Digital payments in Europe are growing fast. In 2023, over 90% of EU consumers used at least one form of digital payment, according to the European Central Bank.
2025 will bring more changes. New rules are coming. Customer behavior is shifting. Local preferences still matter.
This guide helps you plan. It highlights the trends shaping retail payments across Europe. You’ll learn what to expect and how to prepare your payment strategy.
We’ll focus on instant payments, digital wallets, regulations, localization, and embedded finance. Each section ties back to what you need to do.
Let’s start with the most immediate shift: real-time payments.
The EU is pushing instant payments across the board. The new Instant Payments Regulation requires banks to offer euro-denominated transfers that clear in seconds.
This creates urgency for merchants. Real-time settlement means fewer delays and less risk. It also changes customer expectations. Fast checkout is no longer a nice-to-have.
Here’s what you need to prepare:
Tip: Real-time payments increase pressure on infrastructure. If you’re managing multiple PSPs, payment orchestration can help. It gives you one control layer for routing and monitoring. Learn more in this article about orchestration.
Even as Europe pushes for uniformity, local preferences remain strong. Shoppers in the Netherlands prefer iDEAL. Germans still use PayPal and open banking methods. In France, Cartes Bancaires is essential. In Italy, many customers pay with Postepay or cash-based vouchers.
If you don’t support these methods, you’ll lose conversions.
To meet local expectations:
Managing this at scale is hard without orchestration. You need the ability to add, remove, or switch providers without downtime. Gr4vy supports localized payments in Europe through a single control layer. That helps you move faster and reduce integration overhead.
Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay are now widely used in Western Europe. In Eastern markets, wallets like Paysera or Revolut are common. Younger users expect contactless checkout across all devices.
The European Central Bank found that digital wallet usage nearly doubled from 2020 to 2023. This trend will continue in 2025.
What to do:
Digital wallets improve approval rates and reduce cart abandonment. But each wallet has unique integration and compliance needs. A payment orchestration platform helps normalize these flows across PSPs and wallets.
PSD2 brought SCA requirements. Now PSD3 and the Financial Data Access framework are on the horizon. The EU is also increasing scrutiny on data residency and transaction transparency.
This impacts how you handle payment data, authentication, and compliance reporting.
To stay ahead:
If you store card data, use a PCI-compliant vault that supports tokenization and data localization. This helps reduce risk and simplifies audits.
SEPA Instant Credit Transfers (SCT Inst) are now supported by most European banks. This enables real-time euro payments across the EU. Meanwhile, open banking-powered A2A payments are growing in markets like the UK, Sweden, and Germany.
Businesses benefit from lower fees, faster settlement, and fewer chargebacks.
If you’re not offering instant or A2A payments, you’re behind.
Here’s what to do:
Real-time payments are not only a customer convenience, but also a working capital advantage. You get paid faster. To avoid complexity, orchestration lets you test new methods and roll them out gradually without disrupting existing flows.
More Europeans are shopping internationally. But inconsistent checkout experiences, currency issues, and unfamiliar payment options cause drop-offs. European shoppers expect checkout to be local, even when buying from abroad.
You can improve your cross-border payment performance by:
Gr4vy helps businesses scale cross-border ecommerce by integrating with multiple acquirers and routing transactions based on shopper location. This ensures better approval rates and fewer failed payments.
Monolithic PSP setups are giving way to modular architectures. Merchants are adopting multiple providers for different functions: risk, acquiring, wallets, subscriptions, and alternative payments.
But modularity creates new complexity.
That’s why orchestration is critical:
Orchestration platforms like Gr4vy offer no-code tools and API-based routing to simplify operations while preserving freedom of choice. This lets you optimize for performance, cost, and coverage without vendor lock-in.
More than 65% of ecommerce traffic in Europe comes from mobile devices. Yet many checkout flows are still desktop-optimized. This leads to friction, abandoned carts, and lower conversion rates on smaller screens.
