Blue Code International and the EIC Accelerator: Who Runs Bluecode

Most people who pay with Bluecode at a German or Austrian till have never heard of Lachen, a lakeside municipality in the Swiss canton of Schwyz. Yet the company registered there, Blue Code International AG, operates the Bluecode payment scheme, signs the brand's press releases and runs its website. In April 2019 it was also named, in its own row, on the European Commission's list of SME Instrument Phase 2 winners, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator. Of the €1,920,408 the EU granted to the Bluecode project, the Swiss company received €1,044,829.18, more than the Austrian coordinator.

The story of the Austrian partner, Secure Payment Technologies GmbH in Innsbruck, and of the scheme's commercial record is told in a separate Rasph deep dive on Bluecode. This article looks at the Swiss half: what the company is, what it did with its share, and what the Swiss commercial register reveals about the group behind it.

What Blue Code International AG Is

The company was entered in the Schwyz register in March 2017, with articles dated 17 February 2017, a share capital of CHF 100,000 split into one million registered shares and an address "c/o BC Capital AG" at St. Gallerstrasse 18 in Lachen, according to the founding notice in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce (SHAB), retrievable through the federal register index Zefix. Its purpose has not changed in substance since: "the international marketing and further development of software solutions for electronic payment systems, in particular the payment scheme Blue Code", including licensing and related services. Moneyhouse reports the same founding date, capital and purpose.

Its role in the brand is written into Bluecode's own documents. The imprint of bluecode.com names Blue Code International AG as the publisher. The Austrian partner's direct debit terms of April 2025 state that "the Bluecode system is operated by Blue Code International AG" in Lachen, while Secure Payment Technologies issues the app and collects the payments. German Wikipedia's article on Secure Payment Technologies describes the same split: the Swiss company was founded for the international development of the system and took over its strategic and organisational management. In short, the Swiss AG is the scheme owner and brand face; the Austrian GmbH is the technical service provider.

The Swiss company does not stand alone. It was founded at the address of BC Capital AG, a Lachen holding whose purpose includes "the international marketing and further development of software solutions for electronic payment systems" and which owns 100% of Secure Payment Technologies, as Trending Topics reported in 2019 and North Data confirms from the Austrian filings. A third company, Blue Code Emerging Markets AG, was registered at the same address in May 2019, according to Zefix and North Data. The three share their president, Christian Pirkner, and much of their roster of signatories. Who owns Blue Code International AG is not public: Swiss registers do not list the shareholders of a stock corporation, and no source reviewed for this article names them.

What the Swiss Partner Did in the Project

The Bluecode project ran from 1 September 2019 to 31 August 2021 after a grant agreement signed on 7 August 2019. Its total cost was €2,743,440. CORDIS lists Secure Payment Technologies as coordinator with €1,250,826.88 of costs and €875,578.82 of EU money, and Blue Code International AG as the only other beneficiary with €1,492,613.12 of costs and €1,044,829.18 of EU money. Both were funded at exactly 70%, the standard rate of the SME Instrument. CORDIS still shows the Swiss company at its founding address, St. Gallerstrasse 18, although the register had moved it to Gartenstrasse 5 in June 2019 and to Schützenstrasse 7 in January 2020.

The Swiss company could only receive the money because of timing. Switzerland was fully associated to Horizon 2020 from 1 January 2017, which opened the SME Instrument to Swiss start-ups for the first time, as Startupticker reported then and Accelopment also notes. From 2021 Switzerland was a non-associated country for Horizon Europe, and Swiss SMEs regained direct access to the EIC Accelerator only on 1 January 2025, according to Accelopment and the Swiss research network Euresearch.

CORDIS does not break the work down by partner, and no deliverables or publications are public. The company's purpose and its public record point to the international side of the project. Two months after the cut-off, in June 2019, Blue Code International AG announced a pan-European initiative with Vipps, ePassi, Pivo, Momo Pocket, Pagaqui and Alipay to agree a common QR code format, in which it would act as technical service provider for the partners' merchant banks, according to its press release on OTS. The final report, written for both partners, says that chargeback, refund and loyalty features were added to the scheme, that the payment function went live inside "one very large loyalty membership programme with several million users" in February 2021, and that international expansion was "slowed down by COVID-19".

1. Scheme on par with card schemes: chargeback, refund, loyaltyDeliveredReported in the CORDIS final report; the scheme is still operated by Blue Code International AG per the 2025 terms.
2. Large retailer app integrationsDeliveredA loyalty programme live in February 2021 (CORDIS); Kaufland Pay nationwide in Germany from September 2023, per Techbook.
3. Interconnection of Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy live early 2022Partly, lateEMPSA dates multilateral connectivity tests to 2022 and live interoperability to Euro 2024.
4. Entry into Spain "in the next few month" after August 2021Not achievedNo Spanish issuing bank announced; Spain is covered only since 2025 through a Malta-licensed prepaid issuer, per Bluecode.
5. €19.6M cumulative profit by 2022 and 14 new jobsNot verifiableNeither partner's accounts or headcount are freely available.

