EPI, the pan-European payment initiative, has just taken a new step. This new solution designed to compete with Visa or Mastercard will enter the test phase in Belgium and France from the end of 2023.
This is a project that has been discussed for several years now. From 2021, the European Union has announced its ambition to develop a direct competitor to Google Pay, Apple Pay or even Visa and Mastercard. The idea is simple: propose a digital wallet that would work within the 27 member countries of the EU.
Today, this audacious project responds to the name of EPI, for European Payments Initiative. EPI is funded and powered by several European shareholder bankssuch as Crédit Mutuel, BPN Paribas, Crédit Agricole, ING, Banque Postale and Deutsche Bank and Belfius.
These establishments sum up PPE like this: “a unified instant account-to-account payment solution developed in Europe”. In other words, the PPE will allow users to pay via their mobile phone by instant transfer. And as we can say on the official website of the EPI, a new step will be taken in the deployment of the system.
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The PPE enters its 1st test phase in France and Germany
In effect, a first test phase of this P2P digital wallet (person-to-person payment) will be launched with certain users as soon as the end of 2023. Germany and France will be the first countries to experiment with the service. Belgium will then follow from 2024.
As the EPI Company reminds us, this zone represents more than half of non-cash retail payments in the Euro zone. The deployment in other countries of the Old Continent is planned later, without further details. Coming back to PPE, the goal is to eventually cover all the use cases encountered by users on a daily basis :
- person-to-person (P2P) and person-to-business (P2Pro) payments
- online shopping
- point of sale payments
The EPI application will propose in this sense several payment methods such as single transactions, payments in installments, on delivery, reservations or recurring direct debits for subscriptions for example. “EPI is positioned as an innovation platform for the European payment ecosystem. It will serve as a basis for the implementation of the strategy of the European Commission and that of the European Central Bank / Eurosystem in terms of retail payment”. concludes the Epi Company.
