SEPA 3.0: Entering a new era of European payments – Interview with Gijs Boudewijn, EPC Chair

In June 2025, Gijs Boudewijn took the helm as Chair of the European Payments Council (EPC), bringing decades of experience and a clear mission to drive European payments forward.

In this interview, The Paypers talks with Gijs about his vision for the future of European payments and the transition toward SEPA 3.0, highlighting the EPC’s pivotal role in building a secure, efficient, and fully integrated payments ecosystem.

He outlines the evolution of SEPA:

• SEPA 1.0: Development of core payment schemes (credit transfer and direct debit).
• SEPA 2.0: Consolidation and new overlay services like SEPA Request-to-Pay.
• SEPA 3.0: A new phase shaped by geopolitical pressures, digital transformation, and the push for European payment autonomy and resilience.

Gijs stresses that progress will be evolutionary, not revolutionary, as changes in payments require time and coordination across thousands of participants.

Key challenges include the lack of a unified, long-term European roadmap for payments innovation and resilience. He calls for a public–private partnership between regulators, central banks, and industry players to define shared goals, timelines, and success benchmarks.

Gijs also discusses the need to balance multiple initiatives (including EPI, Wero, EuroPA, and the Digital Euro) to ensure they complement rather than compete with one another, and to maintain European control over payment volumes.

Looking ahead, he highlights priorities such as:

• Strengthening fraud prevention and data sharing.
• Expanding instant payments, now reinforced by new EU regulations.
• Enabling cross-border “one-leg-out” transactions between SEPA and non-SEPA countries.
• Advancing Open Banking through EPC’s Payment Account Access scheme (SPAA).

Gijs concludes that collaboration, clarity, and commitment are essential to achieving a unified and resilient European payments landscape built on shared infrastructure, innovation, and trust.

About the author

Gijs Boudewijn is the Chair of the European Payments Council (EPC) since 11 June 2025. Prior to this role, he served as General Manager of the Dutch Payments Association, following his tenure as Deputy General Manager beginning on 1 February 2014. Earlier in his career, he was responsible for payments and security at the Dutch Banking Association. Gijs has broad and deep experience in both domestic and international payment-related issues, including governance, regulation and innovation, competition law, and fraud prevention.

In addition to his current role as EPC Chair, he has also held the position of Chair of the EPC Legal Support Group. He was, until recently, also Vice-Chair of the Payment Systems Committee of the European Banking Federation and Vice-Chair of the European Card Payments Association. Gijs has been actively involved in regulatory initiatives such as PSD2 and the Regulatory Technical Standards of the European Banking Authority. He also represented the three ECSAs (EBF, EACB, ESBG) of the EPC SEPA Payment Account Access (SPAA) Multi-Stakeholder Group (MSG).
Additionally, he served as a member of the European Commission’s Payment Systems Market Expert Group until his retirement on 1 June 2025. 

About the European Payments Council

The European Payments Council (EPC), an international not-for-profit association representing payment service providers, supports and promotes European payments integration and development, notably the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA). The EPC is committed to contributing to safe, reliable, efficient, convenient, economically balanced and sustainable payments, which meet the needs of payment service users and support the goals of competitiveness and innovation in an integrated European economy. It pursues this purpose through the development and management of pan-European payment and payment-related schemes, as well as the formulation of positions and proposals on European payment issues, in constant dialogue with other stakeholders and regulators at the European level, taking a strategic and holistic perspective. The EPC is also active in the fields of cards, mobile payments, including Person-to-Person, payment security and cash.