.