Europe’s instant payments networks form ENP as Bizum, Bancomat, Wero, MB WAY and Vipps MobilePay prepare cross-border rails

Five national and regional payment schemes have created European Network for Payments (ENP), a joint company meant to connect their systems through a common technical layer. For high-risk merchants and their PSPs, the important bit is not the branding exercise — it is the prospect of a new European rail for instant transfers that could sit outside card networks.

1. ENP brings together Spain’s Bizum, Italy’s Bancomat, the European scheme Wero, Portugal’s MB WAY and the Scandinavian Vipps MobilePay. The company will link the existing systems so they can “see” each other and move money across borders without replacing the local apps.
2. The combined network covers about 130 million people in 13 countries, which the source says is more than 70% of the population of the EU and Norway. Bizum has over 32 million users, Vipps MobilePay has around 13 million, and MB WAY processes more than 70 million transactions per month.
3. Rollout is staged. Cross-border P2P transfers are planned for 2026, followed by online payments and in-store payments in 2027. In other words, the first use case is person-to-person transfers, then e-commerce and POS.
4. The project has been building for a year: a Memorandum of Understanding was signed in February, and in April Bancomat, Wero and MB WAY already tested cross-border QR-code payments, where a user on one system paid a merchant connected to another. ENP is headquartered in Madrid, and all five participants hold equal stakes.
5. For gambling and other high-risk verticals, the relevance is straightforward. ENP is being positioned as a European alternative to Visa and Mastercard, and the source explicitly ties that to reducing dependence on U.S. card schemes. That matters because cards are still the most painful channel for gambling acquiring, with MCC blocks, 3DS friction and programs such as Visa GBPP and Mastercard BRAM shaping access.

The first phase — P2P transfers — is also the sort of rail that can become a deposit and withdrawal channel before compliance teams have written a proper playbook for it. By 2027, when e-commerce and POS are added, PSPs and aggregators will need to know how ENP plans to handle merchant categories and AML controls for sensitive verticals, because local instant-payment schemes often get adopted by mass-market merchants first and only later face the question of whether gambling gets direct access at all.