At midnight on 1 January 2026, Bulgaria had a three-hour window to transition its national payments infrastructure to the euro — while transactions continued in real time.

The cutover required synchronized changes across banks, PSPs, fintechs, processors, international card schemes, ATMs, POS networks, and settlement infrastructure. Within the first 48 hours, more than 930,000 transactions worth nearly €42 million were processed with zero unplanned downtime.

Our new article, based on BORICA’s case study, examines how the transition was executed operationally and why the lessons matter far beyond Europe as markets worldwide modernize payment infrastructure.

Key topics include:

• Coordinating ecosystem-wide infrastructure change under fixed-deadline conditions

• Managing a national three-hour payments cutover window

• Maintaining operational resilience under live transaction load

• The role of processing platforms and technology partnerships in national-scale transformation

• Aligning settlement, regulation, and operational readiness

The article is relevant to all who cover payments modernization, instant payments, infrastructure resilience, core banking and processing transformation.

OpenWay is the only best-in-class provider of digital payment software solutions for card issuing, digital wallets, merchant acquiring, BNPL, transaction switching, tokenization, and fleet payments, and the best cloud payment systems provider as rated by Gartner, Aite (Datos Insights), Ovum (Omdia), Juniper Research, and PayTech. Top-tier banks and processors, as well as ambitious fintech startups, have chosen OpenWay as their strategic partner. Notable among them are Nexi, Enfuce, Shift4 and NBG in Europe; Network International and Equity Bank Group in MEA; Lotte and JACCS in Asia; Comdata, BeePay and Banesco in the Americas; Ampol in Australia, and other leading payment players worldwide.

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