Alexandre Droual — Writing

Card acceptance is a system, not a device

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Card acceptance is the whole path a card payment travels: the tap at your counter, the money moving to your bank account, and the line that lands in your books. The terminal is the only part of it you can hold in your hand. It is also the part merchants spend the most time choosing. Choose the system first, and the device becomes the easy decision.

The Saturday you are actually buying

Picture someone opening a shop. Three browser tabs. One pocket terminal against another. One percentage against another. A colour, a battery life, a delivery date.

It feels like buying a device. It is a decision about the next three years.

Every busy Saturday ends the same way. The last customer taps. The shutter comes down. And then the questions start that no product page answers. When does the money arrive? Is it all there? Which fees came off? Why is Monday's amount different from Saturday's total?

When I worked a retail store floor, the day did not end when the till closed. It ended when the takings matched. That second part is where card acceptance lives or dies for a small business, and it happens long after the device has done its job.

What you are really buying is every Monday after every Saturday, for as long as you stay.

The device is the part you can see

The terminal. You can see it, hold it, read its spec sheet. It has a price and a delivery date.

The rate. A single percentage is easy to put side by side. It feels like the whole cost, even though the merchant service charge you actually pay depends on your card mix, refunds and any extra fees in the contract.

The app. A clean screen to type an amount, a sound when it works.

All three matter. None of them tells you what happens to the money after the customer walks out. That is what you can compare. What happens to the money is what you live with.

The gap between the sale and the bank

Follow one payment.

A customer taps a card. The terminal or phone sends the payment to your acquirer, the licensed provider that contracts with you to accept cards. The acquirer gets it authorised by the customer's bank. Later, the banks and the card scheme square up among themselves. That step is settlement, and it happens between institutions, not with you.

Then comes the step you actually feel: the payout. Your acquirer, or the provider working with it, sends your takings to your bank account, usually net: after fees, after refunds, after any dispute. When that happens, and how many days it bundles, is set by your contract.

Note. Settlement and payout are different steps. Settlement is between the banks and the card scheme. The payout is between your provider and you. They can fall on different days and carry different amounts, which is why a payout rarely equals one day of sales.

That is where the gap opens. Four things live in it.

The delay. Money taken on Saturday arrives on whatever day the contract says. Until then it is a number on a screen, not cash you can pay a supplier with.

A second dashboard. The sale, its fee and the payout statement sit in the provider's portal. The money sits in your bank. Two places, two views of the same Saturday.

A second login. Someone in the business has to open both, usually the owner, usually late.

The matching. Reconciliation is the work of proving that every sale was paid, and for the right amount. Take an illustrative shop whose till shows €4,200 across three days, while the bank shows one payout of €4,086. The €114 is fees, a refund and a sale not yet paid. Someone has to work that out, line by line, every week.

None of this shows up in a terminal comparison. All of it shows up in the evenings of the person who runs the shop.

If reconciliation eats an evening every week, look at the distance between where the payment is taken and where the money lives. The accountant is only measuring it.

What "system" means

A system closes that distance. Acceptance, the money and the records sit in one place, so you can read a sale, its fee and its payout side by side, without exporting anything.

Easy to promise. Whether a provider can deliver depends on how it is built. Broadly, merchants in Europe buy card acceptance from three kinds of provider.

Banks. The bank already holds the business account, which is the natural end of the journey. Where acceptance is built into the same account, the gap can close completely. Some business account providers that are not banks build it in the same way. Where the bank resells a partner's acquiring, the merchant can still end up with a separate contract, a separate portal and a separate statement, just with the bank's logo on it. Ask which one you are getting.

Payment pure players. Companies whose whole business is taking payments. They are often strong where merchants look first: the device, the app, fast setup, online checkout. Their product usually ends at the payout. Some now offer their own account for payouts. Where they don't, the money travels to a bank account they do not run, and the matching becomes your job or your accountant's.

