Eupago brings Bizum to Portuguese e-commerce

Eupago, the Porto payment institution founded in 2014 by José Veiga and Telmo Santos, launched Bizum acceptance for Portuguese e-commerce merchants in September 2026, opening their checkouts to a Spanish mobile payment network with more than 30 million users.

Eupago sells a Portuguese-regulated payment gateway that lets online merchants accept cross-border payment methods, including mobile payment schemes from adjacent markets, through a single integration. Bizum, backed by around 40 banking institutions in Spain, is now one of those methods.

A Portuguese shop can take Bizum without contracting directly with a Spanish entity, and that is where Eupago earns its place. It collects merchant fee revenue on the cross-border transactions generated when Spanish Bizum users buy from Portuguese merchants.

The route runs through the Banco de Portugal payment institution licence Eupago has held since 2015. That licence carries EU-wide passporting rights, so a merchant under Portuguese jurisdiction contracts with a domestic regulated entity while the payment originates in Spain.

In 2023 Eupago also became the first payment institution in Portugal to operate open banking through Account Information Service Provider (AISP) and Payment Initiation Service Provider (PISP) licences. That record gives it the regulatory standing and an existing merchant base through which to distribute a foreign scheme.

"When a consumer buys from outside their country, trust at the time of payment is crucial." — Telmo Santos, co-CEO and co-founder of Eupago.

What Eupago has not disclosed is how it obtained the right to distribute Bizum. It could rest on a direct agreement with the scheme operator, an arrangement through Redsys or some other contract, and that basis should be the first question for any merchant weighing the integration.

No other Banco de Portugal-licensed institution has publicly established Bizum merchant acceptance. The nearest competitive pressure comes from a global payments platform that already supports Bizum for Spanish merchants, operates in Portugal and competes for the same Iberian flows from a different regulatory base.

The timing places Eupago ahead of the schemes' own roadmap. The European Payments Alliance (EuroPA), of which Bizum is a member, launched in November 2024 and completed its first live transactions on 31 March 2025, but it handles consumer-to-consumer transfers across Italy, Spain, Portugal and Andorra.

On 2 February 2026 EuroPA signed a memorandum of understanding with EPI Company, operator of Wero. The agreement targets peer-to-peer interoperability from 2026 and e-commerce and in-store payments from 2027, with a stated potential reach of more than 130 million users across 13 countries.

Eupago's launch rests on a bilateral commercial arrangement outside that infrastructure. For a Portuguese online merchant selling into Spain, the practical change is that Spanish buyers can pay with a method they already use, through the same gateway the merchant runs for everything else.

The Spanish side carries its own friction. From 1 January 2026 Spain's Tax Agency significantly increased oversight of digital payments including Bizum, and Royal Decree 253/2025 introduced mandatory monthly reporting by banks and payment service providers, rules that bind Spanish users without blocking Eupago's Portuguese deployment.

Eupago has roughly until 2027 to build merchant volume before EuroPA and Wero open e-commerce interoperability across the wider network. Whether its gateway position survives that opening will depend on the undisclosed contractual basis of the Bizum arrangement and on how many merchants it signs before then.