EIC Accelerator Winner Bluecode and the Mobile Payments Race

Every time a European pays by phone at a supermarket till, the transaction most likely runs over the rails of Visa or Mastercard and through a wallet made by Apple or Google. Bluecode, an Austrian-Swiss fintech, has spent a decade selling banks and retailers an alternative: a one-time barcode or QR code, shown inside a bank or retailer app, that is debited straight from the customer's bank account and carries no name or card number. In April 2019 the European Commission picked the project in the SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, and granted €1,920,408 to make it "the Smartphone Payment Scheme for Europe".

Seven years later the scheme is live. Germany's Kaufland runs its own checkout payment on it, Austria's largest loyalty club does too, and Bluecode users can pay abroad through Alipay+ and the Discover network. What has not happened is the plan the grant was meant to finance: Bluecode-branded issuing banks across Europe. And when the continent's big domestic payment schemes signed a pact with the bank-owned European Payments Initiative in February 2026, Bluecode was not among them.

Who Actually Won the Grant

Bluecode is a brand, not a single company. The award row in the Commission's list of April 2019 SME Instrument Phase 2 winners names Secure Payment Technologies GmbH of Innsbruck, and the same list carries a second row for the same project: Blue Code International AG of Lachen, Switzerland. CORDIS shows both as beneficiaries, with the Austrian company as coordinator.

Secure Payment Technologies was registered at the Innsbruck regional court on 21 July 2011 as ASUGA GmbH and took its current name in November 2011, according to North Data. Its founder, Michael Suitner, ran it until October 2020; Christian Pirkner, the serial entrepreneur who turned the Tyrolean start-up into Bluecode, has been managing director since September 2020. Since January 2018 its sole shareholder has been the Swiss BC Capital AG, as both North Data and Trending Topics report. Blue Code International AG was founded on 27 March 2017 and shares an address in Lachen with BC Capital AG, according to Moneyhouse. The Austrian company issues the app and runs the direct debit; its terms are still published under the Secure Payment Technologies name.

Where Bluecode Stands in 2026

The company is active. Secure Payment Technologies filed its accounts for 2025 on 23 September 2026, according to the Austrian business register service, and North Data records no insolvency. The Swiss partner changed its purpose and management in a register notice of 14 August 2026, Moneyhouse shows. Bluecode's own newsroom lists a launch of NFC payments on iOS and Android in June 2026 and the extension of its Alipay+ link to "all 5 continents" in July 2026. The figures in the accounts, including staff numbers, are only available for a fee and could not be checked for this article.

How the Barcode Scheme Works

Card wallets such as Apple Pay tokenise a Visa or Mastercard card and send the payment over the card network to an NFC terminal. Bluecode sidesteps both: the app shows a barcode or QR code that is valid once, the till scans it like a product, and the amount is collected from the user's bank account. Only an ID number travels; name and account data stay with the bank, and merchants need a software update to their tills rather than new hardware, futurezone reported in 2018. The Phase 1 study, funded with €50,000 in 2018, described this "security by design" as the selling point.

The model is not to win consumers with a Bluecode app but to sit inside other people's apps. Banks embed the payment function in their banking apps, and retailers in their loyalty apps. In January 2021 Pirkner said the network counted more than 300 financial institutions, among them Raiffeisen, the 3-Banken-Gruppe and all Volksbanken in Austria, according to Trending Topics. User and transaction numbers have not been published in any source reviewed for this article.

What the Grant Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The project ran from 1 September 2019 to 31 August 2021, with a total cost of €2,743,440 of which the EU paid 70%. Blue Code International AG received €1,044,829.18 and the Austrian coordinator €875,578.82, according to CORDIS. The objective was to build a "100% European payment scheme" and it forecast "€19.6 million cumulative profit by 2022 and 14 new job positions". The Phase 1 business plan had set out expansion into Ireland, Spain and Portugal in 2019 and into France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden in 2020, according to the Phase 1 report.

The final periodic report records chargebacks and refunds added to the scheme, loyalty and voucher features, new issuing banks in Austria, and "the finished integration of Bluecode as unique payment method into one very large loyalty membership programme with several million users", live since February 2021. That programme is Rewe's jö Bonus Club, whose jö&GO checkout combines the loyalty card and payment in one scan, as Bluecode's own announcement describes. The report also admits that "progress outside the home markets is not as fast as we planned": the company said it had stepped into Italy and expected to enter Spain "in the next few month", and that links with Italian and Swiss partners would go live at the start of 2022. CORDIS lists no public deliverables or publications for the project.