Sub-participant models. Here a payment facilitator holds the contract with the acquirer, and you sign with the facilitator. Visa's rules call this business a sponsored merchant. It is often the quickest way to take a first card payment. Your terms are the facilitator's terms, and the payout and statement come from the facilitator too. The gap stays open unless the facilitator also runs your account.

Each makes a different promise about where its responsibility ends. The question is whether it ends where your money does.

I've helped payment companies through becoming card acquirers: scheme membership, certification, processing. The licence is the hard part. The merchant never sees it. What they see, every week, is whether the money and the records end up in the same place.

What closing the gap looks like: one worked example

To make this concrete, here is one offer where acceptance is built into the business account itself, described only from what its public pages say today. It is Qonto's. I work there, on exactly this, so read it as an illustration of the pattern, and test any provider against the same questions.

Qonto offers in-person card acceptance in two forms: Tap to Pay on iPhone and on Android, which turns a compatible phone into a reader where available in your country (its iPhone page excludes Spain), and dedicated payment terminals. For remote payments, it offers payment links that can sit on an invoice.

Here is how its pages describe the gap.

On the payout: "Card payments are credited to your Qonto account on the next business day (as a single payout)."

On the second dashboard: "Every transaction syncs automatically with your Qonto account - no separate payout account to reconcile."

On the second login: "No extra tool to log in to. No end‑of‑month export and matching."

On the device: the terminal page says the terminal "is billed once", with "no monthly fee". Its terminal page also mentions a tipping feature for restaurants.

I have left the rates out; what accepting cards really costs explains how to read them. They are published on those pages, and they are the part that changes. Read them against your own card mix.

If the pages hold for your business, the sale, the fee and the payout land in the account you already use to pay rent and suppliers. That is the gap, closed.

It does not make the payout instant, and it does not make bookkeeping disappear. A single payout is still one line covering many sales. What changes is that the matching happens where the money already is.

Tap to Pay or a terminal

The device question is still worth answering. Just answer it second.

Tap to Pay turns an NFC smartphone into a contactless reader. The customer taps a card, phone or watch on the back of the merchant's phone. There is nothing to buy or charge separately, and nothing to wait for in the post. Security is assessed under the PCI Security Standards Council's MPoC standard, written for payments on commercial off-the-shelf devices.

It suits:

the plumber, the tutor, the market stall, anyone who goes to the customer;
low or irregular volumes, where a dedicated device would sit in a drawer;
a second till on the first busy Saturday, while the queue is out of the door;
testing whether customers want to pay by card at all.

Its limits are practical. Availability depends on the phone, its operating system, the country and the provider. The phone that takes payments is also the phone that takes calls, runs the rota and needs a charge by four o'clock. And contactless has a ceiling, the contactless limit. Under the EU's strong customer authentication rules, a card issuer may skip extra checks on a tap only up to €50 per payment, and only until a running total or a count of taps since the last check is reached (as of October 2026). Above that, the customer usually needs a PIN. Whether your app can take one on the phone screen is a question for your provider.

A dedicated terminal is built for the counter.

It suits:

a fixed counter with a steady queue;
staff who pass a device to the customer, table to table or across the till;
higher volumes, where every second of each payment adds up across a day;
customers who still insert a card and type a PIN, or ask for a printed receipt.

It costs money up front and needs to be delivered and set up. You feel the difference the first Saturday the queue reaches the door.

Tips live in the software. Some providers offer tipping on both, some only on a terminal. Ask.

Many merchants end up with both. A terminal on the counter, Tap to Pay in a pocket for the pop-up, the delivery or the day the terminal is charging. That only works if both feed the same payout and the same records. Two devices on one system is fine. Two systems for one business is the gap again.

Five questions to ask any provider

Before you compare a single rate, ask these. Write the answers down. They are the contract you will live with.

