News from the European merchant stack

From 27 September 2026 traders selling goods to consumers in the EU must display a harmonised notice reminding buyers that goods are covered by a legal guarantee of conformity of at least two years, under the directive on empowering consumers for the green transition and Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/1960. In a physical shop the notice can be shown as a poster near the checkout or on a wall; online it must appear in an equivalent place on the site. A separate GARAN label may be shown where a producer offers a commercial durability guarantee longer than two years, carrying the number of years and a QR code, but its use is voluntary and depends on the producer. The same directive also bans generic environmental claims such as eco-friendly or climate neutral unless they can be substantiated, and limits sustainability labels to recognised certification schemes. A shop must have the guarantee notice up at the till and on its website by 27 September, and should review product pages, packaging and advertising for green claims it cannot evidence.

Copenhagen-based Complir raised an $11 million seed round led by General Catalyst, with angel investors and specialist industry funds taking part, following a $2 million pre-seed in December 2025. The platform automates product compliance work for retailers and consumer brands selling into several markets, replacing documentation checks that are usually done by hand. Named customers include Flying Tiger Copenhagen, Matas Group, Konges Slojd and COOP Trading. Chief executive Gustav Bang says product compliance has become one of the biggest operational bottlenecks for retailers trading internationally. For a shop that imports goods or sells its own private label, this is the category of tool that checks market-by-market product rules before a launch, work currently handed to a consultant or left to the supplier.

The European Central Bank published a call for expression of interest on 15 September 2026 inviting e-commerce and m-commerce merchants to take part in the digital euro pilot. Applicants must be legally established in the EU, operate an active website or app, be able to serve customers in at least two Eurosystem pilot locations, and sign agreements with the ECB and an acquiring pilot payment service provider. The pilot runs from the third quarter of 2027 to the third quarter of 2028 and tests remote person-to-business payments with a beta digital euro; participation is voluntary and unpaid. It follows the selection in July 2026 of 36 payment service providers, among them Adyen, Nexi, SumUp and Worldline. A merchant that wants early sight of what digital euro acceptance will require at its own checkout must apply by 17:00 CET on 27 October 2026.

Brussels-based Chift raised a €10.5 million Series A led by BlackFin Capital Partners. The company sells a unified API that lets a software vendor build one integration and reach more than 120 financial systems across six categories, covering accounting, invoicing, point of sale, e-commerce, payment and property management tools. The round is intended to fund expansion across European markets. Merchants do not buy Chift directly, but it is the plumbing behind claims such as syncs with your accountant or connects to your till, so wider coverage means fewer manual exports between a shop's POS, its webshop and its bookkeeping.

Worldline announced on 14 September 2026 that it has built a payment handler for the Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard for AI-agent-driven purchasing developed by Google and industry partners. The handler lets a merchant configure its payment setup once and then accept cards, mobile wallets and European payment methods across several AI agent platforms without a separate integration for each one. It runs on Worldline's Global Collect cross-border platform and the documentation is available now through the company's developer portal. Worldline says it is among the first European processors to support the protocol. For a merchant already taking payments through Worldline, this means an order placed by an AI assistant can be settled with the same payment contract and methods used at the existing checkout, with no new checkout build.

BNP Paribas said on 14 September 2026 that it is speeding up the rollout of Wero for Merchants, the European Payments Initiative's account-to-account payment method, across France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. French merchants including Air France, Decathlon and Fnac Darty are preparing to launch, Orange already accepts Wero for Sosh subscription bills, and German and Belgian merchants including Decathlon are live. Wero for Merchants uses a single integration that runs alongside a seller's existing payment infrastructure, with the payment validated inside the customer's banking app under strong customer authentication rather than with card details at checkout. Point-of-sale acceptance is scheduled to follow. An online merchant in these five markets can now ask its payment provider or acquirer to enable Wero as a checkout option, and should plan for in-store acceptance as the next step.

