Norwegian-Danish Vipps MobilePay is joining forces with four other European mobile payment providers in a shared network that aims to make account-to-account payments seamless across borders by 2027.
The other four players in the collaboration are Bancomat in Italy, Bizum in Spain, SIBS/MB WAY in Portugal and EPI/Wero, which has already been established in Belgium, France and Germany, among others. Altogether, the five solutions cover around 130 million users in 13 European countries. The agreement links some of the most widely used national mobile payment solutions with a pan-European venture, providing a first picture of what a more cohesive European payments layer might look like in practice.
Vipps MobilePay, led by CEO Rune Garborg, has been a key player in the payments market for several years, including as an alternative to Apple by offering contactless in-store tapping. This solution has already been used by well over a million Norwegians. In November last year, the company also made its first cross-border test payment, from a Vipps MobilePay user to the Portuguese MB Way wallet.
Instead of launching one new European super-app, the parties behind the new mobile collaboration plan to establish a single European point of contact for payments to be operated by a separate company. This linkage becomes a technical layer between the solutions and ensures that payments can be routed across countries using common European standards and existing account-to-account infrastructure. The wallets retain their own brands and features, but gain a common European brand that shows users where their national solution can be used outside their home market.
The agreement marks a transition from feasibility studies to an implementation phase, with the goal of enabling cross-border payments to be made between the existing solutions without users having to switch app, brand or user experience. The parties have added up to a phased roll-out of use cases over the next two years. By 2026, the ambition is to put in place cross-border payments between individuals, allowing a user in one country to send money to a contact in another participating country directly from their existing app. From 2027, the cooperation is planned to be extended to both online shopping and in-store payments, so that, for example, one can pay at a Spanish or German online store or terminal with a Nordic or Italian wallet within the same framework.
The parties describe the agreement as a concrete step towards a more independent European payment system, in which Europe relies less on international card networks and global payment providers. Pointing to the fact that the continent already has both the infrastructure and the reach to offer its own solutions, they point to the Europe collaboration — which since March 2025 has connected mobile payment solutions in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Andorra — as an early proof that cross-border account-to-account payments can work in practice. According to the announcement, around six million euros were transferred across borders through Europe in 2025 without any special marketing, and the new agreement is touted as a next step to scale this model to more countries and applications.