Where does the money land, and on which day? Get the payout schedule in writing, including weekends and bank holidays.
What does one payout tell me? Is it paid gross or net of fees? It should show which sales it covers, the fees as separate lines, and any refunds or disputes deducted.
How many logins does it take to see a sale, its fee and the money in my account? One is the target.
Whose contract am I signing? An acquirer's directly, or a facilitator's as a sub-merchant. Both can work. Know which.
What happens when the business grows? A second shop, a busier counter, online orders. Does it all arrive in the same place, or does each channel bring its own dashboard?

A provider that answers these clearly has thought about your Monday. One that only talks about the device is selling you the sale, not the Monday after it.

The terminal takes the payment. The system decides whether you can count it.

What accepting cards really costs a small business in Europe (2026)

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Accepting cards costs a small business in France more than the rate on the offer. You pay a percentage on every sale, a few fixed costs around it, and your own time. EU law caps one small part of that percentage: the fee your provider passes to the customer's bank, 0.2% of a consumer debit card payment and 0.3% of a consumer credit card payment. Your contract sets everything else.

The number on the offer

Every offer has one number on it. Every month-end statement has another.

When I ran my own e-commerce brand, I learnt that a sale and the money from it arrive on different days, and not for the same amount.

Nine years in payments later, I still see it. Merchants compare the rate because the rate is what they're shown. The cost sits in the lines they aren't shown.

What is inside one card payment

Cards carry most of France's payments: 62.7% of 35.6 billion in 2025, says the Banque de France, cash withdrawals aside.

Take a €100 sale in a café in Toulouse, paid by card. The café is invented. The rules are real.

The fee you pay on it is the merchant service charge. The European Commission splits it into three parts: interchange, scheme fees and the margin of your acquirer, the provider that accepts cards for you.

Interchange. Your provider pays it to the customer's bank, on every payment. It is the only part EU law caps. Regulation (EU) 2015/751 caps the interchange fee at 0.2% of the payment for consumer debit cards and 0.3% for consumer credit cards. The caps cover cards issued in the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, taken by a provider based there.

Business cards are not capped (Article 1(3)). Cards issued outside that area fall outside the law too, but Visa and Mastercard have committed to the European Commission to cap them in shops at 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit, until November 2029. Online, their caps are higher: 1.15% for debit cards and 1.5% for credit cards.

The French scheme shows the gap. Cartes Bancaires publishes what its banks charge each other, in force since 1 January 2021: 0.2% on a debit card, 0.3% on a credit card and 0.9% on a business card. Same €100. Four and a half times the interchange.

Scheme fees. The card network (CB, Visa or Mastercard) takes its own fee for carrying the payment: the scheme fee. No law caps it. After the caps, the Commission found the international schemes' fees crept up a little, while domestic schemes like CB stayed "low and stable". In Germany in 2018, Visa and Mastercard's came to roughly 0.15% to 0.24% of sales.

Many French cards carry CB alongside Visa or Mastercard, and you have a say in which one a payment takes. More in five countries, five payment cultures.

The provider's margin. Everything left over: processing, support, risk, profit. On a single-rate contract, it also covers averaging the cheap cards with the expensive ones.

That last part is where small merchants lose. The Commission pointed to "the inability of many (small) merchants to switch acquirers and their limited bargaining power". It also noted that small merchants may prefer one simple rate, because they lack the capacity to process long, complex fee lists.

Where the fee on a €100 card sale could go

Illustrative: 1.5% is an example rate, not an average.

Total fee at an example rate of 1.5%

€1.50

1.5%

Interchange at the EU consumer debit cap

€0.20

0.2%

Scheme fees, a value inside the EU-sourced range

€0.15

0.15%

The rest: margin and averaging, set by your contract

€1.15

1.15%

€0

€0.75

€1.50

Illustrative. Total: an example rate; no EU or French public source gives a small-merchant average, and the rest varies by contract. Interchange: Article 3 of Regulation (EU) 2015/751. Scheme fees: inside roughly 0.15% to 0.24% (Visa and Mastercard in Germany, 2018, Commission SWD(2020) 118, Figure 9; domestic scheme fees stayed low).

