Konstantin Surkov, Co-Founder and CEO at Nopan, shares why A2A and wallet performance is the next step for true European payments sovereignty.
Europe has spent years building the foundations for a more independent payments ecosystem. Instant payment infrastructure is becoming widely available, domestic account and wallet payment methods have scaled significantly, and initiatives such as Wero are working towards broader European reach. This momentum matters. A stronger European ecosystem can improve resilience, increase competition, and give merchants and consumers greater choice. Payment sovereignty is therefore a strategic imperative. But sovereignty alone is not a merchant business case. Merchants do not prioritise payment methods because of where the infrastructure was built. They prioritise them because they improve conversion, extend customer reach, reduce costs, strengthen reliability, and support revenue growth. A method can be strategically important for Europe and still struggle to earn a place on a merchant’s roadmap if it does not deliver measurable commercial value. This is where the next phase of account and wallet payments begins.
Availability is not the same as performance
Europe already has a rich landscape of account and wallet payment methods. Some are deeply embedded in local consumer behaviour, while others are expanding into new markets and use cases. Yet these methods do not perform equally by default.
The same payment method can produce very different results depending on the bank, customer journey, device, authentication flow, merchant category, transaction value, or integration. It can:
- have strong consumer recognition but inconsistent bank connectivity;
- offer lower processing costs but underperform at checkout;
- convert well for first-time payments but lack the recurring capabilities required by subscription businesses.
Connecting to a method is only the first step. Making it perform consistently at scale is the real challenge.
Merchants need to measure what really matters
For many years, account and wallet payment methods were assessed primarily through availability: is the method live, and can customers use it?
That is no longer enough. Merchants need to understand the full commercial and operational impact of each method. This includes completion rates, customer drop-off, bank and market coverage, cost per successful transaction, refund performance, fraud controls, reconciliation, support requirements, and repeat-payment capabilities. These metrics should not be viewed in isolation. A low-cost method that creates checkout friction may be more expensive than it appears. Strong local reach may deliver limited value if failed payments and manual operations offset conversion gains. Conversely, a method with a smaller headline market share may become strategically important if it performs particularly well for a merchant’s customers or use case. The objective is not simply to add more methods. It is to build the right payment mix and continuously improve how each method contributes to the business.
Go-live is only the beginning
Cards have benefited from decades of investment in acceptance, routing, risk, recurring payments, reporting, and operational tooling. Account and wallet payments now need a similar performance discipline. This means moving beyond one-off implementation projects towards ongoing measurement and optimisation. Merchants and payment service providers (PSPs) need visibility into where customers drop out, which banks or flows underperform, how results vary across markets, and whether technical or operational changes improve outcomes. They also need the ability to respond. This may involve improving the checkout experience, optimising payment flows, and continuously refining performance across different markets and use cases.
Without a dedicated operating layer, merchants are left managing a fragmented portfolio of local integrations, each with its own technical behaviour, reporting model, and operational requirements.
Account and wallet payments need a dedicated performance layer
Delivering consistent performance across account and wallet payments requires closer collaboration among schemes, banks, PSPs, specialist infrastructure providers, and merchants. Schemes must deliver strong consumer propositions and broad acceptance. Banks must provide intuitive in-app experiences and seamless authentication. PSPs must make methods easier to access and operate. Merchants must evaluate them through customer behaviour and business outcomes.
The market also needs a dedicated performance layer that connects technical payment behaviour with commercial results and helps merchants and PSPs optimise across providers, banks, methods, and markets. This is not about replacing existing PSP relationships. It is about complementing them with the specialised capabilities required to make account and wallet payments perform as a category.
Turning European preference into business impact
Europe has the infrastructure, regulatory momentum, and consumer payment habits required to build a stronger account and wallet ecosystem. Sovereignty can accelerate investment and alignment, but it will not guarantee adoption. The winners will be the methods and providers that combine European reach and trust with merchant-grade performance. They will make payments easy to launch, reliable to operate, transparent to measure, and valuable to scale.
The next phase of European payments will not be defined only by who owns the rails. It will be defined by who turns local payment preference into measurable business impact.
This editorial piece was first published in The Paypers' Account-to-Account Payments Report 2026, which features insights into global trends, technologies, partnerships, and the next phase of the A2A evolution. Access the full report to understand where the A2A payments ecosystem stands today and what’s next.
About the author
Konstantin Surkov is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nopan. A former Netflix payments leader, he has extensive experience building and scaling payment strategies for large digital merchants across markets. At Nopan, he focuses on helping merchants and PSPs turn account and wallet payments into measurable business performance.
About Nopan
Nopan is a performance platform for account and wallet payments. It complements merchants’ and PSPs’ existing payment infrastructure by making these methods easier to launch, operate, optimise, and scale. Nopan continuously improves performance across methods, markets and use cases, helping businesses increase conversion, reduce payment costs, improve operational efficiency, and drive revenue.
