Europe is Building Its Own Payment Rails to Rival the Competition
The past year has been a big one for the Single Euro Payments Area, more familiarly known as SEPA. Its geographic scope grew to 41 countries and territories, and Bulgaria's adoption of the euro brought yet another EU economy fully into the common currency.
SEPA also got much faster. By late 2025, the EU's Instant Payments Regulation required euro area banks and payment providers to send and receive instant euro transfers, charge no more for them than for standard transfers, and verify that a recipient's name matches the IBAN.
The improvements and expansion for SEPA are connected to a common goal: Europe is building a payment system that can move euros across borders faster and easier than before, then using that improved infrastructure to support homegrown alternatives to foreign card networks and digital wallets.
SEPA Instant gives the region a common, bank-based foundation for faster payments. Wero, a digital wallet backed by the European Central bank and connected to SEPA, is making a push towards expanding its market share. New interoperability among existing digital wallets in Europe are making legacy products more powerful. Taken together, Europe is making SEPA something consumers and merchants interface with every day.
For American businesses, the developments may have downstream consequences for moving money between the continents; if recent successes for payment modernization in other global regions are any indication, businesses should start preparing for the changes. If Europe succeeds, US companies will increasingly need to pay, collect and hold money through the local payment rails their counterparties expect.
The standard in finance
Slash goes above with better controls, better rewards, and better support for your business.
Instant Payments are in Vogue, and Europe is Seizing the Moment
SEPA is often described as a network, but it is better understood as a family of common payment schemes. The European Payments Council writes the rules that let banks and payment providers move euros across national borders using the same formats and operating standards.
- The standard SEPA Credit Transfer scheme is the closest European comparison to ACH: an account-to-account transfer designed to cost less than a wire and traditionally settled on a business-day timetable.
- SEPA Instant can digitally process a payment within seconds, around the clock, even on banking holidays.
- SEPA Direct Debit covers authorized payments pulled from an account.
SEPA Instant existed before the recent regulation changes, but voluntary participation limited its usefulness at first. European area banks weren’t required to participate in the scheme until 2025, which is when mandates from the Instant Payment Regulation began to take effect.
Usage of SEPA Instant jumped as universal support rolled out. Instant transfers represented 33.7 percent of all SEPA credit transfer volume in the fourth quarter of 2025, up from 19.7 percent in the third quarter of 2024. The Eurosystem's TIPS platform processed 82.5 percent more instant payments in 2025 than in 2024.
Sharp increases in instant payment usage are not isolated to Europe. China's Alipay showed how quickly QR-based wallets could change retail payments. Brazil's Pix proved that a public instant-payment rail could do the same: five years after launch, Pix processed almost 80 billion transactions worth more than R$35 trillion in 2025.
Another motivation for Europe is actualizing its goal of payment sovereignty, which was a goal set by the EU in 2020 to inculcate independence from non-EU financial technology. Internationally owned card schemes like Visa and Mastercard handled about 61 percent of euro area card transactions in 2022, and 13 euro area countries relied entirely on international schemes for card payments. The ECB also found that none of the major cross-border card processors it identified was fully EU-owned.
SEPA Instant makes the ambition for payment sovereignty plausible. A real-time bank rail gives European companies something to build on without starting a new card network from scratch, and other countries have already showcased what success looks like.
Payment Sovereignty is Becoming a Business Model
The European Payments Initiative is trying to turn their modernized infrastructure into products people interact with everyday. The most notable example is the Wero wallet, which began with person-to-person transfers and has expanded into ecommerce payments, with in-store and other retail uses on its roadmap.
By March 2026, Wero reported more than 50 million users and live online merchant payments in Germany and Belgium. The company plans to expand into other nearby countries soon.
Besides Wero, Europe already has several successful domestic payment apps, including Bizum in Spain, Bancomat in Italy, MB WAY in Portugal and Vipps MobilePay in the Nordics.
Rather than force the existing payment apps to fold into a larger, multi-regional payment product, the [regulatory body] is encouraging them to remain independent yet interoperable. The companies created the European Network for Payments in September 2026 to create a common layer for cross-border payments while preserving each app’s local brand and interface.
The strategy is well suited to Europe's fragmented payment market. Consumers do not have to abandon the app they already use, and local systems do not have to surrender their identity to a single pan-European front end. Interoperability can create regional reach without demanding uniformity.
Why American Businesses Should Care About Changes to SEPA
European payment modernization will probably show up through ordinary commercial requests: a supplier who invoices in euros, a customer who expects to pay an IBAN, a merchant that wants immediate confirmation, or a finance team that expects every payment to reconcile automatically.
Widespread adoption would make local-rail access part of the cost of doing business in Europe. American companies that rely solely on international wires could wind up being slower and more expensive to work with than local competitors. On the other hand, a US business with direct access to SEPA could use a faster and often more predictable rail that their suppliers are familiar with, giving them a leg up in international negotiations.
Local rails change the economics of a cross-border payment because they remove unnecessary distance. International wires often rely on a loose chain of correspondent banks which can charge processing fees and introduce multi-day delays. A SEPA transfer can reach a European recipient without passing through that chain of correspondent banks, reducing opportunities for delays and unexplained deductions.
Local access also gives a treasury team more control over foreign exchange. A business can hold euros, pay an invoice in its stated currency and choose when to convert funds instead of accepting an automatic FX conversion on every transaction.
Operationally, local account details make a US business easier to pay. An IBAN and a structured payment reference fit the systems European counterparties already use, while predictable settlement makes reconciliation and cash planning easier.
Access the Advantage of Local Rails with Slash
Slash is a business banking platform¹ that connects directly to the payment rails your European business partners already use. With Slash, you can send money through:
- SEPA: Pay in euros to the recipient’s IBAN, without a chain of correspondent banks.
- Faster Payments: Pay in pounds to a UK sort code and account number.
- Pix, SPEI and Bre-B: Reach Brazil, Mexico and Colombia over their local rails.
- SWIFT: Send international wires to more than 180 countries where no local rail is available.
- Stablecoins: Send and receive USDC or USDT across 15 blockchains, around the clock, including weekends and holidays.⁴
Slash gives you receiving details that match each rail, like an IBAN for SEPA or a Pix key for Brazil, so a European customer can pay you the same way they’d pay a local business.
Europe is rebuilding how money crosses its borders. With Slash, American businesses can send and receive money using the local rails their European partners already rely on. Get started today.
Apply in less than 10 minutes today
Join the 10,000+ businesses already using Slash.
Read more from us