The Scheme It Operates

Bluecode is a payment scheme, a set of rules and infrastructure like Visa or Mastercard, but built for the bank account rather than the card. The app, embedded in banking and retailer apps, shows a barcode or QR code valid for one purchase; the till scans it and the amount is collected from the user's account by direct debit. No name or account number reaches the merchant, which the project called "security by design" in its objective. Card wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay instead tokenise a card and route the payment over the card networks.

Since 2026 the scheme also supports contactless NFC. Blue Code International AG announced the launch on iOS and Android on 23 June 2026, built with the Discover network so that European users can pay abroad, in a release also reported by The Paypers. Christian Pirkner, who signs as chief executive, is also on the board of the European Mobile Payment Systems Association and chairs its communications working group, according to EMPSA.

What the Swiss Register Shows

The register notices are the most detailed public record of the Swiss side, and they tell three things the press releases do not.

First, the company is small on paper. When it was founded it declared that it would not be audited at all, an "opting-out" that Swiss law reserves for companies with no more than ten full-time positions on annual average and the consent of all shareholders, as My Swiss Company summarises (Bär & Karrer phrase it as fewer than ten). None of the twelve later SHAB notices for the company enters an auditor, and Zefix lists none today. Its actual headcount is not public, so how much of the €1.49 million of project costs was its own staff and how much was bought in cannot be checked.

Second, the management has turned over. Anton Stadelmann, previously deputy chief executive of Switzerland's TWINT, was named Bluecode chief executive in March 2022, according to Organisator and Bluecode; he was entered as chief executive of the Swiss company in June 2022 and removed in August 2023; two German signatories registered in January 2020 had left by mid-2022; two Austrian signatories were added in July 2023, according to the Zefix notices and North Data.

Third, the group is being refinanced. On 26 June 2026 shareholders of all three Lachen companies adopted the same new purpose clause, published in August 2026. It states that each company "is part of a group of companies" and may grant loans to subsidiaries, to third parties and to its direct and indirect shareholders, including through cash pooling, and provide "collateral of all kinds" for their debts, including pledges of its assets and guarantees, "whether for consideration or not". At the same time board member Thomas Oberholzer left Blue Code International AG and Niklaus Santschi joined, as Moneyhouse also records. Clauses of this kind are typically required by lenders when a group borrows; no loan or lender has been announced, and the reason for the change is not public.

The Group Since the Grant

Public funding news for Bluecode stops in 2021. The brand announced €20 million led by the Hopp Family Office in April 2021, reported by tech.eu as a "Lachen, Switzerland-based" company and by Trending Topics, which quoted Pirkner as chief executive of Blue Code International AG and put the valuation, according to him, at more than €100 million. Neither report says which legal entity received the money. BC Capital's share count rose from 2,353,591 to 3,001,126 in March 2021, the month before the announcement, and has since reached 5,703,412, its register notices show. No round has been announced since.

Blue Code International AG is not in the EIC Fund portfolio: none of the 315 organisations listed across its 17 pages is Blue Code International, BC Capital or Secure Payment Technologies, which fits a grant-only award. A search of CORDIS for the company name returns only this project; the earlier Phase 1 feasibility study of 2018 was carried out by the Austrian company alone.

Commercially, the scheme the Swiss company operates has kept moving: Kaufland Pay since 2023, a prepaid product with The Payments Group across 20 euro-area countries since 2025, and NFC payments since June 2026. The Bluecode deep dive covers these deals and the pan-European payments pact of February 2026 that Bluecode did not join.

Why the Swiss Seat Matters for Europe

The project's case to Brussels was payment sovereignty: a scheme in which "the entire payment process is conducted with European entities", as its objective put it. Its final report quotes the Commission's Retail Payments Strategy of 24 September 2020, which warned that, apart from global card networks and large technology firms, "there is virtually no digital payment solution that can be used across Europe" in shops. The scheme operator that the EU paid for that goal sits in Switzerland, outside the EU, with an Austrian operating company inside it. That is the structure the EU accepted in 2019 when Switzerland was a full Horizon 2020 partner; it would not have been eligible between 2021 and 2024.

The Verdict

Blue Code International AG was not asked for comment for this article. It is based on public register notices, EU project data and published statements, linked throughout. Its staff numbers, revenue, profit and shareholders could not be verified.