How Bancomat Is Translating Card-Scheme Rules for Stablecoin Payments
Louis Tellier
June 12, 2026
Project Eur.Bank: Last week, Italian payment network Bancomat announced that nine banks, including Intesa Sanpaolo, Banco BPM, and Crédit Agricole Italia, will begin internal testing of its euro stablecoin Eur.Bank in July. A public launch is targeted for late 2026 or early 2027, pending regulatory approval.
Italy’s payment backbone: Owned by roughly 125 Italian banks, Bancomat operates the country’s largest domestic network for debit card payments, processing 2.7 billion transactions per year worth approximately €200 billion.
Why it matters: European banks are converging on stablecoins. Beyond single issuers such as SG-FORGE and ODDO BHF, Eur.Bank is going to be the second collective initiative after Qivalis, which is now 37 banks strong. What makes Bancomat distinct is its attempt to turn stablecoins into a scheme-based payment instrument, with shared rules, bank distribution, dispute mechanisms, and reserves that remain inside the banking system.
Details: To understand the strategy, we spoke with Emanuele Guzzoni, Senior Vice President of Blockchain Solutions at Bancomat. Here is what we learned from our conversation:
Bringing payment schemes to stablecoins: Bancomat’s core proposition is to bring the card-payment rulebook to digital money. In cards, a double charge triggers a standardized dispute process between issuers and acquirers. Stablecoin payments lack comparable protections, and Bancomat sees that governance gap as the main barrier to everyday use.
“Stablecoins already offer efficient settlement; what networks like Bancomat add are the rules, protections, and trust that consumers expect from everyday payment instruments, such as standardized acceptance, dispute resolution mechanisms, and consumer safeguards,” Guzzoni told Blockstories.
One issuer, no new consortium: The first token under the scheme will be issued by Flowpay, an open-banking fintech Bancomat acquired last August, while the banks act as distributors. There is no separate consortium either: decisions run through Bancomat’s existing governance with its shareholder banks, and any shareholder or client bank can join through standard onboarding.
Reserves in cash, held by the banks: The reserves will sit entirely in cash, custodied pro rata across the distributing banks: a bank that distributes €20 million of the token holds €20 million of reserves, with an algorithm aligning custody balances with minting and burning. Bancomat monitors the accounts at scheme level. Qivalis, by contrast, plans to concentrate custody with a selected subset of custodian banks.
“The objective is not to maximize returns on the reserves. Should there be any change in reserve management policy, Flowpay would be required to inform the participating banks and secure their approval,” Guzzoni told Blockstories.
Public chain, no bridges: The token will launch on a public blockchain rather than a permissioned bank network. Additional chains would follow via native burn-and-mint issuance rather than bridges. As brand owner, Bancomat keeps final say on chain and exchange listings.
“While I cannot disclose the specific network at this stage, it will be part of the Ethereum ecosystem and will definitely be a public blockchain,” Guzzoni told Blockstories.
Outlook: The July tests will run in a closed loop, restricted to bank employees, covering minting, redemption, transfers, and reserve management. But Bancomat does not plan to stop at a single token or a single market. Its scheme is built as an open framework, willing to welcome other euro stablecoins, while tokenized deposits sit among the next assets it wants the framework to support. The architecture is also designed to travel beyond Italy:
"We want to scale this to other countries, not necessarily on Bancomat's own infrastructure, but through partnerships and local schemes that interoperate, the way we already do in the payments industry. The goal is to help the European banking ecosystem work together and play a larger role in digital assets," Guzzoni told Blockstories.
Mallesh Pai is a researcher and head economist at Tempo, a blockchain backed by Stripe and Paradigm, designed specifically for stablecoins payments. Players such as UBS, Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered are among the design partners.
Stablecoins keep multiplying. What will make them exchangeable at par, the way deposits at different banks are?
In traditional finance, par is guaranteed by the central bank. Every bank holds a master account there, dollars at Bank A and Bank B settle one-to-one, and the central bank absorbs the tail risk by admitting only regulated participants, sometimes clearing in central bank money as a neutral instrument.
Stablecoins have no central bank, so that function has to be recreated.
Within a single issuer, it is already solved: for example, open issuance, as Bridge does, lets several tokens share one pool of fiat, so a swap between them is just an internal ledger entry.
Across issuers, it is harder. Market makers can hold prices within a few basis points of par, but never exactly one-to-one without a subsidy, since holding stablecoin inventory means forgoing the opportunity cost of that capital. The alternative is an arrangement between issuers to convert at par on certain networks, or a consortium agreeing on a shared pool of dedicated liquidity to serve as the analog to "central bank money".
The real obstacle is incentive: the largest issuers each own a distinct share of the market, so such a scheme benefits everyone else more than them. True par is not a technical problem; it is a coordination/regulatory one.
Giacomo Vella is Director of the Blockchain and Web3 Research Group at Politecnico di Milano, one of Italy’s leading technical universities. The group studies digital innovation in close collaboration with financial institutions, corporates, and public-sector organizations.
What has been the journey of Italian banks and financial institutions in digital assets, and where does the ecosystem stand today?
Back in 2016 and 2017, Italian financial institutions were among the most active in Europe when it came to early experimentation with blockchain. More broadly, the Italian ecosystem was quite advanced, as several surveys showed that Italian consumers had some of the highest crypto ownership rates.
Then the environment turned against it. The regulator never gave banks a full and clear green light, and in a highly regulated industry, leadership rarely moves at scale without one. Beneath this sat the real obstacle: no convincing business model, since offering crypto alone to retail clients meant real risk for modest revenue, never a use case at scale. Italy slipped from ahead of the curve to behind it.
More recently, however, there has been a clear re-engagement. Under growing international pressure, banks want to take part in launching sovereign initiatives rather than leaving the market entirely to non-European projects, particularly in areas such as stablecoins.
As a result, banks are planting their flag by joining shared initiatives such as Qivalis and Bancomat, while also preparing their own digital asset offerings. The challenge is that, even today, the business models that are compatible with the European financial system have not yet been clearly identified.