🇩🇪 Payments in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland

Three markets, two currencies, one account-based culture

“DACH” refers to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland under a single label, common in media planning. The grouping is linguistic. It reflects no shared payment infrastructure. Treating the three countries as one market leads to three costly mistakes. The first is assuming SEPA direct debit is enough in Switzerland, when it does not cover the franc. The second is assuming the German debit scheme works in Vienna, when no Austrian bank issues it. The third is putting cards at the center of the collection plan, when cards dominate neither online sales nor recurring payments.

All three markets rely on a bank account culture rather than on credit lines. The core instrument is the checking account (Girokonto, Konto, Kontokorrent). Payers draw on it by direct debit, by credit transfer, or by paying an invoice after the goods arrive. Credit cards remain a minority instrument. In Germany, they account for only 4.7% of transactions and 8.7% of spending in the Bundesbank’s 2025 payment diary. Debit cards account for 26.2% and 27.8%.

girocard: the scheme that rules the German checkout counter

girocard has been the shared brand of the German banks’ debit system since 1990. It is owned collectively, not by a private operator. The brand belongs to the Deutsche Kreditwirtschaft (DK), the umbrella body of Germany’s five banking associations: private banks (BdB), cooperative banks (BVR), savings banks (DSGV), public banks (VÖB), and mortgage banks (VDP). EURO Kartensysteme GmbH handles day-to-day administration. This cooperative setup has two opposite effects. Coverage is nationwide, since every bank issues the card and all retailers accept it. Change is slow, since every update requires agreement among the five associations.

Two sources publish girocard figures, and they measure different things. DK figures count transactions processed in the scheme. The Bundesbank survey counts payments reported by cardholders, across all instruments. For 2025, it puts girocard at 20.1% of transactions and 21.9% of value, ahead of Visa Debit (4.2% / 3.4%) and Mastercard Debit (1.4% / 1.9%). This is the first time the Bundesbank has broken out the debit networks separately, and its data confirm what issuers had been claiming. 90% of respondents have a girocard, and 98% have at least one debit card.

• Co-badging is the key to reading the market. A girocard almost never stands alone on the plastic: for years it was co-badged with Maestro or V PAY so it would be accepted outside Germany. Mastercard stopped issuing new Maestro cards in Europe on July 1, 2023, and V PAY met the same fate, so German banks migrated to Debit Mastercard and Visa Debit. In practice, the same physical card can route as girocard at a German point of sale and as Visa or Mastercard elsewhere, at a different acceptance cost.
• girocard has no native e-commerce acceptance. That is the scheme’s structural gap, and the reason German e-commerce grew up without it. A German merchant that asks for “girocard online” is actually offered the Visa or Mastercard rail of the same card.
• girocard does, however, work in wallets. The 2025 Bundesbank survey shows that among mobile payments at the point of sale, about a third of the cards stored in wallets are girocards and another third are Visa debit cards. Credit cards account for only about 20% of mobile payments.
• Contactless is the norm, and mobile is taking off. Mobile payments rose from 6% to 10% of transactions in Germany between 2023 and 2025, and from 6% to 13% in brick-and-mortar retail. Apple Pay leads (41% of mobile payers), ahead of Google Pay and banking apps.

Austria: one operator, PSA, and three brands to know

PSA Payment Services Austria GmbH is the bank-owned utility for Austrian retail payments. This single company runs the domestic debit scheme (Bankomat), the ATM network (Bankomaten), the retail clearing house (PSA CSM), e-commerce pay-by-bank (eps-Überweisung), and direct debit (ems Lastschrift). That level of concentration is rare in Europe. It cuts the number of counterparties a new entrant has to map, and it concentrates the operational risk of all these services in a single point.

• Bankomat is the Austrian debit card, run by PSA on behalf of the banks. Like girocard, it was co-badged with Maestro and then, after Maestro issuance ended in Europe in July 2023, with Debit Mastercard. In everyday speech, Bankomat means both the card and the ATM, so read contracts carefully.
• eps-Überweisung (2005) is Austria’s standard for online payment by bank transfer, run by PSA together with STUZZA. It is the functional equivalent of iDEAL in the Netherlands: the customer is redirected to online banking and authenticates the transfer, and the merchant receives a confirmation. It is a must for selling online in Austria, including to public agencies, and it survived where its German counterpart, giropay, died.
• PSA CSM Instant Payments (2025) is Austria’s answer to the EU instant payments mandate, built on PSA’s existing clearing infrastructure.
• Bluecode (Blue Code International AG, 2016) is a barcode or QR payment drawn directly from the bank account. It is live in Austria and Germany and connected to Asian QR schemes through the Alliance of Merchant Payment Schemes. It is the only QR solution in the German-speaking region to have sought interoperability beyond Europe.

Online, the Austrian picture differs from the point of sale. Of the 921 online transactions recorded by the OeNB in 2025, conventional cards account for 35%, online payment methods (PayPal, Klarna, Apple Pay, Google Pay) for 30%, credit transfers for 23%, and direct debits for 8%. By value, the picture changes: credit transfers reach 62% of the amount paid online. The gap comes from large purchases. Cars, housing, and home improvement work are paid by credit transfer, not by card. An Austrian merchant selling high-ticket goods that accepts neither eps nor regular credit transfers misses the segment where most online value is concentrated.