Biorsaf, based in Castell'Azzara in Tuscany, raised €5.2 million in a round led by P101 SGR with Maia Ventures, Farming Future and Toscana Next, and used it to acquire Bologna-based Cooki. Biorsaf's BS-Safe platform digitises HACCP records, food safety checks, workplace safety and water quality monitoring, and reports more than 10,000 active users, among them the Cigierre group behind Old Wild West and America Graffiti and the retailer Conad. Cooki adds digital food information: traceability, labelling, allergen risk assessment, food costing and stock management, with a database of more than 35,000 coded products and users in over 450 Italian towns. The two will be combined into a single food regulatory technology platform. For a restaurant or food shop, it points to HACCP paperwork, allergen declarations and dish costing sitting in one system rather than in separate binders and spreadsheets.

Berlin-based Limetax announced €36 million, split between a €6 million pre-seed equity round led by Motive Partners with Activant and Heliad, and a €30 million credit facility. The company has acquired four tax and accounting practices across seven locations in its first eight months and will use the money to buy more. Its agentic software handles bookkeeping, payroll and financial statements with human review, and the company says early bookkeeping deployments cut monthly processing time from about 20 hours to six. Germany has roughly 54,000 tax and accounting practices, many of them capacity-constrained. For a shop or restaurant owner in Germany, the practical effect is that the firm filing their books is increasingly likely to be part of a software-led group, with faster monthly turnaround as the selling point.

Shopware released version 6.7.14.0 of its commerce platform on 9 September 2026. The release adds built-in support for the EU legal guarantee notice and the GARAN durability label that become mandatory on 27 September 2026, with the notice available in all 24 official EU languages and displayed in the cart, at checkout, on the order confirmation and in transactional emails. Merchants set the GARAN label per product from the manufacturer's commercial guarantee and product variants inherit it. The release also moves more than 40 community translations into the administration interface, adds a flow template that notifies customers when a payment fails, and makes purchase on invoice available through Shopware Payments. A shop running Shopware can switch the guarantee notice on under cart settings and record durability guarantees product by product before the 27 September deadline, instead of building the wording itself.

Lille-based marketing software group Positive, previously known as Sarbacane, closed a €106 million bank refinancing arranged by CIC with Arkea, Credit Agricole, Caisse d'Epargne Hauts de France and Banque Populaire du Nord. The facility replaces a €75 million line taken out in 2022 and is earmarked for further acquisitions; the group has bought more than a dozen companies since 2017, including Iconosquare earlier in 2026. Positive reports around €70 million in annual recurring revenue and targets €200 million by 2030. Its products cover e-mail and customer engagement, social media management, e-mail signatures and the Surfer tool for SEO and generative-search optimisation, sold mainly to firms with 10 to 1,000 staff. For a retailer or restaurant group, it means the French owner of several local-visibility and marketing tools now has capital to buy more of them, which usually ends in bundled contracts and tighter integration between those tools.

Amsterdam-based Mollie confirmed on 1 September that it had closed its purchase of London-based GoCardless, a deal first agreed in December 2025. No value was restated at completion. The combined group says it serves more than 350,000 businesses across over 30 markets and will offer cards, local payment methods and Pay by Bank in 38 countries through a single contract, alongside Mollie Capital financing. GoCardless keeps its brand and is led by co-founder Hiroki Takeuchi, with Koen Koppen remaining chief executive of Mollie. For a shop or restaurant already taking payments through Mollie, this adds direct debit and account-to-account collection for recurring charges and larger invoices without signing up a second provider.

From 1 September 2026 every business established in France and registered for VAT must be able to receive electronic invoices through an approved platform, a plateforme agreee. Large companies and mid-size companies must also issue their invoices in electronic format from that date, while micro-enterprises and SMEs have until 1 September 2027 to start issuing. The tax administration has granted a tolerance until the end of 2026, so firms that hit implementation difficulties will not be penalised immediately, and has opened a helpline on 0 806 807 807. A restaurant or shop in France must now pick an approved platform and register its details with it to keep receiving supplier invoices, and must be able to send its own invoices through that platform by 1 September 2027.

