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.
