France

CB is the most durable domestic card scheme in Europe

Cartes Bancaires co-badges with Visa or Mastercard on virtually every consumer card and routes roughly 75% of domestic French card volume on its own network. Lower MDR than the international schemes, combined with an issuer-consortium governance structure, has insulated CB from the kind of disintermediation that has hollowed out domestic schemes elsewhere in Europe.

The Instant Payments Regulation has rewritten SEPA Instant economics

The EU IPR (Regulation 2024/886) required every eurozone PSP that offers SEPA credit transfers to also offer SEPA Instant by October 2025, at no higher fee than standard SCT, and to run Verification-of-Payee before execution. French banks, previously slow on SEPA Instant, have caught up; volumes roughly doubled between Q3 2025 and Q1 2026. Wero, the pan-European wallet, rides on top of SEPA Instant as its settlement layer.

Cash declined fast but remains the baseline for low-value retail

Cash share of POS transactions dropped 16 percentage points between 2019 and 2024. Below a €10 ticket, cash is still the plurality choice in France on the ECB SPACE data, and Banque de France's cash-availability policy obliges branches and ATMs to remain accessible in smaller communes. Cash-in-circulation relative to GDP is lower than Germany but higher than the eurozone average.

Wero's French rollout (BNP Paribas, Société Générale, Crédit Agricole, Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale, BPCE) is in P2P with P2M expected mid-2026. Combined with SEPA Instant as settlement and Verification-of-Payee at initiation, recurring mandates over Wero will compete with card-based subscriptions on economics and fraud characteristics. PSPs that own the merchant-side mandate tooling capture the early migration.

PSD3 and PSR proposals, advancing through trilogue in 2026, will remove the remaining friction from payment initiation — mandatory API-quality benchmarks, consent-dashboard requirements and a harmonised refund regime. French SMB treasury players (Qonto, Memo Bank, Regate) are already pre-integrating; larger ERP and e-invoicing providers have an 18-24 month window to ship equivalent workflows.

The government's B2B e-invoicing mandate begins rolling out in phases from September 2026 (large enterprises receive, September 2027 all businesses issue). Payment providers offering integrated capture-pay-reconcile on Chorus Pro-compatible rails are entering a market that the DGFIP expects to add €4.5bn in annual VAT compliance gains.