From 12 August 2026 the PPWR applies directly in all member states: packaging placed on the EU market must meet substance limits (heavy metals, PFAS in food-contact packaging), carry an EU declaration of conformity and manufacturer identification, and producers must be registered for EPR in each country. HORECA-specific duties follow later, notably the obligation from February 2027 for takeaway outlets to accept customers' own containers, so restaurants and shops should audit their packaging suppliers now.

Uber launched a takeover offer for Berlin-based Delivery Hero valuing the group at roughly €13bn, with closing expected in the second half of 2027. Fourteen markets, including Glovo in Spain, Portugal, Poland and Romania and foodora in Austria and Sweden, will be divested to SSW Partners, so restaurants in those countries will see a change of platform ownership.

The plenary voted 416 to 169 to open trilogue negotiations with member states on the digital euro regulation, after the ECON committee backed the text in June. Negotiators aim for a deal by end 2026, with an ECB pilot in 2027 and retail availability targeted for 2029; merchants would face acceptance rules and fees intended to be lower than card fees.

Nory presented an agentic version of its platform that forecasts demand, optimises staffing and inventory, runs payroll and tracks profitability across multi-site restaurant groups. The launch follows its $37M Series B and US expansion, and targets operators looking to automate back-office work rather than only report on it.

Mollie launched in Croatia and Iceland, completing its footprint across all 30 EEA countries, and announced a €350M investment over five years in local teams, payment methods and onboarding. Merchants get local-language support, local payment methods settled in local currency and faster sign-up through national business registries.

American Express agreed to buy Paris-based restaurant booking platform TheFork, which lists more than 50,000 restaurants in 11 European countries, for $700M in cash. Closing is expected before the end of 2026; for restaurants it signals a stronger link between reservations and Amex's dining and loyalty programmes.

Italian payments unicorn Satispay is raising up to €120M, with existing investors Greyhound, Addition and Lightrock committing close to €60M, to fund stock and ETF trading, pension products and possible acquisitions. The app counts 6.5 million users and more than 450,000 affiliated merchants, mostly small shops and restaurants in Italy.

French restaurant software vendor Innovorder, which equips about 3,000 restaurants in France, Spain and Italy with kiosks, POS and online ordering, raised €20M from the family office UL Invest. The profitable company will invest in its Atlas AI orchestration layer, new native modules and targeted acquisitions.

Barcelona-based HR platform Factorial closed a $150M Series D led by General Catalyst, alongside a $540M customer-value financing commitment, at a $2.5bn valuation. The company serves more than 16,000 businesses and will expand in Germany, France, Italy and Portugal with an AI workforce operations platform used by many hospitality and retail SMEs for scheduling and payroll.

Italian software group TeamSystem bought Terya, a vendor of integrated platforms for retail, food service, food manufacturing and large-scale distribution with around €25M revenue and 160 employees. The deal connects store execution, logistics and traceability data for chains and prepares AI-driven operations tools.

EU institutions reached a political agreement delaying high-risk AI obligations from 2 August 2026 to 2 December 2027 for stand-alone Annex III systems and to 2 August 2028 for AI embedded in regulated products. Transparency duties under Article 50 still apply from 2 August 2026, so merchants using chatbots or AI voice agents must disclose AI interactions to customers.

Ghent-based Deliverect introduced autonomous menu agents that reconfigure delivery menus to maximise revenue and margins, support agents that detect and fix integration errors before they affect orders, and assistants that generate themed menu content across hundreds of locations. The tools target restaurant brands managing large volumes of third-party delivery orders.

myPOS added Romania and Slovakia to its myPOS Glass app, bringing iPhone-based contactless acceptance to 15 European markets. Small merchants can accept cards and wallets on a phone without a dedicated terminal, a growing option for market stalls, mobile services and pop-up retail.