Note. The EU caps what your provider pays the customer's bank. It does not cap what you pay your provider. And you cannot pass the fee on. In France the law bars any extra charge for paying with a given payment instrument, business cards included (Code monétaire et financier, article L112-12). EU law sets the floor: no surcharge on capped consumer cards anywhere (PSD2, Article 62(4)).

Three ways to be charged

Providers price that bundle in one of three ways.

Flat rate. One percentage for every card, often with no fixed fee per payment and sometimes no subscription. It is the easiest bill to read: sales times the rate. The catch is that the same rate applies to a capped debit card and an uncapped business card. The provider cannot know your mix in advance, so it prices in an average.

The UK regulator, in one of the few detailed public studies of small-merchant pricing, put the logic plainly: a provider sets its headline rate at a level that recovers interchange "across the mix of transactions that the merchant accepts". The provider prices in an average mix, so if your customers mostly use French debit cards, your flat rate may be paying for a mix that isn't yours. If many of your customers pay with business or foreign cards, a flat rate can work in your favour.

It suits a new or small business with low volumes and no time to read statements.

Blended. A few rates instead of one: say one for consumer cards and another for business and foreign cards, sometimes with a fixed fee per payment. Blended pricing follows your real costs a little more closely and stays easy to read. A legal detail: in the EU, an itemised bill is the default. A single rate, or a few, is something you agree to in writing (Article 9). Flat rates included.

It suits a business with a steady card mix that wants a short statement.

IC++. IC++ passes the interchange and the scheme fees through at cost, then adds the provider's own fee on a separate line. You see every cost, and your bill moves with every card. The Commission found that merchants with this kind of itemised pricing saw their credit card fees fall faster after the caps, and cited evidence that large merchants gained the most.

It suits bigger merchants with real volume and someone who reads the statement every month.

Whichever you have, the law lets you see it. Article 12 requires your provider to show the merchant service charge and the interchange fee separately for your card payments.

The costs that are not a percentage

Some of the bill arrives whether you sell or not.

The device. You can buy a terminal, rent one, or use your phone with Tap to Pay. Renting spreads the cost. Check how long it runs.

Subscriptions and minimums. Look for a monthly service fee, a separate fee for online payments, and any minimum monthly charge.

Three questions cover most of it. What do I pay in a month with no sales? How long am I committed? What does leaving cost?

Your time is on the bill

Two costs never appear on a fee statement: the days your money spends travelling, and the hours spent making the numbers agree.

Back to the café, with my assumptions. Swap in yours.

It takes €12,000 a month on cards, about €400 a day, open every day.
Offer A pays out three days after the sale. Offer B pays out the next day.
Offer A's payouts land away from its sales reports, so matching takes two hours a week. Offer B's arrive next to the sales they cover: 30 minutes a week.
Offer A's rate is 0.2 points lower.

The rate. 0.2 points on €144,000 of card sales a year saves €288 with offer A.
The delay. Two extra days means about €800 always on its way to you. At roughly what money earns on deposit today (the ECB's deposit rate, 2.50% since 16 September 2026), that is about €20 a year. The interest is small. The real cost is €800 missing on the morning a supplier's invoice is due.
The hours. Two hours a week is 104 hours a year; 30 minutes is 26. The difference is 78 hours. Eurostat puts the average employer cost of an hour of work in France in 2025 at €44.3. At that price, the extra matching costs about €3,450 a year.

The hours cost about twelve times the rate difference. If your accounting software already imports the payout file, the hours shrink and the rate may win. Either way, put your hours on the comparison.

Reconciliation is where the gap between the sale and the bank account becomes work, and where the payout lands decides how wide it is. More on that in card acceptance is a system, not a device.