Switzerland: TWINT, the franc outside SEPA, and a revamped debit card

TWINT is Switzerland’s national wallet. Payments are initiated by QR code and settled from the payer’s bank account, outside the card rails. It is run by TWINT AG, owned by the major Swiss banks, PostFinance, and SIX. Today’s TWINT is the product of a 2017 merger between TWINT and its rival Paymit (SIX / UBS / ZKB). Critical mass came from that merger: neither solution would have reached it alone. Switzerland is the only country in Europe where a national wallet has held back the advance of Apple Pay and cards.

The table shows two shifts. Debit cards have overtaken cash at the point of sale, the headline finding of the SNB’s 2024 survey. Credit cards are losing ground in remote payments (19%, down from 27% two years earlier). The SNB explicitly attributes that decline to the arrival of debit cards usable online, meaning the migration from Maestro to Debit Mastercard and Visa Debit. Since then, Swiss consumers have had, for the first time, a debit card accepted in e-commerce. Swiss merchants now receive online debit traffic that did not exist before the migration. A Swiss merchant that has not revisited its 3-D Secure setup since then is processing online debit traffic its configuration never anticipated.

Kauf auf Rechnung: paying after delivery, and why it endures

Pay-by-invoice (Kauf auf Rechnung) is a deferred payment method in which delivery comes before payment. The customer receives the goods, tries them, then pays. Payment is usually due within 14 or 30 days, by credit transfer or direct debit. The practice is common in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and it reverses the order taken for granted in the English-speaking world, where payment comes before delivery. It falls under the rules on payment terms in distance selling, inherited from mail order, not under consumer credit in the classic sense. Payment is also made in a single installment, which sets pay-by-invoice apart from pay-in-three BNPL.

The Bundesbank measures the weight of this mechanism in its payment diary. In German retail, for durable goods purchases, direct debits and credit transfers account for only 2% of transactions but 27% of value. Online, they account for 30% of transactions and 45% of the amount paid. Half the value of German e-commerce therefore does not run on a card rail. In Austria, the same pattern gives credit transfers 62% of the value of online payments.

• Reconciliation happens at the invoice level, not the authorization level. A Kauf auf Rechnung flow creates a built-in lag between the order, the shipment, the bank entry, and any return. Reconciliation tools calibrated for D+1 card captures fail here.
• The product return rate becomes a cash flow variable. In German fashion e-commerce, where return volumes are huge, the gap between invoiced and collected revenue is structural, not accidental.
• The cost of pay-by-invoice is a risk premium. The provider sells a payment guarantee. Its price tracks the customer profile and the average order value, whereas interchange tracks the amount of each transaction.
• Without an invoice option at checkout, German conversion drops. A checkout limited to cards and wallets leaves out the direct debits and credit transfers that carry nearly half the value paid online in Germany.

Building a checkout that converts in Berlin, Vienna, and Zurich

A German-speaking checkout relies on three separate payment method lists, one per country. The three lists overlap on pay-by-invoice, then diverge on pay-by-bank and on the expected wallet. The German list rolled out unchanged in Austria leaves out eps-Überweisung, the local standard for online payment by bank transfer. Rolled out in Switzerland, it leaves out TWINT. It also overweights credit cards there, whose share of remote payments is shrinking.

giropay was Germany’s service for online payment by bank transfer. Launched in 2005, it later merged with paydirekt and Kwitt. Paydirekt GmbH operated it for the Deutsche Kreditwirtschaft. It never rose above a single-digit market share, with 23 million transactions worth €1.6 billion in 2022. Its shutdown was approved at a shareholder meeting on June 12, 2024, and it went dark at the end of 2024. The failure of this bank-run pay-by-bank against PayPal freed the German banks to back Wero. Any checkout, documentation, or contract that still mentions giropay is out of date.

Sofortüberweisung is an online payment service based on bank transfers. SOFORT AG launched it in 2005. Klarna acquired the company, closing the deal on March 7, 2014, and it now operates as SOFORT GmbH. The service originally relied on screen scraping of online banking before moving to PSD2 APIs. Under the Klarna Pay Now brand, it remains the leading pay-by-bank method in Germany and Austria. The German pay-by-bank market was thus won by a third-party provider, not by the scheme the country’s banks had created for that purpose.

Rails: central banks as operators and mandatory instant payments

German-speaking Europe stands out for the role its central banks play in running payment infrastructure. Its central banks themselves operate a large share of the infrastructure, whereas France, Italy, and Spain rely more on private or jointly owned operators. The SEPA-Clearer of Germany’s RPS has been run by the Deutsche Bundesbank itself since 2008, a rare case of retail clearing that has remained public. In Switzerland, SIX Interbank Clearing Ltd runs SIC on behalf of and under the oversight of the Swiss National Bank.

