One of the most extensively discussed topics in the hallways and on the main stages at Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam this week was account-to-account (A2A) payments. Participants expressed optimism that new account-based payment methods are breaking through in Europe and that the market is at the beginning of a long-term structural shift from cards to A2A.
On June 2, UK Payments Initiative Ltd (UKPI) launched a commercial scheme for variable recurring payments (VRPs), backed by 23 banks and payment service providers (PSPs). Across the Channel, EPI Company is rolling out Wero, and the EuroPA Alliance, which connects domestic A2A schemes in several European countries, signed a memorandum of understanding to create interoperable A2A infrastructure across 13 European countries by 2027.
The story we hear is that A2A is cheaper for merchants, settles in real time, and will therefore gradually displace card payments. However, Datos Insights thinks that framing is only half right.
The Lackluster Adoption of Open Banking (and How to Fix It)
The development of A2A payments in Europe started with open banking, which has been a regulatory success but a commercial disappointment. The PSD2 Directive mandated free access for PSPs to bank APIs, and the infrastructure largely got built, but adoption of payment initiation remained thin.
The missing ingredient was never the payment rail itself; SEPA Instant support is mandatory for banks, enabling consumers and businesses to move money in seconds. What was missing was a commercial scheme for open banking: the shared rulebook, dispute frameworks, liability standards, and bank incentive model that turns a clearing infrastructure into a payment product. Without this, banks had little reason to invest in the customer experience, and merchants had little reason to integrate.
The U.K. is showing Europe how to fix that. UKPI brings together banks and PSPs behind a common commercial model for VRPs, with operational standards and a governance structure that gives all participants a reason to participate. It starts with a focused set of use cases, covering government, utilities, charities, and financial services, but the architecture is designed to expand. That is the right sequence: Prove the model first, then scale it.
A payment rail and a payment network are not the same thing. Faster Payments and SEPA Instant move money, but a scheme tells a merchant the payment is authorized, defines what happens when it goes wrong, and gives everyone a commercial reason to show up. Europe is still building that layer; the U.K. just laid the first real foundation.
The Alternative Route: Wero
Wero, launched by EPI Company in 2024, is the most advanced European A2A scheme to date. Built on instant-payment infrastructure and initially rolled out in Germany, France, and Belgium, it already counts tens of millions of registered users. It covers peer-to-peer transfers and is expanding into e-commerce, with point-of-sale to follow. Critically, Wero operates as a branded consumer product, not just a rail, which is precisely the commercial layer that most European open-banking efforts have lacked. It is the closest Europe has to a proof point that a pan-regional A2A scheme can gain real consumer traction.
Wero is also part of the EuroPA Alliance for payments, which aims to establish interoperability among providers across Europe. It is targeting e-commerce and point-of-sale use cases by 2027, though coordinating across 13 countries and multiple regulatory regimes makes the timeline ambitious.
Not Every Use Case Is Ready, but Don’t Dismiss the Long Game
Global precedent shows that A2A can win at scale. In India, UPI processes over 17 billion transactions a month, and Brazil’s PIX reached 150 million users within two years of launch. BLIK dominates domestic e-commerce in Poland, while iDEAL, the Netherlands’ online payment system, has handled online payments for two decades. Strong regulatory backing, broad bank participation from day one, and a clear consumer proposition are the common threads. None succeeded by issuing a rulebook alone, and all took time.
The U.K. and much of Europe are not as far along on that journey. According to Datos Insights data (2025), dedicated A2A solutions account for just 2.0% of total volume in Europe. If account-funded wallets and buy-now-pay-later solutions are included the share rises to 11.3%. For the U.K., the shares are 0.1% and 4.3% respectively.
