PKO Bank Polski one of Poland’s bigger banks, and OP Financial Group, a Finnish retail bank, along with a group of 12 Spanish credit institutions banks that have formed a consortium, are joining EPI as a collective founding shareholder of the EPI Interim Company.

The admissions lead the way for EPI’s access to the Polish and Finnish markets. Poland will become the first non-euro-based market to form part of EPI and will enable the group to address the challenge of currency conversion within the solution.

The addition of the 12 Spanish institutions will increase the coverage of EPI in the Spanish market, alongside the three largest Spanish banks BBVA, CaixaBank and Banco Santander which are all individual shareholders of EPI. The consortium of credit institutions consists of ABANCA, Banco Cooperativo Español, Grupo Cooperativo Cajamar, Caja de Ingenieros, LABORAL Kutxa, Cecabank, Eurocaja Rural, Grupo Bankinter, Ibercaja, Kutxabank, Liberbank and Unicaja Banco.

In the coming months, EPI will focus on the implementation of the new solution. In July 2020, a group of 16 major European banks from five countries (Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain) paved the way for the future launch of the European Payments Initiative, by announcing the creation of the EPI Interim Company in Brussels, responsible for initiating the implementation of the joint payment initiative.