Do we really need a European alternative to Visa and Mastercard? These are the misunderstandings – EUobserver

When Aurore Lalucq, the chair of the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee, called in January for Europe to build “an Airbus of payment systems,” she captured a mood that has been building for years.

European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde has warned that “Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Alipay are all controlled by American or Chinese companies.”

A study commissioned by the parliament itself has examined how US authorities could, in theory, cut Europe off from global payment networks.

The concerns are legitimate.

Thirteen member states lack any domestic card scheme. Russia’s ejection from SWIFT showed that payment infrastructure can be weaponised.

In a world where economic interdependence is increasingly a coercive tool, no serious policymaker can ignore these realities.

But here is the problem: the political discourse is not getting the diagnosis right. And misdiagnosis leads to bad medicine.

When policymakers lump Visa, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal into a single category of “American payment systems,” they conflate fundamentally different things.

Four elements

The payments value chain has at least four distinct layers — schemes and rails (who set the rules), processing and acquiring (who moves the money), digital wallets (the consumer interface), and account-to-account overlay services (bank-to-bank payments) — each involving different actors, different competitive dynamics, and different sovereignty implications.

Collapsing them into one category produces incoherent regulation.

Start with what is often overlooked: the processing layer. The European processing and acquiring landscape is dominated by European companies — Worldline, Nexi, Adyen, and Nets.

The EU simply does not have a processing dependency. The technical infrastructure that authorises transactions and moves money between accounts is built, owned, and operated by European firms. 

Then consider digital wallets.

Apple Pay is not a payment scheme. It is a digital envelope, a container that carries your existing European bank card to a merchant’s terminal. It does not set interchange fees, define clearing rules, or determine liability in disputes. A payment made via Apple Pay using a BNP Paribas Visa card is, from the perspective of every actor in the chain, a Visa transaction.

Apple Pay and Google Pay raise questions of competition and platform power, but they are not sovereignty issues.

Where does dependency lie? At the scheme layer — the rules, governance, and access decisions that Visa and Mastercard control.

This is genuine and deserves attention. But even here, context matters.

The Interchange Fee Regulation already caps fees. Throughout two Trump administrations and multiple trade wars, these networks have operated without interruption in the EU. The theoretical risk of weaponisation against an allied continent exists, but it sits in a fundamentally different category from the Russian scenario that implicitly frames the debate.

Something the sovereignty issue ignores

And let us be clear about something the sovereignty discourse conveniently ignores: Visa and Mastercard provide enormous value to European consumers and businesses.

The EU is the world’s most trade-dependent major economy. Europeans travel more internationally than any other population, European businesses sell globally, and the EU receives more tourists than any other region.

All of this requires payment interoperability that works beyond EU borders. A European’s card works in Tokyo, New York, and São Paulo.

A Wero payment, for the foreseeable future, will not.

Dismissing international card schemes as mere “dependencies” to be eliminated ignores the real service they provide — and the real cost to Europeans if that service were disrupted or restricted.

The right question is not how to replace Visa and Mastercard, but how to build a competitive ecosystem where multiple payment rails coexist and where the pressure of competition benefits everyone.

That is precisely what is beginning to happen.

On 2 February 2026, EPI (the European Payments Initiative behind Wero) and the EuroPA alliance (connecting Bizum, Bancomat, MB WAY, Vipps MobilePay, and others) signed a memorandum of understanding to build a central interoperability hub.

The combined reach: roughly 130 million users across 13 countries, covering some 72 percent of the EU population.

Cross-border peer-to-peer payments are targeted for 2026, e-commerce and point-of-sale for 2027.

This is not a PowerPoint project: Bizum alone has over 30 million users and processes more than 3.4 million daily transactions. iDEAL dominates online payments in the Netherlands. Swish is near-universal in Sweden.

Add the digital euro, the ECB’s most ambitious project, and Europe has three parallel streams of genuine payment innovation underway simultaneously.

The entry of these European A2A services into the merchant payments space is already putting competitive pressure on card schemes to reduce costs and improve services.

The prospect of the digital euro is accelerating private-sector investment. Competition between rails drives innovation in ways that a monopoly, whether by a US scheme or a European one, never does.

This is the dynamic Europe should nurture: not protection from foreign players, but the construction of credible European alternatives that force every actor in the ecosystem to raise its game.

Five solutions

So what should policymakers do? Five things.

First, adopt precise language: stop treating Apple Pay and Visa as the same kind of threat; each layer of the value chain needs its own policy response.

Second, position the digital euro as a public good, a universal backstop and settlement anchor, not as a replacement for private innovation.

Third, support the EPI/EuroPA initiative through regulatory enablement without mandating its adoption; forced adoption kills competitive discipline.

Fourth, encourage wallet-rail interoperability: let digital wallets become distribution channels for Wero and the digital euro, expanding their reach.

Fifth, complete the Banking Union. Without genuine cross-border consolidation, European payment champions will remain structurally constrained.

The history of European payment initiatives is littered with failed mega-projects that substituted political ambition for commercial viability. The current generation has a better chance precisely because it builds on proven infrastructure and responds to real market demand.

Europe does not need an “Airbus of payments.” It needs an ecosystem where multiple rails compete: international card schemes providing global reach and robust consumer protections, European A2A networks offering lower-cost domestic and cross-border payments, and the digital euro serving as a public anchor and systemic backstop. 

Sovereignty in payments, as in other domains, is best achieved by building capacity, not by building walls. The first step is getting the diagnosis right.