A group of more than 30 European banks and acquirers planning to build a unified payment system for merchants and consumers across Europe is seeking technical partners to develop the system’s central infrastructure.

The European Payments Initiative (EPI) aims to build a solution that will “become a new standard in payments for European consumers and merchants across all types of retail transactions” and “become an alternative to existing international payment solutions and schemes,” EPI explains in a request for information (RFI) document laying out the requirements for potential technical partners.

EPI now needs “to set up a number of technical and components and processing solutions, called ‘Central Infrastructure’,” the RFI document continues.

“One of the objectives of EPI IC is therefore to determine how the necessary Central Infrastructure could be obtained or built, and how it should best be operated, to sustain all the necessary scheme functions and needs, as well as the processing needs of the EPI Technical Entity, in relation to the payment products EPI IC intends to deploy.

“In particular, determining the financial aspects of the different options for the setup and the running of the Central Infrastructure is critical for allowing proper decisions and choices.”

By issuing the RFI, the EPI says it aims to “establish a longlist of potential participants to be invited, and also in order to collect market information to feed the architecture analysis and the sourcing strategy analysis” prior to the launch of a private request for proposals “later in 2021”.

The RFI and supporting documents, along with information about how to submit an application, can be downloaded from the EPI’s website here.

Plans to set up a pan-European unified payment system, then known as the Pan European Payment System Initiative (PEPSI), were first revealed in November 2019.

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