- Key insights: Visa is partnering with several mobile wallets in the European Union.
- What’s at stake: Apple has agreed to open its mobile payment technology as part of a settlement with EU antitrust regulators. That has drawn companies into the EU’s wallet market.
- Forward look: The card network plans to pilot more mobile wallet technology early next year.
Other Visa mobile wallet projects in the region include an iOS/Android contactless mobile payment collaboration with Klarna, a Visa co-wallet with Vipps Mobile Pay in the Nordics; and a planned 2026 pilot with Bancomat, an Italian digital payments product. Payment companies are drawn to the
Visa this week released internal research noting a boost in demand for mobile payments in Europe, reporting mobile payments make up 59% of all e-commerce transactions in Europe, with growth on pace to reach 75% in the next four years. Thirty-two percent of European consumers only use mobile wallets for payments.In a statement, Visa said the wallet projects would give “Europe more choice, more competition and more innovation in mobile wallets.”
The opportunity is coming largely from Apple, which has faced pressure to relinquish control over its technology in recent years, with regulators globally contending Apple’s technology restrictions unfairly benefited Apple Pay.
Apple in 2024 agreed to provide access to near-field communication, which enables contactless payments via iPhones, to outside companies, under threats of
One of Visa’s partners, the Norwegian wallet Vipps, includes BNB, SparBank 1 and more than three dozen other local banks covering about 70% of the Nordic banking market. Vipps has focused on expanding beyond its local region, a strategy that gets a boost through its Visa partnership.
Countering Apple Pay won’t be easy. At the time of Apple’s EU settlement, payment experts said that while Apple was ceding ground by opening NFC access to outside wallets, Apple would still retain an advantage due to its
“My view was that few individual banks would rush to redevelop their mobile banking apps and deny their customers access to Apple Pay,” Zil Bareisis, a senior analyst at Celent, told American Banker this week, saying the most likely beneficiaries of Apple’s move would be existing wallets, such as PayPal, or those created by collaborative bank efforts around Europe, such as Vipps, Twint, Swish, Bancomat or Bizum, which already compete with Apple Pay and can now add the contactless NFC technology.
“It will also be developers outside of the payments domain who can now access Apple secure elements to store sensitive credentials, such as tickets, hotel keys and identity,” Bareisis said, noting that beyond BBVA Pay, Visa’s news includes established wallets (Klarna) or collaborative bank efforts (Vipps, Bancomat).
Supporting mobile wallets can also help Visa’s “network of networks,” or the card brand’s effort to diversify its business beyond card swipe revenue by using its scale and technology to sell services to banks and other payment companies.
Visa’s “access layer [technology that accesses payments] enables Visa’s customers and partners to access its network any way they would like, increasingly via open application programming interfaces,” analysts from William Blair said in a research report on Visa. “We argue that Visa’s global digital payments leadership and ubiquity will support at least 10% three- to five-year organic revenue growth with modest operating leverage.”