Pennylane started selling card terminals from €89, built on Adyen infrastructure, with fees of 0.75% for EU consumer cards and 2% for non-EU and commercial cards. Payments settle into the Pennylane pro account within 24 business hours and are reconciled automatically in the books, removing manual entry for shops and restaurants.

Article 125 of the 2026 finance law restores the option for POS vendors to prove compliance with anti-fraud rules through an individual attestation, effective 21 February 2026, after the 2025 finance law had planned to require accredited certification (NF525 or LNE) by 1 September 2026. Merchants may again rely on either an accredited certificate or the vendor's attestation, easing the transition for smaller POS providers.

Pennylane closed a €175M round led by TCV with Blackstone Growth, less than a year after its €75M Series B, doubling its valuation to €3.5bn. With 800,000 client companies and 6,000 accounting firms, the company is capitalising on France's mandatory e-invoicing rollout and plans payment terminals and a third country in 2026.

French short-term lender Karmen obtained a €50M debt line from Sienna IM, its third refinancing in four years, following its takeover of Silvr in late 2025. The financing supports Karmen Factor invoice financing and its embedded 'Capital as a Service' API, with loans from €20,000 to €3M over 2 to 24 months for SMEs including retailers.

Under the 2025 Budget Law and an Agenzia delle Entrate provision of 31 October 2025, Italian merchants must register each POS terminal and associate it with their telematic register or certified software via the 'Fatture e Corrispettivi' portal from 1 January 2026. The measure lets the tax authority cross-check electronic payments against issued receipts, so retailers and restaurants should verify that their POS and cash-register vendors support the link.

Amsterdam-based Mollie agreed to buy UK bank-payments specialist GoCardless for about $1.1bn, creating a provider serving more than 350,000 businesses, with closing expected mid-2026 subject to approvals. Merchants will be able to combine cards, local methods and account-to-account payments in one integration.

The Nanterre commercial court awarded Karmen the operating assets of revenue-based financing pioneer Silvr, which had filed for bankruptcy in June 2025, excluding its non-performing loan book. Silvr clients are being migrated to Karmen, marking a first consolidation step in France's alternative short-term financing market for SMEs and e-merchants.

A royal decree-law delayed the entry into force of Verifactu by one year: companies subject to corporate tax must comply from 1 January 2027 and other businesses and self-employed from 1 July 2027, instead of January and July 2026. The government cited the need for an orderly adaptation of invoicing and POS software; merchants gain time but should still select certified systems.

Cegid signed a definitive agreement to acquire Shine, the Copenhagen-founded fintech (formerly Ageras) offering business accounts, e-invoicing, accounting and payroll to more than 400,000 SMBs in France, Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany; the deal closed in June 2026. Cegid intends to combine payments, e-invoicing, accounting and payroll for over one million SMBs and 15,000 accountants across seven European markets.

EPI's European wallet Wero, which counts more than 46 million users, went live for online payments in Germany with merchants including Lidl, Rossmann, Decathlon, Zooplus and Eventim, supported by the Sparkassen and cooperative banks. Rollout to Belgium, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands is planned for 2026, with point-of-sale payments to follow.

Pay-at-table specialist sunday, founded in Paris by the Big Mamma group founders and now run from Paris and Atlanta, raised $21M to extend its QR-code payment platform to kiosks, casual and fine dining and to new US and international cities. The company says its checkout is used by 80 million diners and aims to double revenue by summer 2026.

Adyen announced two Android 13 terminals: the spill- and drop-proof S1E4 Pro aimed at restaurants and bars, and the S1F4 Pro with integrated printer and docking for retail counters, both PCI 6 certified with 4G and Wi-Fi. Availability in Europe is scheduled for Q1 2026.