One example: acceptance inside the business account

A disclosure first: I work at Qonto. This is one public example, described from qonto.com as of 14 October 2026. Prices change, and pages can differ by country.

On its pricing and in-person pages, Qonto publishes a standard per-transaction rate for EU consumer cards and a higher one, 2.6%, for business and non-EU cards. Its in-person page says "No fixed fees, and no monthly rental fees for terminals (Qonto plan fees apply)". Tap to Pay needs no device to buy ("Free" in its device table), and payouts arrive the next business day. Check the live page for the current EU consumer-card rate.

Against the three models: two published rates, split by card type. The fixed cost sits in the account plan, and the plan fee is part of the price. Run it through the list below like any other offer.

Before you sign or renew

Price five lines:

Your effective rate last month: total fees divided by total card sales.
Your card mix: how much comes from business cards and from cards issued outside the EU and EEA.
Every fixed fee: device, subscriptions, minimum charge, and the cost of leaving.
The payout calendar: which day you are paid, and for which sales.
The hours each month spent reconciling, and what an hour of your time is worth.

Add them up over a year. The cheapest rate is rarely the cheapest system.

Five countries, five payment cultures

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Take the same card terminal and put it on five counters: in Paris, Berlin, Milan, Madrid and Amsterdam. Same box, same software, same euro. The first question the shop owner asks will be different in every one. In France it is about the network. In Germany it is about the debit card and the till. In Italy it is about the tax register. In Spain it is about a payment app that is not a card. In the Netherlands it is about the phone. That is what card acceptance across Europe taught me: the card is European, and the counter is always local.

I have spent nine years in payments, at an e-money institution, a payment service provider and a business neobank, and today I work on card acceptance across several European markets at once. Before that I ran a store floor. On a store floor nobody asks about schemes. They ask whether the queue will move on a Saturday. Every country moves the queue its own way.

This is a tour of five of them, and what I would carry from one to the next.

Note. The figures below come from each country's central bank or official bodies and are the newest I could find as of October 2026. Each section links to the full country guide, with every source.

France: the network question

In France, the card won. The Banque de France counted 35.6 billion cashless transactions in 2025, and cards were 62.7% of them by volume, excluding cash withdrawals. In shops, 72% of card payments were contactless.

So the French shop owner rarely asks whether to take cards. They ask which card.

France has its own scheme, Cartes Bancaires, run by the GIE CB. It calls itself the most used card and mobile payment scheme in the country. Most French consumer cards are co-badged: CB for domestic use, Visa or Mastercard for everything else. One piece of plastic, two networks.

That matters because the network a payment goes through can change what it costs you. EU law gives the merchant a say. Under Article 8 of the interchange regulation, you may set a default brand on your terminal. The customer must be able to override it.

France also regulates the till, separately from the terminal. If you are subject to VAT and record consumer payments in till software, that software must be certified or covered by the publisher's attestation. Plain card terminals are outside the rule.

In France you get to pick the road the payment takes. Pick it.

More in the guide to card payments in France.

Germany: girocard and the till

In 2025, for the first time, Germans paid without cash more often than with it. Cash was still the single most used way to pay, at 45% of payments by number in the Bundesbank's survey. Debit cards were 26% by number and 28% by value.

And the German debit card is the girocard, a domestic debit card run by the German Banking Industry Committee on its own system and rules. Many girocards carry a second brand, Debit Mastercard or Visa Debit, which steps in where the girocard system cannot process the payment, often abroad. Banks generally stopped issuing new cards with the Maestro badge at the end of June 2023.

A terminal that takes only Visa and Mastercard can miss the card most Germans carry.

The second German question is the till. Under section 146a of the Abgabenordnung, if you record sales on an electronic system, it must be protected by a certified technical security device, the TSE, and reported to the tax office. Running a till without a properly connected certified TSE, or selling a till without one, is an administrative offence fined up to 25,000 euros even if nothing was manipulated. If you use an electronic system, every sale gets a receipt, on paper or electronically.

