Comment by aarroyoc
4 hours ago
This is written from a French perspective as if southern countries joined later because they were not as developed. Quite the opposite. Spain, Italy and Portugal were in the first years of EPI, but they went there own ways because of the lack of progress that was being made by other members like France and Germany. Bizum in Spain is quite popular (I would say that more than Wero in France) and now is starting to manage payments in physical stores, after being a popular solution to transfer money between friends and in online payments (and in the physical black market).
You must be very poor at reading French because the article says the exact opposite, and that Spain, Portugal, Italy and Andorra served as test subjects since they already have this system called EuroPA.