The draft 2026 finance law kept the calendar for mandatory e-invoicing (reception for all businesses and issuance for large and mid-sized companies from 1 September 2026, issuance for SMEs and micro-businesses from 1 September 2027) and tightened oversight of approved platforms with renewable three-year registrations. Fines rise to €500 then €1,000 for businesses that fail to issue or receive e-invoices, so restaurants and shops need a compliant platform before September 2026.

From 9 October 2025 euro-area payment providers must let customers send instant euro transfers around the clock, offer free verification of payee (IBAN-name check) and charge no more than for a standard transfer. For merchants this makes account-to-account payments and wallets such as Wero practical at checkout and reduces misdirected supplier payments.

Prosus declared its offer for Amsterdam-listed Just Eat Takeaway.com unconditional after 90.13% of shares were tendered and the European Commission cleared the deal in August 2025; JET will be delisted from Euronext Amsterdam. Prosus plans to invest in AI-driven logistics and personalisation, which affects restaurants using Just Eat, Takeaway.com, Lieferando and Thuisbezorgd.

Paris-based Defacto raised €16M to expand its AI-powered credit infrastructure, which approves short-term financing in under 30 seconds through partner platforms and marketplaces. The company has financed more than €1bn for about 17,000 SMEs and targets €10bn within three years.

Restaurant operating system Nory raised $37M in a Series B led by Kinnevik with Accel, bringing total funding to $62.6M. Its platform combines forecasting, inventory, workforce and payroll and claims roughly 20% operating-cost reductions for multi-site restaurant groups.

French reservation platform Zenchef and Seville-based CoverManager combined under a holding majority-owned by PSG Equity, forming a group with 36,000 restaurants across 20 countries, led by Zenchef CEO Thomas Jeanjean. It is Zenchef's fourth deal in two years after Formitable, Resengo and Tablebooker, consolidating European restaurant booking software.

Qonto filed for a credit-institution licence with the ACPR, which would let it offer lending, savings and investment products on top of its business accounts. The neobank serves more than 600,000 SMEs and freelancers across Europe and targets two million customers by 2030.

Amsterdam-based business-banking fintech Finom raised €115M from AVP, Headline Growth, General Catalyst, Northzone and Cogito Capital, on top of an earlier €92.7M growth facility. Serving more than 125,000 SMEs with accounts, invoicing and expense tools, it aims for one million customers by the end of 2026.

Worldline became a Wero member and announced a staggered launch of the instant-transfer wallet for e-commerce: Germany from summer 2025, Belgium in October 2025 and France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands in early 2026, with in-store payments planned for 2026. Merchants are promised lower chargebacks and better conversion compared with cards.

Paris-based staffing marketplace Extracadabra, which connects hospitality and retail businesses with freelance, temp and permanent workers, secured €15M from Actual Ventures while earlier investors exited. The funds will strengthen AI matching, expand to France's ten largest cities and to logistics and large retail.

Adyen went live with Tap to Pay on iPhone in Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Merchants on Adyen can accept contactless cards and wallets on an iPhone without extra hardware, useful for queue-busting, pop-ups and small outlets.

French payment-terminal company Yavin released Yavin Platform, letting POS and management-software vendors, resellers and hardware makers build their own branded payment offer with mixed terminal fleets, SoftPOS and a free choice of acquirer. It reflects a trend of restaurant and retail software vendors embedding payments rather than relying on bank-supplied terminals.

Athens-based Viva.com took a majority stake in Salzburg-based Fiskaltrust, whose API middleware handles cash-register fiscalisation and compliance for more than 100,000 merchants. Viva.com is bundling fiscalisation with its payment acceptance and banking services in Austria, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

Since 1 January 2025 German businesses must report every electronic cash register and its TSE (technical security device) to the tax office via Mein ELSTER, with a 31 July 2025 deadline for existing systems and one month for systems bought after 1 July 2025. Non-compliance can lead to fines of up to €25,000 and revenue estimates, and many cloud POS vendors now offer one-click reporting.