France Payments Forum
France Payments Forum is a non-profit association in Paris that brings together companies and independent experts from the payments industry. Its roughly 90 members include consultancies, IT service firms, fintechs, banks, and credit and e-money institutions. The association describes itself as a place for exchange and meetings on payments in France and Europe.
The members work in ten working groups on regulation, cards, fraud, crypto payments and digital identity, and the groups report on their results every month. France Payments Forum passes on the messages of European and French authorities to the whole payments chain and argues for a common European approach to real-time and digital payments.
Members and membership
The member companies of France Payments Forum range from banks such as Société Générale, BNP Paribas and La Banque Postale to payment infrastructure providers such as STET, Swift and Worldline. Consultancies, law firms, technology suppliers and fintechs make up a large part of the membership, and independent experts can join as individuals.
Members pay an annual fee that finances the meetings and the administration, with separate rates for companies, startups and individuals. Membership opens a closed area with the papers of the working groups, the full archive of the monthly newsletter, the event archives and a discussion forum that only members can read.
Ten working groups
Each of the ten working groups presents its results at the monthly plenary and contributes to white papers, glossaries and articles in the press. One group follows the rules for payment flows, from ISO 20022 to instant payments and request to pay, and another analyzes the card market and mobile payments in France and Europe. The crypto payments group published a glossary of crypto payments, which the forum calls the first of its kind in France.
The digital identity group works with the Fédération Nationale des Tiers de Confiance on end-to-end security for retail payments, and the fintech group works with France FinTech to give payment fintechs visibility in France and Europe. The Place group brings French and European payment firms together on European integration and wants to found a federation of the professional associations for payments. Further groups cover fraud prevention, the legal framework for payment services and European projects, which the Europe Payments Forum group discusses in English.
The European Women Payments Forum is the group for women in the payments industry and works for equal opportunities between women and men in the sector.
Council and president
Hervé Sitruk is the founder and president of France Payments Forum and opens its plenaries with an introduction to current payment topics. Corina Fontaine is secretary general of the association, and Alain Rividi is its treasurer and a member of the Europe Payments Forum working group.
Representatives of member firms such as BNP Paribas, Worldline, STET, IBM and Thales sit on the executive bureau and the council of the association and take part in its working groups.
Upcoming fintech and finance events in France
Plenaries, Pay Tech Day and digital meetings
France Payments Forum holds about 20 meetings a year: nine plenaries, three conferences in person and eight digital meetings on Microsoft Teams. The plenaries take place on a weekday morning in Paris, are free for members and combine the reports of the working groups with talks on current topics.
The Pay Tech Day is the paid conference of the forum and is open to all payments professionals at the Automobile Club de France in Paris. In February 2023 nearly 300 guests attended its four round tables on instant payment, stablecoins and the digital euro, e-invoicing and Web3, plus 23 keynotes. For its tenth anniversary in June 2022, the forum held a conference on building a European payments market at the same venue.
When the payment software firm OpenWay joined in 2022, it described the annual meeting as the flagship event of the forum, with around 200 payments professionals every year.
Digital euro, Wero and payment sovereignty
The monthly newsletter of France Payments Forum follows the digital euro, stablecoins, artificial intelligence in payments and the future of the French card scheme Cartes Bancaires. A commentary of October 2026 named three conditions for European sovereignty in payments: agreement on operational payment solutions such as the link between Wero and the mobile payment services of the EuroPA alliance, on wholesale central bank money for tokenized assets, and on the digital euro.
At the plenary of September 2026, Anselme Mialon of the French Treasury reported on the trilogue between the Council, the Parliament and the Commission on the digital euro. He named the fee model for the payment service providers that will distribute the digital euro as an open question, together with its fit next to Cartes Bancaires and Wero.
Address in Paris
The office of France Payments Forum is at 14 avenue de l'Opéra in 75001 Paris, and the plenaries and other morning meetings take place at 5 rue Masseran in the 7th arrondissement.
France Payments Forum and Finance Loop
The working groups of France Payments Forum deal with questions that Finance Loop members in Germany and other European countries also discuss, from the digital euro and Wero to crypto payments and fraud prevention. Finance Loop covers them in its four content tracks, most of all in Payments & Digital Money.
Finance Loop is a professional network and has the goal of driving the institutional use of emerging technologies in finance, such as AI, tokenization, stablecoins, and DeFi. Finance Loop helps its members build skills and personal networks in these fields: Investment & Digital Assets, Payments & Digital Money, Digital Infrastructure & Sovereignty, and Risk & Compliance.