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Innovation is led by (i) the EPI Wero wallet rollout (P2P live in France 2024, e-commerce checkout 2025-2026, POS 2027); (ii) open banking under PSD2 (PSD3/PSR in train); (iii) the digital euro — the ECB opened a new technical-preparation phase on 29 Oct 2025 with a possible pilot from mid-2027 and gradual launch from 2029; and (iv) the Banque de France's pioneering wholesale CBDC programme (Projects Venus, Jura, Mariana, and the 2026 Pontes wholesale-CBDC pilot) plus DLT settlement experiments. The ACPR runs a Fintech-Innovation Hub.
On the wholesale track, in January 2026 governor Villeroy de Galhau stated the Banque de France was working on the 'Pontes project' to pilot a wholesale CBDC in 2026, framed as combating the 'privatisation' and 'Americanisation' of money. This builds on prior experiments — Project Venus with the Central Bank of Luxembourg, and DL3S Full-DLT Interoperability — and the 20 February 2025 Eurosystem decision to settle DLT transactions in central bank money via two tracks. Wholesale CBDC settlement for DLT market infrastructures is a leading French innovation track with sovereignty framing, relevant to tokenised-asset settlement operators.
Outlook
Two dated milestones anchor the outlook: the digital euro pilot pathway from mid-2027 (subject to 2026 co-legislator adoption) and the Banque de France Pontes wholesale-CBDC pilot scheduled for 2026.
Product Innovation & Market Development
France's Wero e-commerce deployment officially began 20 April 2026, with progressive activation of BPCE's 13 million clients continuing through summer 2026, a probable-confidence finding. The e-commerce launch, undertaken jointly with BPCE, Societe Generale and Hello bank!, was aided by the February 2026 EuroPA interoperability agreement, which links Wero with equivalent instant-payment wallets in other European markets. A distinct product development within this same period is 'Wero for Work,' a QR-code-based payment product aimed at self-employed individuals and micro-entrepreneurs, extending Wero's product suite beyond both pure P2P transfers and standard e-commerce checkout into a segment-specific professional-payments use case.
This progressive, phased activation approach, activating BPCE's client base incrementally through summer 2026 rather than all at once, suggests a deliberate rollout strategy designed to manage technical and operational load during the e-commerce product's early deployment phase, consistent with a cautious approach to a materially new payment-acceptance use case for a wallet that originated as a P2P product.
Outlook
The completion of BPCE's phased client activation through summer 2026 and the market reception of the 'Wero for Work' product for self-employed and micro-entrepreneur users are the two product-development threads to watch in the coming cycle. Broader merchant adoption of Wero e-commerce beyond the initial three banking-group cohort would be a further signal of the product's market traction.
1 earlier distinct update(s)
Product Innovation & Market Development
Wero, the pan-European instant-payment wallet built by a consortium of major French and European banks including BNP Paribas, BPCE, Crédit Agricole, Société Générale and Crédit Mutuel, continues operating in P2P mode in France, Germany and Belgium, a deployment that has been running since 2024 on SCT Inst rails. This is a probable-confidence, bank-consortium-led product development representing a structural bet by incumbent French banks on building domestic instant-payment wallet infrastructure rather than ceding that space to non-bank or foreign wallet providers.
Alongside Wero's continued scaling, France's underlying open-banking infrastructure shows substantial build-out: STET-compliant open-banking APIs now cover 95% of French banks, with SCT Inst adoption growing at approximately 39.1% compound annual growth rate. This adoption metric is vendor-sourced and carries dashboard-tier rather than full standing-brief confidence, meaning it should be read as an indicative market-development data point rather than a fully corroborated regulatory or industry-body finding.
Taken together, these two threads describe a French instant-payment and open-banking product environment that is scaling on largely bank-led rails (STET-standard APIs, SCT Inst, and the Wero wallet built by the major domestic banking consortium), a pattern consistent with the broader bank-PSP-centred structure of French payments infrastructure relative to non-bank payment-institution and e-money-institution-led alternatives.
Outlook
The product-development question to watch is whether Wero expands beyond P2P mode into merchant-facing use cases in France, and whether the 39.1% CAGR SCT Inst adoption trajectory, if it holds, continues to reinforce bank-led rails as the dominant instant-payment product infrastructure relative to non-bank alternatives.
Sources and findings (5)
- T1https://www.banque-france.fr/en/monetary-strategy/means-payment/digital-euroretrieved
- T1https://www.banque-france.fr/en/banque-de-france/innovative-central-bank/innovation-banque-de-franceretrieved
- T3https://cbdctracker.hrf.org/currency/franceretrieved
- T3https://stripe.com/resources/more/wero-guide-franceretrieved
- T1https://www.banque-france.fr/en/press-release/banque-de-france-commends-decision-eurosystem-provide-short-term-wholesale-central-bank-digitalretrieved