The German lesson is that the till is part of the payment. Ask about the TSE and about girocard before you buy anything.

More in the guide to card payments in Germany.

Italy: BANCOMAT and the tax register

Italy is still a cash country, and it is moving fast. In the latest ECB survey, for 2024, cash was 61% of point-of-sale transactions by number. Yet the Banca d'Italia's 2025 figures, published in August 2026, show contactless at 88% of card payments at the point of sale and phones at 24% of transactions in physical shops. The same customer pays the bar in coins and the electrician by tap.

The domestic debit brand is BANCOMAT, formerly PagoBANCOMAT on cards. In July 2025 BANCOMAT S.p.A. announced it was unifying the card and its BANCOMAT Pay app under a single identity. Many Italian debit cards are co-badged with an international scheme, and the same Article 8 rule applies: you set a priority brand, the customer can override it.

Italy also tells the shop, in law, that it must take cards. A seller must accept at least one debit card and one credit card. Since 30 June 2022 a refusal brings a fine of 30 euros plus 4% of the amount refused.

Then comes the receipt. Daily takings must be stored and transmitted electronically, through a registratore telematico (RT) or the Agenzia delle Entrate's web procedure. Paper receipts are gone. Since 1 January 2026 each POS has to be linked online to the RT it works with. The deadline for devices already in use was 20 April 2026, and missing the pairing is fined 1,000 to 4,000 euros, and it also brings a suspension of the licence.

Think about what that pairing means. Your card sales are now visible from two sides: the tax record and the payout. In Italy the terminal is a tax device as much as a payment one.

The Italian lesson is that the payment and the receipt are one event. Pair the terminal the day it arrives.

More in the guide to card payments in Italy.

Spain: Bizum next to the card

Spain looks like card country from the terrace. The Banco de España's statistics for the second half of 2025 show cards at 65.9% of non-cash operations, and contactless at 95.6% of in-person card payments by number.

Ask people how they pay in shops, though, and 57% still name cash as their main method, in the Banco de España's 2025 study. Cards came second at 27%, mobile devices third at 15%.

The method every Spanish customer knows is Bizum, an account-to-account mobile payment that began between friends. Bizum says 30.6 million people used it in 2025, at 3.4 million payments a day on average.

In 2026 it walked into the shop. In-person payment at the terminal began rolling out in May 2026, bank by bank. The customer holds the phone near the card terminal, and the money moves from their account to the merchant's, with no card and no PIN. It works only where the customer's bank and the merchant's bank both support it.

Can the terminal you already own take the thing your customers already use? Ask your bank in writing. The answer may be yes.

Spain also puts a ceiling on cash. When one party acts as a business or professional, a payment of 1,000 euros or more cannot be made in cash. The fine is 25% of the amount, and payer and recipient are jointly liable, so the shop that takes the cash pays too.

In Spain the local habit arrived at the card terminal without being a card.

More in the guide to card payments in Spain.

The Netherlands: after Maestro, the phone

The Netherlands has mostly stopped using cash at the till. In 2025 cash was 17% of point-of-sale payments and cards 83%, according to the Dutch central bank and the Dutch Payments Association. Inserting a card was 4% of payments. Contactless was 78% (rounded): 40% with a card and 39% with a phone or smartwatch.

For years the Dutch debit card carried Maestro or V PAY. Mastercard and Visa are phasing both out gradually. Banks started issuing Debit Mastercard and Visa Debit in 2023, and the Dutch Payments Association says every terminal in the country has been updated to read the new cards. For the merchant the shift was mostly invisible.

One EU rule becomes visible here. Under Article 10 of the interchange regulation, a scheme can only require you to accept all cards of the same brand and the same category. You can take debit and decline credit or commercial cards, if you tell customers clearly.

