Bizum has joined EMPSA (European Association of Mobile Payment Systems) becoming the 15th member of this association, which promotes the creation of a complete European coverage of mobile payments. With the entry of Bizum, EMPSA exceeds 90 million consumers in 16 markets. According to Christian Pirkner, president of EMPSA, «With the incorporation of Bizum, we are taking a big step towards making interoperability between European payment systems a reality. Both payment systems, as well as businesses and banks, are seriously betting on this initiative”.
According to Angel NigorraCEO of Bizum, «With our entry into EMPSA we open an exploration phase to analyze the opportunity of this potential interoperability and we hope to contribute to the establishment of a future pan-European mobile payment solution. We have always talked about the interoperability of Bizum with other European solutions as a very real possibility and we share EMPSA’s conviction that European consumers can freely choose their payment method«.
What is EMPSA?
EMPSA was founded in 2019 by seven European mobile payment providers, with the aim of allowing all Europeans to use their national payment application anywhere in Europe. From today, EMPSA brings together 15 mobile payment companies in 16 different markets, with more than 90 million users, more than a million businesses and several hundred European banks. The companies that make up EMPSA are:
- Bamcard (Bosnia Herzegovina)
- Bankart (Slovenia)
- Bancomat Pay (Italy)
- Bancontact (Belgium)
- Bizum (Spain)
- blik()
- Bluecode (Austria, Germany)
- Borica (Bulgaria)
- Ideal (Netherlands)
- Mobile Pay (, Finland)
- Plick (Italy)
- Sibs (Portugal)
- Swish (Sweden)
- Twint (Switzerland)
- Vipps (Norway)
EMPSA seeks to establish a comprehensive, scalable and sovereign European payment systeminterconnecting the main existing national payment systems, allowing transactions between them based on the payment solutions preferred by consumers. Since its creation in 2019, the organization aims to give the European mobile payment user the right and possibility to use their mobile payment solution also when traveling abroad.
«We are currently in an initial phase that has been quite successful so far. We have shown that interoperability is possible and we are very close to achieving full interoperability between the Twint (Switzerland) and Bluecode (Germany and Austrian) systems, accessible to all users.“, He says Pirkner.
EMPSA’s aspiration is to create European payment sovereignty without having to build new infrastructure from scratch. Most importantly, national mobile payment leaders can continue to focus on the needs of their customers and create local use cases for them, while being interoperable across Europe. «The interoperability of European payment systems will strengthen Europe as an economic power, because a sovereign and independent European payment system can react to pressure from abroad in a more resilient and agile way. Not only European banks will benefit from this innovation, but especially businesses and consumers will«, he concludes Pirkner.
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