title: France — Product Innovation & Market Development | World Payments Monitor canonical: https://payments.gi/jurisdictions/france/w9/ publisher: Asymmetric Intelligence ### W9 Product Innovation & Market Development Confirmed confirmed 2026-06-23 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. Horizon · 2027-H1 (± more than a year) Digital euro potential launch pathway_Adopted, not yet in force · Tier 1 source_ Horizon · 2026 (± a year) Banque de France Pontes wholesale-CBDC pilot_Adopted · Tier 3 source_ Standing sub-brief · as of 26 June 2026 218 words · last cycle 2026-09-21 #### Product Innovation & Market Development France is positioned at the front of the EU CBDC agenda. On 29 October 2025 the ECB Governing Council opened a new phase of the digital euro project to prepare technically for a potential launch; if the regulation is adopted by co-legislators in 2026, a pilot could begin as early as mid-2027 with a gradual launch from 2029, though no decision to issue has yet been taken. A retail digital euro would reshape French and EU payment economics, intermediary roles, and competition with private wallets and stablecoins. 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. Periodic update · new data 2026-09-21 #### 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)** Periodic update · new data 2026-09-13 #### 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)** 1. T1 [https://www.banque-france.fr/en/monetary-strategy/means-payment/digital-euro](https://www.banque-france.fr/en/monetary-strategy/means-payment/digital-euro) retrieved 2026-06-23 2. T1 [https://www.banque-france.fr/en/banque-de-france/innovative-central-bank/innovation-banque-de-france](https://www.banque-france.fr/en/banque-de-france/innovative-central-bank/innovation-banque-de-france) retrieved 2026-06-23 3. T3 [https://cbdctracker.hrf.org/currency/france](https://cbdctracker.hrf.org/currency/france) retrieved 2026-06-23 4. T3 [https://stripe.com/resources/more/wero-guide-france](https://stripe.com/resources/more/wero-guide-france) retrieved 2026-06-23 5. T1 [https://www.banque-france.fr/en/press-release/banque-de-france-commends-decision-eurosystem-provide-short-term-wholesale-central-bank-digital](https://www.banque-france.fr/en/press-release/banque-de-france-commends-decision-eurosystem-provide-short-term-wholesale-central-bank-digital) retrieved 2026-06-23