Europe moves to loosen Visa, Mastercard grip on payments

Several European news outlets reported that leaders there want to cut their countries' reliance on foreign payment companies, especially Mastercard and Visa. In fact, 13 European countries formed an alliance, EuroPA, with an eye to building a continent-wide payment system around Wero, a digital wallet operated by the European Payments Initiative (EPI), a consortium of 16 major banks and payment processors.

Separately, the UK publication The Guardian reported that a group of executives representing UK banks will gather Thurs., Feb. 19, 2026, to consider establishing a national alternative to Visa and Mastercard. About 95 percent of UK card transactions are made using Visa- or Mastercard-branded payment cards, according to a 2025 report by that country's Payment Systems Regulator.

"We are highly dependent on international [payment] solutions," said Martina Weimert, EPI chief executive at Yahoo Finance. "[W]e need action urgently."

"It's important for us to have digital payments under our control," Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, said in an interview with Irish radio host Pat Kenny. The ECB estimated that close to two-thirds of card transactions, valued at $24 trillion, in the Eurozone were routed through the Visa or Mastercard networks in 2022.

"Whether you use a card or whether you use a phone, typically it goes through Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Alipay. Where are all those coming from? Well either the U.S. or China," Legard told the radio host.

Pushing for payments sovereignty

Author and activist Cory Doctorow, in a Feb. 11 post to his blog, Pluralistic, took direct aim at Visa and Mastercard. "[T]he companies have raised their prices by more than 40 percent since the pandemic started," he noted. "This allows two American companies to impose a tax on the entire global economy, collecting swipe fees and other commissions on $24 trillion worth of the world's transactions every year."

What's more, Doctorow asserted, Mastercard and Visa are effectively controlled by the U.S. government. "Visa and Mastercard have a record of billions (trillions?) of retail transactions taking place between non-Americans, which Trump officials can access for surveillance purposes, or just to conduct commercial espionage to benefit American firms," Doctorow wrote.

The world got a glimpse of how this could play out when Russia invaded Ukraine, and U.S.-imposed sanctions on Russia cut that country off from Visa and Mastercard, leaving many Russians financially stranded. This led European leaders to wonder what would happen if the U.S. decided – or was pressured – to restrict European access to those same networks, according to reporting by the magazine European Business.

Similar concerns were raised by UK bankers. "If Mastercard and Visa were turned off, it would send up back to the 1950s," an executive familiar with the project there told The Guardian. "Of course we need a sovereign payments system."

The rest of Europe is looking to link sovereign payment systems to support cross-border payments using a coalition of national payment systems. The UK initiative, which is being funded by the government, could be added to the roster of connected payment systems.

Could Wero unseat Visa and Mastercard?

Wero was launched by EPI in 2024 as an alternative to Apple Pay. The consortium is made up of some of the largest banks in Europe, including BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank, as well as the payment processor Worldline. Built on SEPA instant credit transfers, Wero allows users to send money using just a phone number, no International Bank Account Number (IBAN) is required.

(SEPA is a European Union integration initiative that supports payments across 36 participating countries. Launched in 2017, it supports credit transfers denominated in euros in under 10 seconds 24/7/365.)

Wero already has over 47 million registered users in Belgium, France and Germany and has processed over 7.5 billion euros in transfers. It counts 1,100 member institutions and is accepted at many of Europe's leading businesses, including Lidl and Air Europa.

On Feb. 1, EPI signed a memorandum of understanding with EuroPA Alliance – a coalition of national payment systems including Bancornat, Spain's Bizum, Portugal's MB WAY and the Nordics' Vipps MobilePay – aimed at enabling seamless cross-border payments across Europe by 2027, according to an EPI LinkedIn post.

These solutions currently serve approximately 130 million users. At launch, the initiative will span 13 European countries, with others likely to follow, the post noted.

"This industry-led initiative demonstrates that European banks and payment service providers have both the infrastructure and the scale to deliver a concrete alternative [to Visa and Mastercard] rapidly," EPI wrote.

This isn't the first time European countries have tried to build a cross-border payment network. A similar initiative, the Monnet Project, was launched in 2008 by 20 European banks. But it fell apart in 2012.

European Business magazine suggested in its reporting that market and political conditions differentiate the current initiative. The drive for European autonomy in a world of tariff wars and "great power rivalry all point in the same direction," the magazine stated, adding that it's not a matter of whether Europe wants its own continent-wide payment infrastructure, but whether if can do so fast enough.

"We have the assets and opportunities to do that ourselves. And if we were to remove the internal barriers that we have set for ourselves in Europe, our economic wealth would increase significantly," Lagarde said.

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