Bizum a challenge for Visa and Mastercard - The Spanish application, a platform with 30 million users
Spanish payments app Bizum, already widespread across Spain, is moving into brick-and-mortar stores. Until now, when you tap your phone or card on a POS reader, the transaction traveled across the Visa or Mastercard networks. For each payment, the merchant pays interchange and service fees to those card schemes. Meanwhile, spending data is processed on servers across the Atlantic. From May 18, that changes. Using NFC technology, Bizum Pay will direct money directly from the customer’s account to the merchant’s account via an instant transfer – eliminating foreign intermediaries and reducing reliance on US-owned infrastructure.
What began as an experiment in interoperability between Spanish banks has transformed into an ecosystem that has attracted great attention from both Brussels and New York.
The platform now counts more than 30 million users — practically the entire adult banking population in Spain — along with 111,000 businesses already integrated into the digital ecosystem and around 40 banking institutions forming a unified bloc that has achieved what Germany and France can only dream of. In 2025, Bizum reached 3.4 million instant transfers per day.
In a two to three year horizon, the most realistic expectation is for Bizum to reach between 25% and 35% of the total payment volume in physical stores in Spain. Its advantage is not only the cost for merchants, but also the fact that it is already the default payment method for users.
Why is there no French or German Bizum? The answer is fragmentation.
While Spain’s banks quickly agreed on a single standard, the rest of Europe’s systems are fragmented. Spain not only has a model to export, but it is already leading the European Payments Alliance. Bizum offers instant payments and significantly lower fees for merchants than the typical 0.2%-2% fees charged by card networks.
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