SIC is Switzerland’s interbank settlement system, launched in 1987. It was one of the world’s very first real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems. It is also the only system in Western Europe that processes large-value and retail payments together in the same system. SIX Interbank Clearing reports about 1,028 million transactions a year, and interbank turnover of up to about CHF 6 trillion in peak months (six-group.com, 2026). That architecture explains Switzerland’s approach to instant payments. When it launched them in November 2023, it built no separate infrastructure and placed them inside the RTGS itself. Every Swiss instant payment therefore settles in central bank money.

EBICS: the bank-to-corporate channel shared by four countries

EBICS (Electronic Banking Internet Communication Standard) is the protocol companies use to send payment orders to their banks and retrieve statements. Its specification is managed by the EBICS SC, which brings together the CFONB (France), Die Deutsche Kreditwirtschaft (Germany), SIX (Switzerland), and Payment Services Austria (Austria). The protocol therefore belongs to neither Germany nor France. The four markets share a single bank-to-corporate channel. A group with operations in Munich, Vienna, and Zurich needs one technical integration, not one per country. Bank-to-corporate connectivity is where German-speaking Europe is most integrated, yet it is little known outside treasury departments.

• EBICS T, transport only: orders are submitted over the channel, but final approval happens outside the protocol (typically in the bank’s portal).
• EBICS TS, transport and signature: the authorized signatory’s personal electronic signature travels with the file. This is the mode to use whenever the entire approval chain must be paperless.
• EBICS 3.0 (schema H005) unifies national practices through BTF (Business Transaction Formats): a service/format pair replaces the old country-specific order types. When changing banks or treasury systems, check the EBICS version supported on both sides: order mappings are not automatic.
• What travels over it is mostly ISO 20022: pain.001 for credit transfers, pain.008 for direct debits, camt.053 for the end-of-day statement, camt.052 for intraday reporting, and camt.054 for debit and credit notifications. MT940 survives as a fallback format, often delivered as a file, and therefore without the network header blocks of a real Swift message.

SWITZERLAND — QR-bill, QRR reference
  21 00000 00003 13947 14300 09017      27 digits, including a check digit
  Scope: reference specific to the Swiss system, generated by the creditor.
  Reconciliation is automatic: the reference identifies the invoice.

SWITZERLAND / INTERNATIONAL — ISO 11649 creditor reference (SCOR type)
  RF18 5390 0754 7034                   RF + 2 check digits + 21 chars max
  Scope: recognized by the Swiss QR-bill AND by SEPA credit transfers.
  It is the only structured reference that works in both worlds.

EURO AREA — unstructured remittance information (Verwendungszweck)
  "Rechnung 2026-04471 / Kunde 88213"   140 characters, free text
  Scope: SCT and SDD. No mandatory structure, so no guaranteed matching:
  this is the black hole of automated cash application in Germany.

  Alongside it, the EndToEndId (35 chars) travels end to end and comes
  back in the camt.053: THAT is the field to reconcile on, not the
  free text typed by the payer.

Each country adds its own invoicing layer on top of this shared channel. Switzerland combines the QR-bill (SIX, 2020) with eBill (SIX, 2018). eBill delivers the invoice directly into the payer’s online banking, is widely adopted by Swiss billers, and works together with eBill Direct Debit. Austria is pushing e-invoicing to the public sector, while Germany is gradually making structured e-invoicing the norm between businesses. Combined with EBICS and camt.053, these layers connect invoice issuance, collection, and cash application in a single data chain.

What breaks in production, and the neighbors worth knowing

Two neighboring markets use the same model as Germany and Austria, a dominant domestic scheme paired with an industry-wide pay-by-bank, and have taken it further. Belgium has Bancontact (Bancontact Payconiq Company, 1979). Bancontact processed 2.5 billion payments in 2025, including 1.9 billion in-store card payments and 526 million mobile payments. The scheme holds 78% of the country’s online transactions. The Netherlands has iDEAL (Currence iDEAL B.V., 2005), which accounted for about 62% of Dutch online spending. Wero is now absorbing iDEAL, which is scheduled to be decommissioned on December 31, 2027.

• Key players in Germany: Deutsche Kreditwirtschaft and EURO Kartensysteme (scheme), Deutsche Bundesbank (clearing and supervision, alongside BaFin), and, on the acceptance side, Payone (Worldline), Unzer, Computop, and Adyen. For pay-by-invoice: Ratepay, Riverty, Klarna, and Billie.
• Key players in Austria: PSA Payment Services Austria for almost everything, STUZZA for standards, the OeNB and the FMA for supervision, and Nexi, Worldline, and Unzer for acquiring. Blue Code International AG for QR.
• Key players in Switzerland: SIX (SIC, QR-bill, eBill, LSV+), TWINT AG, PostFinance SA, the SNB and FINMA, and, on the acceptance side, Worldline (formerly SIX Payment Services), Nexi, and Datatrans.
• Metrics to track: the ELV share of the German mix, the scoring decline rate on pay-by-invoice, the SDD return rate at 8 weeks, the share of instant payments among incoming credit transfers, and, in Switzerland, the split between CHF (SIC) and EUR (euroSIC) collections.