Online is a different country again. iDEAL carries about 70% of Dutch e-commerce transactions, and it is becoming Wero. The brand has read iDEAL | Wero since late January 2026, and the Payments Association says every iDEAL merchant will have moved to Wero by the end of 2027 at the latest.

At the counter, plan for the phone. Online, plan for the Wero date.

The Dutch swapped the debit card in every wallet, and the shop never noticed. That is what a migration looks like when the industry does the work.

More in the guide to card payments in the Netherlands.

What travels and what doesn't

Launching acceptance in one country teaches you a market. Doing it across several teaches you which parts of your plan were about payments and which were just habits from home. The habits are the expensive part.

Lesson one: the card rulebook travels

Some things are the same in all five, because they come from Brussels. The interchange regulation caps the fee on consumer cards at 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit. It applies in the EU, and through the EEA Agreement also in Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. It does not cover commercial cards, three-party schemes or cash withdrawals, and what accepting cards really costs shows how small that capped layer can be on the bill. The co-badge rule in Article 8 is the same in Paris and in Milan. The instant payments regulation made every euro-area bank receive instant transfers from 9 January 2025 and send them from 9 October 2025.

Learn that layer once. It is the cheapest knowledge you will ever buy, because it works everywhere.

Lesson two: the counter does not travel

Three of these five countries reach into the till. France regulates the till software. Germany wants a certified TSE and a notification. Italy wants every POS paired with a tax register. None of those rules sits in a scheme manual, and none of them looks the same from one border to the next.

The domestic scheme does not travel either. CB, girocard and BANCOMAT each sit alongside the international brands, and each one changes what a terminal has to accept. Bizum and iDEAL are not cards at all. iDEAL is what the Dutch reach for first online. Bizum had 30.6 million users in 2025.

Cash does not travel either, and it sets the pace. In 2024 it was 43% of point-of-sale transactions in France and 61% in Italy. In 2025 it was 45% of payments in Germany and 17% in the Netherlands, and 57% of people in Spain still named it their main method in shops. The surveys use different methods, so read them as shapes, not a league table. Everywhere but the Netherlands, cash is still four payments in ten or more, or most people's main method, and the terminal sits next to the drawer.

I have helped companies through becoming card acquirers, and the scheme work is the part everyone plans for. The local work is the part that surprises them. Plan for the tax office as seriously as for the scheme.

Lesson three: the merchant's levers travel

Here is the part that is easy to miss. The levers a merchant can pull are the same in all five countries.

Set the default brand. On a co-badged card, Article 8(6) lets you choose the priority brand on your terminal, as long as the customer can override it. In France that might be CB, in Germany girocard, in Italy BANCOMAT. The right is the same in Spain and the Netherlands.

Choose the card categories you take. The Article 10 rule from the Dutch section works in all five: take debit, decline credit or commercial cards, and say so clearly at the entrance, at the till and online before the customer commits.

Get the payout timing in writing. In none of the five does a national rule fix how many days it takes for card money to reach your account. It is whatever your contract says, so make the contract say it.

Reconcile against the record you already keep. Italy makes this obvious: the RT sends the day's takings to the tax office, and the payout tells you what the card side paid. Two ledgers, one day. Wherever you are, the gap between your card sales record and your payout should be fees, refunds or a chargeback, and nothing else.

The hardware, meanwhile, is settled. Contactless was 72% of in-store card payments in France, 88% in Italy and 95.6% in Spain. In the Netherlands 78% of all point-of-sale payments were contactless, a different base but the same story. Every terminal you ship needs to take a tap and a phone.

If I had to give one checklist to anyone launching acceptance in a new European country, it would be three questions. Which local scheme or method do customers carry? What does the tax office want from the till? How much cash still crosses the counter?

Answer those before you translate the website.

One currency, many counters

Five countries, one currency, one tap. Not one first question. The shop owner in Milan is thinking about the tax register. The one in Madrid is thinking about Bizum. The one in Berlin is counting the cash drawer.

The euro crossed every border. The counter never did.