At Pay360 in London, industry leaders warned that the real power in payments now lies with the wallets that control the user experience – and the data.
European banks are losing visibility at the checkout as digital wallets tighten their grip on consumers’ everyday spending, speakers at the Pay360 conference in London warned today (March 25).
As more payments flow through Apple Pay, Google Pay and a patchwork of domestic wallet schemes, the brand a customer sees – and remembers – is increasingly that of the wallet, not the bank or card issuer behind it.
“I use Apple Pay all the time, wherever I go,” said Claire Gates, Global Head of Payments and Solutions at Crown Agents Bank. “Whether I’m doing a coffee, or whether I’m buying something that’s a couple of 100 pounds… I think of Apple. I don’t think of American Express.”
Moderated by Anton Kornilov, founder of Kernel Acumen, the session explored how wallets are evolving from a simple payment button into a multi-layered experience that sits between banks, merchants and consumers. That middle position, the panel argued, is where the real power now lies.
From ‘pay button’ to financial front door
Kornilov opened by redefining what a digital wallet has become in Europe and the UK. No longer just a way to click and pay, wallets are becoming “the place where customers interact with money,” and increasingly with “loyalty, identity, credit and the whole array of broader financial services.”
That shift raises a fundamental strategic question, he suggested: who becomes “the customer’s default financial screen”?
Across Europe, he noted, wallets manifest in three main forms: large consumer wallets like Apple Wallet and Google Pay, checkout wallets such as PayPal, specialised wallets focused on verticals or use cases, and a growing set of domestic schemes like Swish, Vipps, Blik and Bizum. Connectivity initiatives are emerging to knit these into something that feels more interoperable across borders, even as the market remains highly fragmented.
The orchestration layer that owns the relationship
For Gates, the core of this transformation lies in two pillars: user experience and an orchestration layer sitting above the underlying rails.
On the experience side, wallets “hold the payment method, whether it’s a card or whether it’s an account-to-account,” and make it effortless for the user: “They enable the click, the tap, whatever that may be.” Over time, they also become the container for “the added extra functionality as loyalty or embedded finance.”
Behind the scenes, however, is where the structural shift happens. The orchestration layer “takes the intelligence,” she said. It decides “how it’s going to be paid. Is it this card? Is it that card? Is it account to account? It also identifies the fastest and cheapest rails that transaction is going to flow through,” applies payment and FX fees, and manages security and tokenisation.
Critically, this layer “sits in between the bank or the card and actually the user,” Gates said. It “controls the user experience,” “collects all the data,” and can turn that data into loyalty, better screens and journeys, and finely targeted offers to specific users.
The result is growing disintermediation of the traditional players that actually hold the account or issue the card. As Gates put it, the more she taps her phone, the more her mental relationship is with the wallet brand, not with the bank or network behind it.
Share of mindset, not just share of wallet
What, then, makes consumers excited enough about wallets to keep shifting their behaviour?
Gates pointed to a few fundamentals. First is ubiquity – “being able to use it anywhere, for anything.” Second is “the embeddedness of it, making it so seamless.” The same experience must stretch across “going into a store” and paying “also online as well,” with the wallet “seamless through all the different channels that you have.”
But over the long term, the real battleground is psychological, not just technical.
“You’ve got to think about your users,” she said, stressing generational differences. Having grown up with credit cards embedded in daily life, she never expected to use a wallet “more than a card to tap,” yet now finds herself doing exactly that. For younger users raised on apps, that shift is even more pronounced.
“It’s really looking at understanding what’s going to gain their share of mindset, not just their share of wallet,” Gates said. Once a wallet has that “share of mindset, it just becomes a default type of reaction that that wallet is going to be used.”
Banks: build, partner or become invisible?
From the bank side, Anna Stoianova, Head of Digital Product for Money Transfers at Nordea, argued banks are already “in the game” through their ownership stakes and roles in European wallet schemes. But she drew a sharp distinction between the primary jobs of wallets and banking apps.
With wallets, “payments is no longer enough,” she said. They need “more value added services,” from lifestyle offerings to credit, and the ability to “plug in more services inside the end-to-end journeys” to drive engagement.
Traditional banking apps, by contrast, are still about managing money. The bank “holds the accounts, you hold the trust to the customer,” and that creates the possibility of a consolidated “financial hub,” using the bank’s account-level view to add more services around that core.
Stoianova sees the future in partnerships – for example, domestic schemes like Blik being integrated directly into bank apps as an entry point to mobile payments—rather than banks trying to replicate everything wallets do on their own. “It’s about partnerships, I believe,” she said.
Implicit in that strategy is a recognition that if banks don’t make themselves central to the experience, someone else will. As wallets stitch together multiple services and providers into a single tap, the risk is that the bank becomes the silent plumbing behind a brand the user actually remembers.
Why Europe won’t simply copy Asian super apps
On the question of whether Europe is heading toward an Asian-style super app model, both speakers were sceptical.
Super apps in Asia evolved “because there was a need,” Stoianova said, pointing to gaps in banking, payments and even internet access in some markets. In Europe and the UK, those structural gaps and dynamics simply aren’t the same.
Gates was more blunt: “I think it would be a challenge to make a super app in Europe,” she said, citing regulatory and structural factors as barriers, and noting that many super apps emerged to compensate for “a fundamental flaw in the banking [and] payment environment.”
Instead, the panel suggested, Europe is likely to see super app–inspired experiments: gamified education, login rewards, community features and more integrated journeys, but built on top of a mature, regulated banking system where banks, schemes and wallets are forced into partnership rather than outright replacement.
What remains non-negotiable, the speakers agreed, is that as these ecosystems become more layered, consumers must not be left guessing who is responsible when something goes wrong. With “15 different services” and “10 different providers” potentially sitting behind one button, the industry will need clearer accountability to match the frictionless front-end experiences wallets now deliver.
