Paycon Payments & Banking Advisory

The World Bank published a technical note in March 2026 examining how fast payment systems — the term used for open-banking-based rails like SEPA Instant in Europe, UPI in India, FPS in the US, or Open Banking in the UK — are beginning to adopt NFC and offline capabilities. The very features that made card payments dominant at the point of sale for decades.

Wero, backed by the European Payments Initiative, is planning NFC-enabled POS payments later this year. The ambition is clear: build an account-to-account alternative to Visa and Mastercard for in-store payments across Europe, settled in seconds over SEPA Instant.

It is a compelling vision. Lower merchant fees, instant settlement, European sovereignty over payment infrastructure. But from years inside the card payment ecosystem — terminal integration, acquirer routing, and the operational realities of merchant acceptance — there are structural gaps in the FPS-at-POS proposition that deserve a more careful examination than they typically receive. Gaps that are very often poorly, or not at all, addressed when this topic is discussed.

The scheme problem at the point of sale

Card payments work at scale because the scheme layer solves a coordination problem that no individual participant can solve alone. Visa and Mastercard define the terminal certification requirements, the message formats, the authentication protocols, the liability rules, and crucially, the consumer experience. Any consumer with a Visa card can tap any Visa-certified terminal at any merchant, served by any acquirer, in any country. The interoperability is not accidental. It is the product of decades of specification work, certification programmes, and scheme governance.

FPS-based payments at the point of sale face exactly the same coordination and interoperability problem, but most markets haven’t solved it yet. For an account-to-account payment to work at a merchant terminal, the consumer’s banking app needs to support the same payment-initiation flow — whether that is scanning a QR code or responding to an NFC tap — that the merchant’s terminal presents. If the consumer’s bank uses a different format, a different authentication flow, or simply hasn’t implemented POS payment initiation in their app, the transaction fails.

In Europe, Wero is building this scheme layer for Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. But the rest of Europe, including significant markets in Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe, has no equivalent and no published timeline. SEPA Instant provides the clearing rail, but a clearing rail without a standardised initiation and acceptance layer is like having motorways without on-ramps. The infrastructure exists; the access points don’t. And this is the crucial point that cannot be solved overnight.

A continent of domestic solutions, none of them ready for POS

The fragmentation of the European landscape makes this more concrete. Nearly every market has developed its own domestic mobile payment tool over the past decade: Bizum in Spain, Flik in Slovenia, MBWay in Portugal, Swish in Sweden, Payconiq in Belgium and Luxembourg, and others. Several of these support some form of merchant payment, typically through QR codes scanned by the consumer’s banking app, and they have achieved meaningful domestic adoption for person-to-person transfers and small business payments.

But none of them have built what would be needed for structured point-of-sale acceptance at the level that card schemes provide. There is no terminal certification framework. There is no NFC specification for proximity payment initiation. The consumer-protection and dispute-resolution mechanisms are either rudimentary or non-existent compared to card-scheme standards. And critically, none of them interoperate across borders. A Bizum user cannot pay at a Flik-accepting merchant, and neither can pay at a terminal in Germany.

These domestic tools are evidence of real demand for account-to-account payments beyond simple bank transfers. But they also illustrate the fundamental limitation: without a coordinating scheme that standardises the consumer experience, the terminal protocol, and the acceptance rules across banks and across borders, each solution remains a domestic island. Wero’s ambition is precisely to consolidate this fragmented landscape, and the EuroPA-EPI memorandum of understanding signed in February 2026, aiming to interconnect solutions like Bizum and others with the Wero ecosystem, signals that the industry recognises the problem. Whether this consolidation happens quickly enough, and whether it reaches the markets currently outside Wero’s footprint, remains an open question.

The consumer-protection gap that rarely gets discussed

Card payment ecosystems have developed layered consumer-protection mechanisms over their entire history, and these mechanisms are deeply embedded in how the system operates. At the terminal, EMV chip and contactless transactions use dynamic cryptograms that prevent replay attacks and cloning. Tokenisation ensures that actual card credentials never traverse the merchant’s systems. The liability-shift framework allocates fraud risk based on which party failed to support the most secure available authentication method. And the chargeback process, for all its operational overhead, gives consumers a structured, well-understood path to dispute transactions and recover funds.

SEPA Instant credit transfers are, by design, irrevocable. Once the funds leave the payer’s account, there is no standardised mechanism to pull them back. The SCT Inst scheme includes a recall process, but it requires the beneficiary’s bank to cooperate, and the beneficiary can simply refuse. There is no chargeback right equivalent to what card schemes provide. Wero is introducing dispute resolution and buyer-protection features, but these are being built from scratch alongside the payment capability itself. They don’t benefit from the decades of case law, operational precedent, and scheme-level enforcement that card disputes do.

For e-commerce, where the consumer initiates the payment consciously and has time to review, this may be manageable. At the point of sale, where transactions happen quickly and the consumer may not fully register what they have authorised in their banking app, the absence of a mature dispute framework is a more serious concern. Merchants who deliver defective goods, services that aren’t rendered, or transactions where the amount differs from what was agreed — all of these scenarios have well-established resolution paths in the card world. In the SEPA Instant world, the mechanisms are still being defined. This is not something to be taken lightly.

There is also a practical security consideration at the terminal itself. Card payment terminals go through EMV Level 1, 2, and 3 certification: hardware compliance, kernel validation, and end-to-end processing verification with the acquirer. These certifications exist because the terminal is an active participant in the security chain. It verifies cryptograms, manages cardholder verification, and ensures that transaction data hasn’t been tampered with. In the FPS POS model, the terminal’s role is substantially reduced. It presents a QR code or broadcasts NFC data, but the security burden shifts almost entirely to the consumer’s device and banking app. Whether that shift in trust architecture produces equivalent security outcomes at scale remains to be seen — particularly given the diversity of Android devices and banking-app implementations across European markets.

What this means practically

None of this is an argument that FPS at the point of sale won’t happen or shouldn’t happen. The economic case for merchants is strong, and the political momentum behind European payment sovereignty is real. The domestic tools already in use across Europe demonstrate genuine consumer appetite for account-to-account payments beyond traditional banking.

But card payments at the point of sale are not just a transaction channel. They are an ecosystem with terminal certification, multi-party liability frameworks, mature dispute resolution, global interoperability, and consumer-protection mechanisms refined through billions of transactions and decades of operational experience. Replacing that, or even standing alongside it as a credible alternative, requires more than a faster, cheaper clearing rail.

It requires a scheme. It requires certification governance for terminals and acceptance devices. It requires a consumer-protection framework that gives buyers genuine recourse when something goes wrong. And it requires all of this to work consistently across banks, across borders, and across the full range of devices and terminal environments that exist in the European market. Above all, it requires a sound, sustainable business model where the costs are covered and margins collected, so that all participants can thrive.

Wero is pursuing exactly this, and the consolidation of domestic solutions under the EPI umbrella may eventually deliver the pan-European coordination that is needed. But for the markets it doesn’t yet cover, for the POS specifications it hasn’t yet published, and for the protection mechanisms it hasn’t yet matured, the gap between ambition and operational reality remains significant.

Anyone building payment infrastructure for the European point of sale — banks, PSPs, terminal providers, or merchants — should be planning for a multi-rail future where cards and FPS coexist. They should also be clear-eyed about what each rail can and cannot deliver today. Because friction is the last thing the consumer wants in the payment process itself. And creating a solution for a problem that, from the consumer’s perspective, does not exist, is not an easy task.

If you are planning POS strategy or evaluating FPS-vs-cards trade-offs, get in touch. See also our card acquiring & orchestration services and the rest of the Insights archive.