European Payments Sovereignty: Reducing Reliance on Visa and Mastercard

Brian Gaynor serves as BlueSnap’s European chief executive, part of Payroc WorldAccess in suburban Chicago, and is based in Dublin.

Why the European Union Seeks Less Dependence

United Kingdom banks are right to try to trim their dependence on Visa and Mastercard, as the market share of these two card schemes raises legitimate worries about concentrated power. In much of Europe, industry estimates put their combined share at a clear majority of card payments—often around three-quarters or more—leaving few practical substitutes when rules, pricing, or outages ripple through the system.

Those concerns are well founded. The world’s most widely accepted networks shape European payments at scale, creating strategic and economic exposure for the United Kingdom and the European Union. Pursuing alternatives aligns with Europe’s broader push to lessen reliance on United States technology and infrastructure in the interest of sovereignty, including concerns about where sensitive transaction data is processed and stored, which legal regimes can compel access, and how quickly cross-border dependencies can become a security issue in a crisis.

Replacing the Card Payment System Is Unlikely

Spotting the problem is far simpler than fixing it, and efforts to nudge the continent off the dominant card networks are unlikely to succeed in the near term.

That does not mean there are no substitutes. The most discussed alternatives tend to fall into a few buckets: “pay by bank” account-to-account payments that send funds directly from a customer’s bank to a merchant; pan-European wallet and instant-payment efforts such as Wero; domestic card schemes that are strong in specific countries; and digital wallets that can route via cards or via bank transfers depending on how they are configured.

Pay by bank has clear strengths: it can reduce acceptance costs versus cards, it uses bank-grade authentication, and it moves funds directly without relying on the card schemes’ authorization and settlement model. Its trade-offs are just as real: customer experiences vary by bank, dispute and refund handling is less standardized than card chargeback flows, and it can be less convenient for certain use cases such as travel, offline scenarios, or payments where consumers expect card-style protections.

Payments Are an Ecosystem, Not Just Code

Moving money differs from typical enterprise software. There is no simple open-source substitute ready to swap in; building a competing payment network requires a full ecosystem—rules, risk, interoperability, and merchant acceptance—not just technology.

A pan-European alternative is less a software launch than a long-running coordination effort across banks, merchants, regulators, and consumer habits.

Wero: An Instant Payment System With Gaps

Wero is the most credible effort so far to reduce dependence, but its practical features and reach are still catching up to what consumers and merchants already take for granted with card rails.

Wero’s main advantage is that it aims to make instant, bank-to-bank payments feel like a mainstream consumer product, rather than a niche transfer method. The hurdles are familiar: merchants need a compelling reason to add and promote it at checkout, consumers need a reason to change behavior, and the product must deliver a consistently fast, low-friction experience that matches the reliability, dispute handling expectations, and near-universal usability of cards.

Adoption and Network Effects in European Payments

Adoption is the fulcrum. Two-sided network effects mean both consumers and merchants must reach critical mass. Without scale on each side, a new scheme cannot rival established rails. In the United Kingdom and Europe, card payments are deeply ingrained, so switching will require a markedly better experience.

For consumers, reducing reliance on the card schemes would likely be felt first in day-to-day convenience and acceptance. If alternatives are unevenly supported across banks, merchants, and countries, checkout can become more inconsistent—especially for travel and cross-border e-commerce. Costs could move in either direction: merchants may pay less for some account-to-account methods, but savings are not guaranteed to flow through, and new operational costs can appear in reconciliation and customer support. Security can also look different rather than strictly “better” or “worse”: bank-to-bank flows often rely on strong customer authentication, while card payments bring familiar protections and mature dispute processes that consumers have come to expect.

At the moment, cards are nearly universal, secure, and comparatively cost-effective—an incumbent that is tough to surpass.

India’s Unified Payments Interface and Brazil’s Pix Are the Wrong Benchmarks

References to India’s Unified Payments Interface or Brazil’s Pix can mislead. Their rapid growth came from moving users off cash, not from displacing mature card networks. With historically lower card penetration in those markets, the path was different; by contrast, the European Union and United Kingdom already have robust card schemes, making behavioral change far harder.

Near-Term Guidance: Build Resilience

For now, resilience should outrank replacement.

Creating a successful alternative scheme is difficult not only because of user behavior, but because of the plumbing: interoperability across banks and countries, consistent liability and dispute rules, integration into merchant checkout and point-of-sale systems, and the commercial incentives that determine whether anyone promotes the new method.

• Keep some cash for emergencies.
• Diversify payment acceptance methods.
• Use payment providers with failover capabilities.
• Prepare for infrastructure or connectivity disruptions.

Long-Run Outlook: Evolution, Not Displacement

Over time, evolution is more plausible than ousting Visa and Mastercard. Regulatory pressure may drive greater localization of processing and data within the United Kingdom and Europe, restoring elements of regional oversight while preserving alignment with global card networks. The most relevant moves are not a single ban or switch, but a mix of policies: caps and scrutiny around card fees, open-banking rules that make pay-by-bank options easier to offer at checkout, mandates that strengthen instant bank transfers as a viable default, and operational-resilience requirements that increase expectations for uptime, incident handling, and continuity. Collectively, these measures can limit the schemes’ pricing power, improve transparency, and make room for account-to-account alternatives without pretending the cards will vanish.

Building alternatives is a worthy ambition; expecting them to supplant the incumbent schemes is likely unrealistic.