From coverage to performance: what enterprise merchants need from account and wallet payments

Konstantin Surkov, Co-Founder and CEO of Nopan, explains why enterprise merchants need better data, control, and tools to make account and wallet payments perform. 

Cards have always been in the spotlight, in terms of investment, ownership, and optimisation. Account and wallet payments are growing fast, but they rarely receive the same treatment. Why does this gap still exist? 

Cards have benefited from decades of operational maturity. Large merchants usually have dedicated ownership, dashboards, KPIs, and optimisation playbooks around authorisation rates, 3DS performance, tokens, retries, cost, fraud, and customer experience. 

Account and wallet payments have not yet reached the same maturity. Merchants expect these methods to deliver a business case, whether through higher conversion and retention, lower cost, stronger local reach, or better customer experience. But compared to cards, they have often lacked the data, insights, and tools needed to actively manage performance after launch. 

Across Europe, methods such as iDEAL, Bizum, BLIK, Satispay, IRIS, Vipps MobilePay, TWINT, and others, together with the rollout of Wero across several countries, are shaping how consumers prefer to pay. The point is not for these methods to replace cards, but to become credible, high-performing alternatives. 

Enterprise merchants operating across multiple markets often face fragmented payment systems. How does this fragmentation affect payment performance in practice? 

Fragmentation affects performance in practical ways. A merchant may offer the right local methods, but still not get the expected results because the setup is fragmented across providers, markets, reporting layers, and customer journeys. 

Europe’s payment landscape is a network of strong local habits and domestic champions. The opportunity is not to erase those behaviours, but to connect and optimise them. 

The same method can perform very differently depending on its checkout presentation, user flow, provider setup, data availability, and failure visibility. 

For enterprise merchants, payment performance combines conversion, cost, reliability, customer experience, settlement, reconciliation, support, and revenue impact. 

Adding a new payment method is one thing; making it perform is another. Which requirements are most underestimated? 

When an enterprise merchant adds a new payment method, there is usually a clear business case behind it: improving conversion, lowering cost, increasing reach in a specific market, responding to customer preference, or supporting a particular use case. 

The gap appears after implementation. Once the method is live, merchants often do not have enough data, insights, and operational control to understand whether it is truly performing. They may see volume, but not the details such as why users choose a method, where they drop off, which flows underperform, how performance differs by segment, or what should be changed. 

This is where Nopan comes in, offering merchants and PSPs a transparent, method-level view of account and wallet payments, combined with the specialist execution needed to turn insights into measurable improvement. The goal is to help merchants understand, optimise, and scale these methods with confidence. 

Nopan’s mission is to turn account and wallet payments into measurable revenue drivers. What does good performance look like? 

Good performance means that a payment method is not just available but actively contributing to the business. That can mean higher conversion, improved retention, better customer experience, lower cost, faster settlement, stronger local reach, or more reliable recurring payments. 

Performance must be measured in context. A lower-cost method that creates friction or reduces conversion may not improve the business outcome. Equally, a method that performs well in one market or segment may not perform the same way elsewhere. 

This is especially important for merchant-initiated transactions, such as subscriptions, renewals, top-ups, re-orders, and other recurring or repeat payment use cases. Cards have built a strong operational framework around these flows, but account and wallet payments have not always had the same tooling. The opportunity is to make these methods work not only at checkout, but across the full customer lifecycle, with the right data, consent flows, retry logic, renewal visibility, and performance monitoring. 

Merchants should consider some points, such as checkout visibility, selection rate, completion rate, failure reasons, renewal impact, refund experience, settlement timing, reconciliation effort, and net revenue contribution. They should also evaluate support, reporting, disputes, accounting, and edge cases. 

Nopan recently received a Payment Institution licence from De Nederlandsche Bank, allowing it to operate across the EU. What does that unlock? 

The DNB licence gives Nopan the regulatory foundation to operate as a specialised PSP across the EU. For merchants, it means they can work with a partner focused exclusively on account and wallet payments, within a regulated European framework. 

It also allows us to support merchants and PSPs as a complementary performance layer. We improve existing payment stacks with specialised infrastructure, method-level transparency, and a team that collaborates with merchants to improve performance. Technology alone does not unlock performance. Execution does. 

Looking ahead, how do you see the account and wallet payments landscape evolving across Europe over the next five years? Do you see initiatives like Wero shifting from a local infrastructure story to a broader European one? 

Account and wallet payments are moving from local success stories to a broader European infrastructure conversation, and Wero is one of the clearest examples of that shift. 

Wero is already live in Belgium, France, and Germany, with the Netherlands and Luxembourg being added through the transition of major domestic solutions such as iDEAL and Payconiq. That gives Wero a presence across five important European markets and a solid foundation to build broader merchant acceptance. 

Wero is designed as a pan-European wallet, building on existing domestic strengths while creating a more unified account and wallet payment experience across markets. Alongside domestic leaders such as Bizum, BLIK, Satispay, IRIS, Vipps MobilePay, TWINT, and others, it can help create a network of networks: strong local payment behaviours connected through better interoperability, acceptance, and operating models. 

Sovereignty is important, especially in Europe. But sovereignty is not a user feature. Consumers want the payment to work. Merchants want measurable performance across conversion, cost, and reliability. Banks want relevance. Governments and regulators want resilience. All these incentives need to align. 

That is the next phase of European payments: not just more methods, but better-performing methods. Europe does not need to make cards disappear. It needs account and wallet payments, including Wero and the wider ecosystem around it, to be reliable, familiar, and performant enough that merchants and consumers can choose them with confidence. 

 

Konstantin Surkov is Co-Founder and CEO of Nopan, a specialised PSP focused on account and wallet payments engineered for revenue. A former Netflix payments leader, Konstantin has deep experience building and scaling payment strategies for large digital merchants across markets. At Nopan, he focuses on helping merchants and PSPs turn account and wallet payments into measurable business performance. 

About Nopan 

Nopan is a specialised PSP focused on account and wallet payments. Built by former large-merchant payment leaders, it helps turn these methods into measurable revenue drivers. Acting as a complementary performance layer for merchants, fintechs, and PSPs, Nopan strengthens existing payment stacks with transparency-first infrastructure, merchant control, and dedicated payment specialists focused on improving conversion, retention, customer experience, and revenue impact.