Shoppers expect fast, mobile-friendly checkouts with:
Improving mobile checkout performance is critical. Use responsive design, preload form fields, and enable one-click payments.
Payment orchestration helps by centralizing wallet integrations and handling fallback flows if a method fails. This ensures smooth mobile payments across devices and markets.
Europe’s strict data regulations—like GDPR and PSD2—require businesses to handle payments with care. Tokenization, SCA, and data localization are essential.
If your platform isn’t compliant, you risk fines and failed transactions.
Here’s how to stay ahead:
Gr4vy’s agnostic vault supports token portability and region-specific storage, helping businesses adapt to changing rules without rewriting code.
Interchange fees, scheme fees, acquirer margins, and FX charges all add up. Merchants with high volumes are actively reducing costs by:
Payments are no longer a cost center. They’re a strategic lever.
Using orchestration, you can optimize payment flows to maximize margin and reduce third-party dependency.
SEPA Instant Credit Transfer is gaining traction across the EU. In 2024, over 13% of all credit transfers in the euro area were processed as instant payments. More banks are adopting real-time infrastructure, and regulators are pushing for broader adoption.
For merchants, this means:
To support real-time rails, your platform must integrate directly or through a PSP that does. With payment orchestration, you can add and test instant payment providers without rebuilding your checkout flow.
A failed transaction is lost revenue. In Europe, soft declines are common due to SCA, outdated card data, or insufficient funds.
Leading merchants are recovering failed payments by:
Orchestration platforms help by automating retries, managing fallbacks, and increasing overall approval rates. For example, Gr4vy helped Baby Bunting increase their authorization rate by dynamically routing payments based on performance.
Cross-border ecommerce is growing. But currency conversion fees and FX spread margins can shrink profit.
If you sell in multiple currencies, consider:
This reduces costs and gives your customers pricing clarity.
Managing multiple PSPs, wallets, and fraud tools is a technical burden. Orchestration platforms are solving this by providing:
With checkout complexity increasing, orchestration offers flexibility and control without slowing your team down. Learn more about payment orchestration and how it helps you adapt faster in a changing payments environment.
What are the most popular payment methods in Europe?
It varies by country. iDEAL dominates in the Netherlands, Girocard in Germany, and mobile wallets in the Nordics. Cards and digital wallets are common across the region.
What is SEPA Instant?
SEPA Instant is a pan-European real-time payment rail allowing instant bank transfers across more than 29 countries. It’s used for faster refunds, payouts, and A2A payments.
What is the SPAA framework?
SPAA, or SEPA Payment Account Access, is a rulebook enabling standardized access to payment accounts for licensed third-party providers under Open Banking.
Why should I care about payment orchestration?
It helps you manage multiple providers, localize experiences, and reduce downtime. This is critical in Europe’s fragmented payment environment.
What is PSD3?
PSD3 is the upcoming revision of the EU’s Payment Services Directive. It aims to expand Open Banking, improve consumer protection, and enhance payment security.
Europe’s payment landscape in 2025 is complex but full of opportunity. Merchants that stay reactive to regulatory shifts, consumer expectations, and infrastructure advances will be best positioned to scale.
A payment orchestration platform simplifies this complexity. It gives your team the tools to localize, optimize, and grow without getting stuck in integration work.
Contact Gr4vy to learn how orchestration helps you win in Europe.
Sovereign cloud has become a necessary step for industries under pressure to protect data, meet…
Gr4vy, the cloud-based payment orchestration platform, has announced a strategic partnership with Datalex, a market…
Welcome to the Q2 2025 edition of Gr4vy Pulse, your go-to source for the latest…
Payments in Europe are moving fast in 2025. Instant settlement, digital wallets, and local schemes…
Real-time payments move money between accounts in seconds. Funds clear instantly, any day, any time.…
Europe’s payments landscape is both connected and fragmented. While the region shares strong regulatory frameworks…