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Bizum, Spain’s dominant payment app, is launching NFC-based account-to-account payments at physical stores, cutting out Visa and Mastercard networks and lowering fees for merchants.
Bizum, the Spanish payment app that has largely replaced cash at social gatherings, is now extending its reach to physical retail locations.
Previously, transactions initiated by tapping phones or cards went through Visa or Mastercard networks. Merchants paid interchange and service fees to these card schemes, while spending data was processed on servers abroad and used to create consumer profiles.
Starting 18 May, this will change. Using NFC technology, Bizum Pay will execute instant transfers directly from the customer’s bank account to the merchant’s, bypassing foreign intermediaries and US-owned payment infrastructure.
What began as a collaborative experiment among Spanish banks has grown into a major payment ecosystem, drawing attention from regulators and markets in Brussels and New York.
The platform includes over 30 million users—almost the entire adult banking population in Spain—along with 111,000 businesses integrated into the system and approximately 40 banks collaborating as a unified group, a level of integration unmatched in Germany or France.
By 2025, Bizum reached 3.4 million instant transfers per day.
The initial rollout in-store will be led by CaixaBank, Sabadell, and Bankinter, with other banks joining in stages. Full deployment is expected before the end of the year, although the main consumer push is anticipated in September or October.
Drawing on Bizum’s e-commerce success—over 100 million payments in 2025 that helped reduce cart abandonment—the expansion into physical retail could lead to substantial growth.
Within two to three years, Bizum could achieve between 25% and 35% of total payment volume in physical stores in Spain.
Bizum’s advantages include lower costs for merchants and its position as the default payment method for many users.
In markets where domestic systems like Brazil’s Pix or India’s UPI have gained ground, US card networks have responded by increasing loyalty programs offering cashback, purchase insurance, and rewards—features Bizum currently does not provide.
The networks have also relied on credit by enabling deferred payments, a capability Bizum does not have, as it processes instant transfers. Therefore, Visa and Mastercard are expected to maintain strength in high-value purchases and compete vigorously for micro-payments.
The lack of a French or German equivalent to Bizum is attributed to fragmentation in those markets. While Spanish banks quickly adopted a single standard, other European countries developed divided systems.
Spain’s model is now part of the EuroPA Alliance and being positioned as the basis for the European Payments Initiative (EPI), aiming to allow payments across European cities as seamlessly as sending money within Spain today.
For businesses serving only Spanish customers, paying commissions to international aggregators like Stripe, Adyen, or PayPal may increasingly seem unnecessary.
Bizum offers instant settlement and significantly lower merchant fees than the usual 0.2%–2% charged by card networks. If the in-store user experience equals that online, Spanish local commerce will have strong financial reasons to prefer this domestic payment system.
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