Coverage · Romania
Open Banking payment initiation in Romania
MVP Payments is onboarding direct connections to Romanian banks. Bring your own PISP licence and be ready to initiate payments in Romania through the same API you use everywhere else.
- Status
- Onboarding
- Currency
- Romanian leu (RON)
- Payment rail
- Domestic credit transfer in lei (instant where the bank offers it); SEPA for euro accounts
- Interface standard
- Berlin Group NextGenPSD2
- Regulator
- Banca Națională a României (BNR)
- Payment services law
- Law no. 209/2019 on payment services (the PSD2 transposition)
How Open Banking payments work in Romania
Romania pays in lei, not euro. Everyday transfers run on the domestic rails rather than SEPA, with instant transfers available at the larger banks, and euro accounts sit alongside for cross-border business. A payment initiation service here is first of all a lei service: the payer’s bank, the amount in RON and a Romanian IBAN.
The market is concentrated in a handful of large banks — some domestic, several owned by Austrian, Dutch, French and Italian groups — followed by a long tail of smaller and specialised banks. Their PSD2 interfaces are Berlin Group NextGenPSD2 in different dialects: some open a sandbox to any registered developer, others issue their own test certificates or require an eIDAS certificate before a single call.
For a PISP, Romania rewards patience with the interfaces more than with the market: the top banks cover most current accounts, but each one onboards differently and several require a licensed identity before their sandbox opens. Monitoring every connection continuously matters here for the same reason it does everywhere else — a handful of banks carry most of the volume.
What you bring
- Authorisation as a payment institution with payment initiation permission — from Banca Națională a României, or from another EU or EEA regulator with a passport notification into Romania
- 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 Romanian 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, bank by bank
Health re-evaluated at least four times a day, a resident AI agent for every connected 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 Romania: common questions
- Can a PISP licensed in another EU country initiate payments in Romania?
- 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 Banca Națională a României. You do not need a second licence in Romania, and your eIDAS certificates are valid across the EU whichever member state issued them.
- Which Open Banking API standard do Romanian banks use?
- The Romanian banks we have assessed publish Berlin Group NextGenPSD2 interfaces, each in its own dialect — different sandboxes, certificate requirements and authorisation flows. MVP Payments normalises them behind one API, one set of payment statuses and one webhook format.
- Are payments in lei or in euro?
- Both exist, but the everyday currency is the leu. A Romanian payment initiation is normally a domestic credit transfer in RON to a Romanian IBAN; euro payments to and from Romanian euro accounts run as SEPA transfers. MVP Payments carries the currency on the payment, so one integration serves both.