Europe is suddenly treating Visa and Mastercard like a strategic risk. The fear is understandable.
But the real issue is not who printed the logo on your card. It is who controls the rules of the rails, and whether Europe can build credible alternatives without turning payments into a political trophy.
A fresh push for payments sovereignty is gathering pace in Brussels and national capitals. European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde has warned that major digital payment systems used in Europe are controlled by U.S. or Chinese companies. In January, Aurore Lalucq, chair of the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee, called for Europe to build an “Airbus of payment systems” to reduce reliance on Visa and Mastercard.
The concern is structural. International card schemes account for roughly two-thirds of card transactions in the euro area, and 13 EU member states lack a domestic card scheme. As cash usage declines, dependence on digital rails increases. Russia’s removal from SWIFT sharpened awareness that payment infrastructure can be weaponized in geopolitical disputes.
In response, European initiatives are accelerating. The European Payments Initiative has launched Wero, a wallet built on instant account-to-account transfers. On 2 February 2026, EPI and the EuroPA alliance, which links national systems such as Bizum, Bancomat, MB WAY and Vipps MobilePay, signed a memorandum of understanding to build an interoperability hub. The combined reach is pitched at around 130 million users across 13 countries. Cross-border peer-to-peer payments are targeted for 2026, with e-commerce and point-of-sale expansion planned for 2027.
At the same time, the ECB continues to advance the digital euro project, positioning it as a public settlement layer to strengthen monetary sovereignty and resilience.
The anxiety is real. The framing is muddled.
Europe is waking up to the fact that payments are infrastructure. When most transactions flow through private networks headquartered outside the bloc, that becomes a political issue as much as a commercial one.
But the debate often collapses very different things into a single threat. Visa, Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal are routinely lumped together. They do not represent the same layer of risk.
Payments are a stack. At the scheme level sit the rulebooks and governance structures that determine access, liability and pricing. That is where Visa and Mastercard matter most. Processing and acquiring, by contrast, are already heavily populated by European firms. The wallet layer is what consumers see, but a wallet is not a scheme. Paying with Apple Pay using a European bank’s Visa card is still a Visa transaction underneath.
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Blurring these distinctions risks bad policy. Apple Pay raises competition questions. Visa raises governance and dependency questions. They are not interchangeable.
That said, the scheme layer does represent concentration of power. In a severe geopolitical rupture, access decisions could become leverage. The probability may be low, but the impact would be enormous in an economy where cash is fading fast.
There is also a blind spot in the sovereignty narrative. Visa and Mastercard do not just represent dependence. They provide global interoperability. Europe is one of the most trade dependent regions in the world. Europeans travel extensively. European merchants sell globally. A European card works in Tokyo, New York and São Paulo without friction. Any purely European rail will struggle to replicate that reach soon.
So the question is not how to eliminate international schemes. It is how to ensure they are not the only game in town.
That is where Wero and the EuroPA alliance become interesting. Instead of building a new scheme from scratch, the strategy is to connect existing national champions and scale them across borders. Bizum dominates in Spain. iDEAL is entrenched in the Netherlands. Swish is near universal in Sweden. Linking these systems creates a network effect without starting from zero.
If successful, that would introduce real competition into merchant payments and online commerce. Competition can pressure card schemes on pricing and services more effectively than speeches about sovereignty ever could. The digital euro could add a public backstop, anchoring the system without replacing private innovation.
The danger is overreach. A state-sponsored monopoly rail would not automatically be superior to a foreign duopoly. Payments demand uptime, fraud management and consumer trust. Those are built through commercial discipline, not political symbolism.
Sovereignty is capacity, not a logo at the checkout.
The next phase is execution. Cross-border functionality, merchant acceptance and seamless user experience will determine whether Wero and its partners can move beyond rhetoric. If they deliver real utility, Europe will have built a second rail that strengthens resilience without sacrificing openness.
For policymakers, precision matters. Different layers of the payments stack require different responses. The digital euro should complement private initiatives, not crowd them out.
Europe does not need an Airbus of payments. It needs a competitive ecosystem where multiple rails coexist and no single switch can bring the system to a halt.
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