Yesterday we shipped EPC QR support in Usecue POS. A square of black and white pixels that guarantees an instant payment with exactly the right info. Your customer scans it, confirms, and the money moves from their account to yours. And here is the kicker: There is no payment provider in the middle, no percentage and no settlement delay.

Sounds amazing, right? What if this thing could beat all other payment methods?

It already happened somewhere else

Whenever someone tells me that paying straight from one bank account into another cannot beat a card, I point at Brazil. Pix launched in November 2020. It overtook debit cards in January 2022 and credit cards a month later. By 2023 it beat credit and debit combined. It is now growing about 2.5 times faster than credit cards, while debit sits at roughly 1% annual growth, and it has passed credit cards in online purchases too. It got big enough that the United States opened a trade investigation into it, which is the highest compliment a payment method can receive.

Five years. From nothing to the default way an entire country of 200 million people pays each other. So the question is not “can a QR code beat a card?” The question is “what was Brazil’s cheat code, and does Europe have one?” Brazil’s cheat code was the central bank making participation mandatory for large banks. Europe does not do that. Europe does something slower and, I would argue, sneakier.

Europe’s cheat code is a standards document

In December 2025 CEN published EN 18184:2025, “Specification of QR codes for mobile initiated (instant) credit transfers”. The European Payments Council called it a major step toward harmonised mobile-initiated payments. It came out of a multi-year initiative by the European Retail Payments Board, which is chaired by the ECB, developed together with the Commission’s DG-FISMA. Read that sentence again and notice who is in the room. The central bank, the Commission and the banks all agreed on one way to put payment instructions in a QR code.

Meanwhile the Instant Payments Regulation (EU 2024/886) already forces euro-area banks to send and receive instant transfers, at no more than the price of a normal transfer, with the payee’s name checked against the IBAN before you confirm.

Put those two together and something quietly enormous exists: every euro account can now receive money in ten seconds, for free, and there is an agreed standard for asking. Every bank in the eurozone has already built this, already paid for it, and is already required by law to keep it running. All that is missing is the habit.

What happens if EPC QR grows?

What follows are five predictions, some of them bolder than others. I have tried to make them specific enough to be wrong about, and I have not tried to make them safe, because a prediction you cannot lose is not worth writing down. Bookmark this one and laugh at me in 2031.

1. The holdout banks will fold within two years

Today the coverage map is lopsided. Germany and Belgium sit around 80%, Austria and Finland around 70%. The Netherlands is at roughly 40%, because Rabobank and ABN AMRO, together the majority of the Dutch market, do not read the code. I do not think that is a strategy. I think that is a backlog.

The moment a Dutch consumer stands at a market stall, points their Rabobank app at a QR code and nothing happens while the person behind them pays in four seconds with ING, the feature request writes itself. Scanning a code is not a product decision the bank gets to lose slowly and privately. It fails in public, in a queue, in front of witnesses. My prediction: both are shipping it before the end of 2028, and the press release will describe it as an innovation.

2. Other payments become the fallback

Online, the QR code already won. iDEAL is over 70% of Dutch e-commerce, and since its 2023 overhaul the desktop checkout is literally a QR code you scan with your banking app and confirm with your face. Nobody found that strange. Nobody had to be taught. An entire country was quietly trained in the exact gesture an EPC QR needs, by the banks themselves, years before there was anything at the counter to point it at.

Which is why the physical shop is the last holdout, and why I think it flips too. It starts at the bottom of the market: market traders, hairdressers, sports canteens, festival bars, the yoga teacher, the guy who fixes your bike. These are businesses where a terminal is a genuine annoyance: a subscription, a device, a battery, a contract, a percentage of every sale. And the margin is thin enough that the percentage actually hurts.

The code is not a sticker on the wall, by the way: it carries the amount, so it is generated fresh for every sale. But the thing generating it is the phone already in your pocket. That is the trade. You lose a dedicated device and keep everything it did.

Once your customers have scanned a code to pay at the market on Saturday, they will scan one at the bakery on Monday. Habits do not respect merchant categories. My prediction is that by 2030, “we take cards too” is a thing small European businesses say the way they now say “we also take cash”.

3. The fee becomes visible

Card fees survive because nobody sees them. They are baked into the price, quietly, for everyone, including the customers paying cash.

An EPC QR as an alternative to the card terminal makes the comparison concrete for the first time. One route costs the shop nothing. The other costs a percentage. And the moment a shopkeeper can point at that difference, the conversation changes: a small discount for scanning, a sign at the till, a friendly “the code is cheaper for me”.

That is the real threat to the card schemes, and it is not technical. It is that their price stops being invisible. My prediction is that within three years, discount-for-scanning is normal enough in at least one euro country that a card scheme complains about it publicly.

4. The digital euro will fail

So assume the first three predictions land, and by 2029 “scan the code, confirm in your app” is simply how Europe pays. What is left for the digital euro to do? The ECB plans a pilot in the second half of 2027 and a first issuance envisaged for 2029, while an EPC QR works today, for free, with no legislation required. The habit will be years old by the time the product arrives.

