## Conversation
The European payments stack nobody can actually map
Adyen is Dutch. Mollie is Dutch.
is British. Worldline is French. Nexi is Italian. Europe built a $3T card market on a patchwork of national schemes, capped interchange and four players nobody can name. Let me draw it.
90% of European founders building in fintech can't name the 4 players behind a single card payment. Most can name Stripe and Adyen. That's it.
If you're one of them, no shame. The European payment industry is even messier than the US one because we have national schemes layered on top of the global ones. Let me untangle it.
Every time you tap your card at a boulangerie in Paris, a kiosk in Berlin or a café in Milan, 4 different companies coordinate in under 2 seconds to move €5 from your account to theirs. Each one has a specific job. Each one takes a cut. Together they form the rails of a €3T+ European card market.
Here's who they are and what they actually do.
Here's who they are and what they actually do.
Acquirer & PSP: the merchant side
The acquirer is the merchant's bank. It holds the merchant account, collects the funds from the customer, and settles the money to the business 1-3 days later. In Europe, acquirers need a PSD2 license and are regulated by the local central bank or the ECB.
The PSP (Payment Service Provider) is the tech layer sitting on top. It powers the checkout UI, tokenizes the card, routes the transaction to the right acquirer, runs fraud checks, and handles SCA (Strong Customer Authentication, the European version of 3DS that became mandatory in 2019).
and Stripe are PSP + acquirer at the same time. That's the model that won in Europe over the last decade.
The pricing trade-off: PSPs are easier to integrate but more expensive (1.4% + 25¢ on EU cards, more on non-EU). Direct acquirers are cheaper but require volume and your own integration work.
→ Key European players: Adyen, Worldline, Nexi, , Mollie, SumUp, Stripe, Nuvei, Trust Payments, Rapyd
Schemes are the most misunderstood. People think Visa "issues cards" or "lends money." They don't. Visa has never given anyone a credit line in its life.
Schemes run the rails. They are the messaging network that lets the merchant's bank and the cardholder's bank talk to each other in real time. They set the rules, define the security standards (PCI, EMV, SCA), and they set the interchange fees that flow between acquirers and issuers.
That's where they make their money: a tiny fee on every transaction crossing their network.
Here's the European twist: alongside Visa and Mastercard, most countries have a domestic scheme that handles a huge share of local volume. Cartes Bancaires in France routes around 70% of domestic card transactions. Girocard in Germany dominates local debit. Bancomat is the default in Italy. These domestic schemes are cheaper than Visa/Mastercard, which is also why interchange caps in Europe (0.2% debit, 0.3% credit since 2015) hit US issuers way harder than European ones.
→ Key European players: Visa, Mastercard, Cartes Bancaires (France), Girocard (Germany), Bancomat (Italy), American Express
Issuer: the cardholder side
The issuer is the cardholder's bank. The company on the front of your card. BNP, Deutsche Bank, Santander, Revolut, they are the issuers.
Their job: issue the physical or virtual card, manage your account, extend the credit line (when there is one, Europeans use debit way more than Americans), approve or decline every transaction in real time based on balance and risk, and absorb the fraud risk if something goes wrong.
This is where the consumer-side economics sit, but they're much thinner than in the US. EU interchange is capped at 0.2% on debit and 0.3% on credit, vs 2-2.5% in the US. That's why European banks barely run rewards programs and why neobanks like Revolut had to invent new revenue streams (subscriptions, FX, crypto, savings) instead of relying on swipes.
Quick note: American Express operates a closed-loop network in Europe too, doing both issuing and scheme. Everyone else splits the roles.
→ Key European players: BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole, Société Générale, Deutsche Bank, Santander, ING, HSBC, Barclays, Revolut, N26
Processors: the tech backbone
The most invisible layer. Nobody talks about them, but nothing moves without them.
Processors are the technical operators that execute the actual transactions on behalf of banks and PSPs. On the issuing side, they power banks' ability to manage card programs (Marqeta, Tietoevry, Nexi). On the acquiring side, they handle the transaction flow for PSPs (Worldline, Nexi, FIS).
Most European banks don't build their own card-processing infrastructure. They rent it. Same for fintechs: when Revolut, Qonto or Lydia launches a card, there's almost always a processor running underneath, even if you never see the name.
These companies process billions of transactions per day in milliseconds. They are the AWS of European payments.
A quick note on PSP vs processor, because this is where everyone gets lost. Processors are pure infrastructure, sold to banks and PSPs. The merchant never sees them. A PSP like Adyen or Stripe is the layer above, the one that talks directly to the merchant: checkout, API, payouts, dashboard. But Adyen also built its own processor in-house, and with Stripe Issuing, Stripe now competes with Marqeta directly. Think of it this way: a processor is the engine, a PSP is the finished car.
The line between these 4 roles is blurring fast, even more aggressively than in the US.
Adyen has been a PSP, an acquirer, a processor AND a licensed Dutch bank since 2017. Worldline and Nexi each do acquiring and processing and have been consolidating the European market for years (Worldline bought Ingenico for €7.8B in 2020, Nexi merged with Nets and SIA the same year). Revolut started as an issuer, became a PSP with Revolut Business, and got its UK banking license in 2024.
This vertical integration is the single biggest trend in European payments right now. Whoever owns more layers captures more margin per transaction, especially in a market where interchange is capped and every basis point matters.
But here's the thing: if you don't understand the 4 base roles, you'll never understand why Worldline acquired Ingenico, why Nexi merged with Nets and SIA, or why the EU is now pushing for a European card scheme (EPI / Wero) to challenge Visa and Mastercard.
Whether you're a founder picking a payment provider, a PM building a fintech feature, or an investor looking at the next consolidation play, knowing who does what is table stakes.
PS: That's exactly why we built , one gateway that speaks all four players, so you don't have to stitch them together yourself.