EU Payments Sovereignty: Why Europe Seeks Independence from Visa and Mastercard

Two-thirds of all card-based transactions in the eurozone are processed by non-European companies. In 13 euro area countries, there is no domestic digital payment alternative whatsoever. Every tap, swipe and online checkout routes through infrastructure governed by boards sitting in New York and San Francisco.

For years, this was treated as a market efficiency. In 2026, it is being treated as a strategic vulnerability — and the European Union is mobilising on multiple fronts to change it.

The Wake-Up Call

The urgency has a clear origin. When Visa and Mastercard suspended operations in Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, Europeans watched a real-time demonstration of what it means when your payment infrastructure is controlled by foreign companies. Cards stopped working. Digital wallets went dark. An entire population was cut off from modern commerce overnight.

The lesson was not lost on Brussels. If transatlantic relations were ever to deteriorate — and under a second Trump administration imposing tariffs, threatening Greenland claims, and pursuing an aggressively pro-US capital markets agenda, that scenario no longer feels hypothetical — Europe’s daily economic life could be disrupted by decisions made outside its borders.

Martina Weimert, Chief Executive of the European Payments Initiative (EPI), has urged European businesses and merchants to “urgently” adopt homegrown payment schemes. Piero Cipollone, Executive Board Member of the ECB, has framed it in even starker terms: Europe must preserve the ability of its citizens to pay with sovereign money in a digital world. As we reported in our analysis of Europe’s $24 trillion breakup with Visa and Mastercard, the political establishment has finally accepted that payments sovereignty is as strategically important as energy independence or defence autonomy.

Three Pillars of the Response

Europe’s answer is taking shape across three parallel tracks.

The first is Wero, a private-sector initiative launched by the EPI in 2024 and backed by 16 major European banks including Deutsche Bank and BNP Paribas. Wero allows consumers to send money, pay in shops and make online purchases through a single European platform. It has already scaled to 43.5 million registered users and processed over €7.5 billion in transfers in its first year, with e-commerce payments now rolling out across Germany, Belgium and France. The pitch is straightforward: why should European merchants pay Visa and Mastercard interchange fees when a domestic option can do the same job at lower cost?

The second track is the digital euro, the ECB’s central bank digital currency project. The European Parliament voted overwhelmingly in February 2026 to back the digital euro as “essential” to strengthening EU monetary sovereignty. The ECB has released its first financial estimates for the project: an initial rollout cost of approximately €1.3 billion, with ongoing costs to the banking sector of around €6 billion. If legislation is adopted this year, a pilot could begin in 2027, with a potential first issuance around 2029. The ECB has emphasised that merchant fees for digital euro transactions will be capped below current Visa and Mastercard rates. In parallel, a consortium of nine major European banks — including ING, UniCredit and SEB — is building a euro-denominated stablecoin under the MiCA framework, adding a blockchain-based layer to the sovereignty push.

The third is regulatory. The EU already caps interchange fees at 0.2–0.3 per cent of transaction value, and PSD2 requires banks to allow third-party providers access to customer accounts — enabling direct bank-to-bank transfers that bypass card networks entirely. Further tightening of these frameworks is under discussion.

The Critics

Not everyone is convinced. The Center for Data Innovation published analysis in January arguing that the sovereignty push is, in practice, a protectionist handout for legacy European banks — particularly French institutions that stand to capture regulatory rents through transaction fees while German and other European consumers subsidise infrastructure that primarily serves French commercial interests.

There is also a legal question. Trade law scholars have pointed out that sovereignty over the currency does not automatically translate into sovereignty over the markets that form around it. The EU can issue a digital euro, but it cannot prevent consumers from preferring the convenience of Apple Pay or the network effects of established card schemes.

European banks themselves have pushed back on aspects of the digital euro, arguing that the private sector — through Wero and national card schemes — can solve the sovereignty problem without the costs and risks of a state-backed currency. Yet as our deep dive into Europe’s payments power struggle showed, the most serious threat to Visa and Mastercard may not come from any single initiative, but from the convergence of instant bank-to-bank payments, fintech wallets and regulatory pressure eroding the card networks’ toll model from every direction.

The Stakes

The broader context makes the timing unavoidable. Payment transaction volumes in Europe are growing 4–5 per cent annually, while revenues are rising 10–12 per cent. This is an attractive, growing market — and the question of who controls its infrastructure is not academic. It determines where profits flow, where data is stored, who sets the rules, and who can flip the switch. As our wider analysis of the payments industry landscape makes clear, payments are no longer just a commercial issue — they are becoming a geopolitical one.

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