But redundant is not the same as pointless, because there is one thing the digital euro can do that an EPC QR structurally cannot: it can force acceptance. EPC QR is voluntary at both ends. Your bank may decline to read it, your shop may decline to show it, and nobody can be made to care. That is the whole reason prediction one is a prediction and not a fact.

The digital euro is legal tender, and mandatory acceptance sits at the heart of that logic. If you are open for business, you take it. Rabobank cannot leave it on the backlog until somebody complains, and a supermarket cannot leave it out because the card companies gave them a better deal for pushing plastic. That guarantee is worth a lot.

Notice what that is not: a better checkout. Holdings will be capped, so it cannot replace your bank account, and nothing will make it faster than a transfer that already settles in ten seconds. On merit it does not beat an EPC QR, and it is not really aimed at one either. The targets are cash, Visa and Mastercard. Only one code can be on the screen when the customer is standing there waiting, so somebody has to decide which one it is. And here is where it gets interesting, because I do not think the law decides it.

Mandatory acceptance obliges a shop to accept a digital euro if a customer offers one. It says nothing about which QR code the shop holds up to be scanned. And if the code on the screen is an EPC QR, and the customer’s app reads it, the payment is finished before the legal question ever comes up. So the shop chooses, every time, and it will choose the code where the money lands straight into their business account, with no capped wallet to empty out at the end of a good Saturday, and nothing to sign up for in the first place.

Then there is the part I find genuinely funny. Every bank in Europe has a reason to love the EPC QR, and that reason is the digital euro. An EPC QR is a plain transfer from one bank account into another. Banks have been doing that for decades, and the money stays with them. A digital euro is new money from the ECB, living in a wallet of its own, and the ECB has to hand it out through those very same banks. One is business as usual. The other is business walking out of the door.

Beating the digital euro takes no campaign, no lobbying and no new product. All banks have to do is keep offering the code they already support, and keep it one tap away. Which brings me back to prediction one. Rabobank and ABN AMRO may not add the EPC QR because their customers keep asking for it. They may add it because it is the cheapest defence they have against the digital euro, and because a habit their customers already have is the best possible reason not to form a new one.

So here is the wildest assumption in this article, and the one I would least like to defend in front of an economist: the digital euro launches, everyone is legally obliged to take it, and people keep scanning the EPC QR anyway, because it is what is best for the bank and what is best for the shop owner.

5. Wero will fail as well

Wero, from the European Payments Initiative, is doing the same as the digital euro, but with more marketing: live for peer-to-peer since late 2024, e-commerce in Germany from November 2025 and France and Belgium from January 2026, in-store via QR code first and NFC by 2027.

Wero is going to be big. It has the banks, the budget and the political tailwind. But underneath the branding it is the same trick: an instant euro transfer, initiated from a phone. And it has one problem that no amount of marketing fixes. It is free for your customer, but it is not free for you as merchant.

EPI has promised that Wero will not be more expensive than iDEAL for the first two years, which tells you two things: there is a price, and it goes up in year three. It is charged as a percentage with a cap rather than iDEAL’s flat fee, so it grows with the size of your basket instead of with the work involved. And unlike iDEAL it is not a guaranteed payment. A customer can dispute a transaction, and if that dispute escalates there are fees for handling it too.

None of that is a scandal. EPI is a company. It has shareholders, staff, a marketing budget and an NFC rollout to fund, and the money has to come from somewhere. That is not a flaw in Wero. That is what Wero is.

An EPC QR does not have that problem, because there is nobody to pay. No owner, no shareholders, no roadmap to fund, no pricing page. And nothing to sign up for either: no merchant onboarding, no account, no approval, no contract to terminate. You put your IBAN into an app and you are accepting payments. A market trader can start this afternoon, and in year three the price is still zero.

So my prediction is that Wero wins the customer and loses the small shop. And a European payment method that only the big retailers display is not the European champion it was meant to be. Open formats tend to win the long tail. That is the whole history of the web.

So what is my prediction?

If EPC QR becomes a success, which I assume (for the purpose of this article), other payment methods will not die. They will be demoted. And this holds for the new arrivals too. They become the thing you keep for the odd tourist, the corporate card, the big purchase, the legal requirements and the customer without a phone. Exactly like the way cash is still around, still fine, and no longer the default. And the everyday transaction, the €4 coffee and the €12 haircut and the €30 market shop, will move to a way of paying where nobody takes a cut, because there is no longer any reason for anyone to take one.

Try it today

The strange part is that the winning technology here is not new, not clever, and not owned by anybody. EPC QR is a 2013 specification for encoding a bank transfer as pixels. The only thing it needs is adoption.

Bold assumptions aside, you can try it today. Put your IBAN in Usecue POS, show the code, and see whether your customers scan it. That will tell you more than anything above.

()  Joost van der Schee