1. A complete European payment scheme (chargeback, refund, loyalty)DeliveredReported on CORDIS; in use at Kaufland since 2023 per retail-news.
2. Large merchant app integrationsDeliveredjö&GO from February 2021; Kaufland Pay nationwide in Germany from September 2023.
3. Cross-border link with Swiss and Italian schemes by early 2022Partly, lateTWINT link from 2022, Bancomat live only at Euro 2024.
4. Own issuing banks in Spain and other new marketsNot achievedNo Spanish bank announced; a prepaid issuer covers Spain since 2025.
5. €19.6M cumulative profit by 2022, 14 new jobsNot verifiableAccounts and staff figures not public.

The Record Since the Grant

Money was not the constraint. Bluecode raised €11.2 million from unnamed family offices in October 2018 (futurezone), another €12 million from three family offices in December 2019 (deutsche-startups.de; the Fintech Alliance put it at $13 million) and €20 million in April 2021. The 2021 round was led by the Hopp Family Office; tech.eu tied the office to SAP co-founder Dietmar Hopp, while futurezone named his son Daniel Hopp. No later round has been made public, and the company does not appear in the EIC Fund portfolio, as the award was grant only.

The biggest single customer win came after the project ended. Kaufland, after a pilot from May 2022, rolled out "Kaufland Pay" in all its German stores in September 2023, built on Bluecode with Payone as service provider, according to Techbook and retail-news. In July 2025 The Payments Group, a Malta-licensed e-money issuer, became the first issuer to offer Bluecode as a prepaid product across the euro area, including Spain, according to its ad hoc notice and Bluecode's release; its affiliate Calida Financial added acquiring in January 2026, per the Bluecode newsroom.

Leadership shifted for a time. Anton Stadelmann, who had built Switzerland's TWINT, became chief executive of Bluecode with Pirkner moving to executive chairman, Trending Topics reported; Stadelmann left to run the Swiss digital bank radicant from 1 January 2024, according to finews.ch and Netzwoche. Pirkner signs Bluecode's 2025 and 2026 releases as chief executive.

From Pan-European Scheme to Payment Roaming

Instead of opening country after country, Bluecode increasingly links to other schemes. It co-founded the European Mobile Payment Systems Association (EMPSA) in September 2019, together with TWINT, Swish, Vipps, MobilePay, Bancontact Payconiq and SIBS/MB Way, as Mobile Payments Today reported and the 2019 grant coverage confirms. Bluecode and TWINT became the first interoperable schemes under EMPSA rules, running since January 2022 among friends and family, with Banking Circle settling between them, according to IT Finanzmagazin; EMPSA dates the connectivity tests of Bancomat, TWINT and Bluecode to 2022. Live payments with Italy's Bancomat started in fan zones at the UEFA Euro 2024, according to EMPSA and Bluecode.

Outside Europe it connected to Alipay+ and to the Discover network, which Bluecode said gives its users "70 million merchant locations" worldwide, according to its release. Its acceptance claims vary from release to release: "around 160 million acceptance points" in the July 2025 ad hoc notice, and on its mission page 150 million merchants through Alipay+ plus 115 million through Discover. These figures count partner networks abroad, not shops that take Bluecode directly, and none has been independently checked. In November 2025 the company launched a "Payment Interoperability Hub" that it says is live in 20 European countries and could serve as infrastructure for the digital euro, according to its announcement and The Paypers.

Why It Matters for Europe

Bluecode's pitch is the Commission's own argument. Its final report quotes the 2020 Retail Payments Strategy (COM(2020) 592), which warned that, apart from global card networks and large technology providers, "there is virtually no digital payment solution that can be used across Europe to make payments in shops and in e-commerce", and named EMPSA among the "promising market-driven initiatives". Since then the answer from Europe's banks has been EPI and Wero, and the answer from the ECB the digital euro. Bluecode positions itself between them: a private scheme, already running in shops, offering its hub as plumbing for both. Whether either takes it up is not public.

The Verdict

Bluecode and Secure Payment Technologies were not asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout. Staff numbers, revenue and profit could not be verified because the filed accounts are not freely available.