Some use cases are even structurally harder. Cards do several things at once: move money, extend credit, guarantee transactions, and serve as collateral. A2A handles the first well in domestic markets, but the rest take longer. Revolving credit requires a lender and regulatory approval, making it a bank product rather than a scheme feature. Travel and hospitality present a different challenge; for instance, hotels and car rental firms hold a card on file as collateral against no-shows and damage. A2A is a push payment, and holding funds in reserve against a future contingency requires legal and technical infrastructure that no current scheme provides at scale. In the U.K., cVRP is better understood as a superior direct debit than a wholesale card replacement, genuinely valuable but a more modest commercial opportunity.
The lesson from UPI, PIX, BLIK, and iDEAL is that A2A can win in specific markets with the right foundations in place. Those foundations take longer to build than the announcements suggest.
Sovereignty Is a Key Driver of Payment Resilience
Payment resilience has moved from an operational concern to a strategic requirement. In fact, Datos Insights research found that it has become a board-level priority for FIs globally, driven by regulatory enforcement, shrinking customer tolerance, and direct revenue risk. A diverse payment ecosystem, where domestic and regional rails can function independently of global networks, provides a layer of systemic redundancy that regulators and FIs increasingly require.
Sovereignty is one of the clearest motivations behind that resilience push. European governments, central banks, and FIs have concluded that deep dependence on a small number of globally concentrated networks carries geopolitical risk. The EuroPA Alliance signatories explicitly state this, using terms such as “payment sovereignty” and “strategic autonomy.” The U.K.’s National Payments Vision frames UKPI in similar terms: innovation, competition, and resilience for the domestic payments landscape. A domestic A2A infrastructure that can operate independently during periods of geopolitical or systemic stress is a strategic asset worth building, regardless of how quickly it displaces cards in everyday commerce.
Advantages and Challenges: The Scorecard
Where A2A Has the Stronger Hand
- More competition: A2A schemes give merchants a genuine alternative to card network pricing. For domestic recurring payments such as utilities, subscriptions, and government collections, the economics are compelling: lower interchange, faster settlement, and direct bank account access without card-on-file friction.
- Payment resiliency and sovereignty: This is now a board-level priority for FIs globally. Domestic A2A rails that can operate independently of global networks add a meaningful layer of systemic redundancy.Reducing dependence on a small number of globally concentrated networks is a strategic priority across Europe and the U.K. A domestically controlled payment infrastructure reduces geopolitical concentration risk, a concern that has moved from theoretical to pressing.
- Better user experience in some contexts: Where strong customer authentication is not required for A2A but is required for card payments, A2A can offer meaningfully lower friction, a genuine consumer benefit in the right use cases.
Where the Headwinds Come From
- Consumer inertia: Card networks have spent decades optimizing the payment experience. Contactless cards, digital wallets, and card-on-file checkout are fast and familiar. Changing consumer behavior at scale is slow and expensive, regardless of how compelling the underlying economics are for merchants.
- Acceptance gaps: A U.K. or European A2A scheme that works only domestically has a structural problem for internationally active consumers and merchants. Global coverage requires co-branding with existing networks or parallel credentials.
- Use-case immaturity: Credit-funded purchases, travel guarantees, rental deposits, and cross-border e-commerce remain outside the effective reach of current A2A schemes. Closing those gaps requires not just technical work but new legal and regulatory frameworks.
- Years to scale: UKPI’s cVRP rulebook is live, but with a narrow initial use-case set. The European MoU targets full e-commerce and point-of-sale coverage by 2027, an ambitious timeline. Meaningful scale across multiple use cases will take the better part of a decade.
A2A Is Evolving, but It Will Take Time
UKPI and the European A2A initiatives are building infrastructure that will matter for resilience, competition, and strategic control over payment systems. The U.K. has taken a concrete step that Europe should study carefully. The timeline to broad commercial scale is measured in years rather than months, though, and several use cases remain structurally out of reach for now.
A2A and cards will coexist for a long time. The sensible approach is to plan for both and to be clear-eyed about growing levels of payment competition and diversification.
For a deeper dive into the topic of payment resilience, see Datos Insights’ report, Securing Transaction Continuity: A Global Assessment of Payment Resiliency, November 2025.
