Bizum Pay is moving into everyday shopping across Spain. Major banks now let customers pay in physical stores without a card, while Banco Santander has yet to join the rollout.
Bizum has made its biggest move yet into Spanish shops. Customers can now pay without using a bank card. CaixaBank, BBVA, Sabadell, Unicaja and Bankinter already offer Bizum Pay for purchases in physical stores. Banco Santander has not joined the rollout. The service now reaches 20 million users and more than 1.6 million businesses.
The scale is what matters. Bizum says 60% of its users can now pay in person. About 75% of banking terminals already accept the method. Customers get another way to pay at the checkout. Bizum is also moving beyond its better-known role in transfers between individuals.
The physical retail rollout began on 18 May 2026 and is expanding in stages across participating banks rather than arriving in a single nationwide release.
CaixaBank has made Bizum Pay available to 100% of its customers. Users download the application and activate in-store payments through it. More than 517,000 terminals are already enabled by the bank. Unlike a standard card transaction, Bizum Pay can charge the customer's bank account directly. The wallet can also support an added card.
There is already demand.
Since the pilot began in mid-July, CaixaBank customers have made nearly 25,000 payments worth a combined 400,000 euros. These figures offer the clearest early sign of how quickly people are testing cardless checkout in daily life.
Bizum says its next milestone is to make in-store payments available to most of its 32 million users by December 2026. The target shows that the current 20-million-user reach is being treated as an intermediate stage of a broader rollout.
Bankinter has also switched on the option for all its customers. Users enter the Bankinter app, activate Bizum and set up the payment method. Bizum Pay also lets them check recent movements, store digital tickets, passes or entries and add different payment methods.
Access still depends on the bank. BBVA has completed its rollout across more than 368,000 physical establishments linked to the group. It plans to extend coverage to large retailers. Banco Sabadell operates the platform in more than 340,000 establishments and says over 78% of its customers use Bizum regularly. Unicaja has included the service in its Strategic Plan 2025-2027 as part of a wider push to expand Bizum's everyday uses.
Abanca has added Bizum Pay for its customers and for businesses using smart point-of-sale terminals. The bank says all of its customers can use the service and that 100% of its smart terminals accept it. Caja Rural is also among the participating banking groups, taking the network beyond the biggest national brands. More than 25 major retail chains in different sectors already accept in-person Bizum payments. The rollout follows an earlier report on the service entering Spanish shops through Bankinter and CaixaBank.
The figures show Bizum moving beyond peer-to-peer transfers while keeping customers inside the banking apps they already use. For shoppers, the change is simple. When both the shop and the bank support the system, a physical purchase can be completed through Bizum Pay instead of a card. For banks, the competition is now about terminal coverage and customer access. Industry coverage has described the account-based model as a distinctive feature of Bizum Pay in Spain because it allows payment without a physical card.
This is a real change in Spain's payment market, not just a small app update. Five major banks already provide access. Abanca adds another route, while Santander remains outside the deployment described here. With 20 million potential in-store users and 1.6 million accepting businesses, the cardless option has reached enough people to become a mainstream banking feature. Spanish banks are turning Bizum into checkout infrastructure. The early CaixaBank figures also show that adoption is still building. Nearly 25,000 pilot payments are meaningful evidence of use, but they remain modest beside the size of the overall network.
