Coverage · France
Open Banking payment initiation in France
MVP Payments has live, direct connections to French banks. Bring your own PISP licence and initiate payments in France through one API — with every connection monitored around the clock.
- Status
- Live
- Currency
- Euro (EUR)
- Payment rail
- SEPA Instant Credit Transfer
- Interface standard
- STET PSD2 API
- Regulator
- Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de résolution (ACPR)
- Payment services law
- Code monétaire et financier
How Open Banking payments work in France
France built its own PSD2 standard. The STET PSD2 API is used by the large majority of French banks, and it differs from Berlin Group in its resource model, its status reporting and its approach to request signing. A team that has only ever integrated Berlin Group banks starts again in France.
STET is also less uniform than its single name suggests. Signing requirements vary from bank to bank, and some banks add a separate confirmation step after the customer has approved the payment while others complete in one. These differences are invisible in the specification and only appear against each bank itself.
France is historically a card-first market, which is exactly why account-to-account payments are attractive to French merchants: no interchange, no scheme fees and no chargebacks. Payments settle as SEPA Instant Credit Transfers, which every euro-area bank must now support under the EU Instant Payments Regulation.
What you bring
- Authorisation as a payment institution with payment initiation permission — from the ACPR, or from another EU or EEA regulator with a passport notification into France
- eIDAS certificates issued to your firm by a qualified trust service provider — a QWAC to identify you to each bank and a QSealC to sign requests, both carrying the payment initiation role
- Your merchants, your contracts and your compliance framework — the payments run under your licence
What MVP Payments runs
The French bank connections
Built and maintained bank by bank, direct to the bank's own interface or the hub it uses — and identified to each bank by your certificates, not ours.
Monitoring, around the clock
Health re-evaluated every five minutes, a dedicated AI agent per bank, and engineers who release the fix. How monitoring works.
The payment journey
One API, a hosted payment page in 20 languages and your merchants' branding, and signed webhooks at every final status. Explore the platform.
Payment initiation in France: common questions
- Can a PISP licensed in another EU country initiate payments in France?
- Yes. PSD2 lets a payment institution authorised in one EU or EEA member state provide payment initiation services in another through passporting: you notify your home regulator, which informs the ACPR. You do not need a second licence in France, and your eIDAS certificates are valid across the EU whichever member state issued them.
- What is the STET PSD2 API?
- STET is the PSD2 interface standard developed by the French interbank processor of the same name and adopted by most French banks. It covers the same services as Berlin Group NextGenPSD2 — payment initiation, account information and funds confirmation — with a different resource model, so an integration written for one does not work against the other.
- Do I need a separate integration for French banks?
- Not with MVP Payments. STET and Berlin Group banks sit behind the same API, the same payment statuses and the same signed webhooks, so adding France does not change your integration.