How to ensure a national-wide payments infrastructure survives an operational stress test

Bulgaria’s adoption of the euro on 1 January 2026 required a live, national-scale payments transformation involving banks, payment service providers, fintechs, government institutions, international schemes, and technology partners. BORICA AD, Bulgaria’s national card and payment infrastructure operator, has described in a new case study how the cutover was executed with ecosystem partners including OpenWay, whose Way4 platform supported BORICA’s card issuing, acceptance, and payment processing environment. Useful lessons can be inferred for all payment companies preparing high-risk infrastructure change.

Lesson 1: Treat the cutover as an ecosystem challenge

The case study, Bulgaria’s Euro Day One: How BORICA Orchestrated a National Payments Cutover at Scale, shows that successful migration depends on coordination across the full payments ecosystem. More than 35 banks, payment service providers, fintechs, government institutions, and technology partners were involved in synchronized changes to ensure payment continuity across channels.

“The euro transition was a live, national-scale infrastructure transformation that required precise coordination across the payments ecosystem,” said Miroslav Vichev, CEO at BORICA. “Our objective was to ensure that payments worked seamlessly from the first minute of euro adoption, across every channel. This case study captures the operational model behind that outcome.”

Lesson 2: Rehearse the critical window before it arrives

A defining phase was the planned three-hour cutover of the national card infrastructure. During this window, issuing and acquiring systems, POS and ATM devices, and international scheme integrations were updated simultaneously to support euro-denominated transactions.

This highlights a central lesson for other markets: the most visible moment of change must be prepared long before the cutover begins. Governance, testing, escalation paths, partner readiness, and operational rehearsals are as important as the technology itself.

Lesson 3: Treat the processing platform as part of national resilience

In a national currency migration, the processing platform is not a back-office component. It becomes part of the country’s operational resilience layer.

According to BORICA, more than 930,000 card and ATM transactions worth nearly EUR 42 million were processed within the first 48 hours of euro adoption, with zero unplanned downtime. The first successful euro ATM withdrawal was recorded just 20 seconds after midnight, followed by card and digital payment transactions within minutes.

This outcome depended not only on project governance and ecosystem coordination, but also on the readiness of the platform layer. OpenWay’s Way4 platform supported BORICA’s card issuing, acceptance, and payment processing operations, helping maintain transaction traceability, reconciliation integrity, and operational stability under real-time load.

The point for other markets is clear: resilience in a currency cutover is designed long before midnight. It sits in the architecture, testing model, partner coordination, and the ability of the processing platform to absorb synchronized change without interrupting live services.

The case also illustrates the value of long-term technology partnership. BORICA and OpenWay have worked together since 2018 on modernizing Bulgaria’s card infrastructure, making Way4 an established processing platform within BORICA’s national payments environment by the time of the euro transition.

Lesson 4: Protect the wider digital payments ecosystem

The case study also shows that continuity must extend beyond card processing. Value-added services including blink instant payments, B-Trust digital identity, SoftPOS solutions, and e-voucher platforms remained operational during the transition.

For payment infrastructure operators, this is an important point: customer impact is shaped by the full ecosystem of services, not by core transaction processing alone.

Lesson 5: Align regulation, settlement, and infrastructure early

Regulatory and infrastructure alignment played a central role in the transition. BORICA now operates as an ancillary system within TARGET and is connected to TARGET Instant Payment Settlement, allowing Bulgarian banks to offer instant euro transfers across SEPA.

For other markets, this reinforces the need to treat legal, settlement, and operational readiness as connected workstreams rather than separate milestones.

A reference model for future payment transformations

Bulgaria’s experience shows that national payment transformations succeed when governance, technology, regulation, partner coordination, and operational discipline are managed as one program.

It also shows why relationships with progressive technology partners need to be built before the critical window arrives. In BORICA’s case, its long-term work with OpenWay helped ensure that the needed innovative platform was already embedded in the national payments environment, supporting the resilience, traceability, and operational control required for the euro cutover.

For executives at national payment companies, banks, processors, fintechs, and wallet providers, BORICA’s case study offers a practical reference model for preparing high-risk infrastructure change under live transaction conditions — and for choosing technology partnerships that can support modernization before, during, and after the moment of transition.

Maria Vin is Head of Strategy at OpenWay, where her work covers payment technology strategy, business models, roadmap direction, and go-to-market initiatives across banks, processors, and fintechs. Her background spans product management, digital transformation, and strategy, with contributions over the years to payment innovations including early digital wallets, universal payment hubs, omni-channel payments, and payment SaaS models. Today, she focuses on AI-driven and other emerging propositions, as well as product, brand, and growth strategy.