Financial sovereignty, digital euro and payment roaming: EU seeks alternatives to US cards

Europe spends billions of euros every year on card payments, almost all of them processed outside European systems.

The vast majority of card purchases go through Visa or Mastercard, two US companies that dominate global payments.

For many years, this was considered the price to pay for the efficiency that these US giants offered whenever a card was used to pay for a service or product.

EU leaders now see this dependence as a risk that Europe can no longer ignore, given the possibility that this infrastructure could be turned into a geopolitical weapon.

This is one of the arguments used by the European Central Bank (ECB) as it seeks approval for the digital euro in the European Parliament.

The institution led by Christine Lagarde warns that reliance on foreign payment systems leaves Europe exposed to political pressure or sudden disruption.

Donald Trump could throw more than European military security into chaos with a snap of his fingers. What would happen if the US president suddenly switched off the infrastructure that lets Europeans pay for their everyday shopping?

The fallout could be extensive and severe. In Russia, where Visa and Mastercard once handled 60% of payments, US sanctions forced the firms to pull out, leaving ordinary citizens locked out of their money and unable to buy goods.

Costs and data at the heart of the debate

According to data from the European Central Bank (ECB), the US payment giants Visa and Mastercard account for 61% of card payments in the euro area and almost all cross-border card transactions.

This means that every time we use a card or a mobile phone to make a payment, that information leaves the European Union and is stored in a third country, such as the US, where it can be used to build consumer profiles.

Another argument concerns the cost of operations. Retailers say that card network fees have risen sharply in recent years. The fees are set according to commercial conditions defined outside the EU.

For that reason, direct payments between bank accounts can strengthen competition and help businesses and consumers to save money.

Reducing dependence on US-based structures fits with the goal set by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who is following the reports by Mario Draghi and Enrico Letta on the need for Europe to become more competitive against larger-scale companies from countries such as the United States and China.

Mario Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank, warned that global interdependence has shifted from a mechanism of mutual restraint to a tool of influence and control, as deep integration creates strategic dependencies that non-aligned powers can weaponise.

The warnings are not coming only from Europe. There is a growing sense that, in the current context of geopolitical fragmentation, payments have become a matter of sovereignty.

The prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney, echoed these concerns earlier this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, in a speech that resonated around the world for its clarity.

"The great powers have started to use economic integration as a weapon, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion and supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live under the illusion of mutual benefit through integration when that integration becomes the source of your subordination," the Canadian leader stressed.

Digital euro as Europe's answer

On this side of the Atlantic, the digital euro, designed to underpin an EU-wide electronic payment structure, is seen as a way of putting Europe's strategic autonomy into practice.

"All these potential geopolitical tensions and the transformation of every existing instrument into a weapon are clearly increasing the level of risk," said Piero Cipollone, a member of the European Central Bank's executive board, in January, in remarks to the Spanish newspaper El País

"That strengthens the need for a European payment system that meets all needs and is built on European technology and infrastructure, in other words, a system that is entirely under our control," he continued.

The final phase of negotiations between the European Parliament and the governments of the Member States on how the digital euro will operate is now under way. The digital euro will be an electronic form of currency issued and guaranteed by the ECB. It is intended to complement cash and existing banking services, not to replace them.

The system will allow both online and offline payments, with the ECB providing the underlying infrastructure, while commercial banks and payment service providers will offer digital euro services to their customers.

Merchants are expected to pay lower fees than they currently face for card transactions.

The most intense negotiations are expected in the autumn, with final approval currently envisaged by the end of the year. The digital euro should become available for retail payments from 2029, after a pilot programme due to start in 2027, involving 36 payment service providers to help test the future currency.

Portugal is among the countries with the largest number of entities taking part in the test. The two main domestic banks, Caixa Geral de Depósitos (CGD) and Banco Comercial Português (BCP), have been selected to participate in the initiative that will test the implementation of the digital euro, alongside Unicre, a payments company owned by private Portuguese banks.

Lagarde told Euronews in July that the project aims both to reinforce Europe's economic sovereignty and modernise payments, underlining the bloc's continued dependence on payment networks owned by foreign entities.

"We predominantly rely on US, but also sometimes Chinese, networks to process payments. We need a European solution because we want to be sovereign at home," Lagarde said.

The global race for homegrown payment systems

While the public European solution has yet to arrive, private actors have been moving ahead with a view to creating a joint network for interoperability between payment solutions.

The European Payments Alliance (EuroPA) and the European Payments Initiative (EPI) have signed an agreement to link their instant payment systems, creating a platform with the potential to reach 380 million users in 15 European countries.

EuroPA brings together the Portuguese payment solution MB WAY, the Spanish and Andorran Bizum, the Italian Bancomat, the Nordic Vipps MobilePay (Norway, Denmark, Finland and Sweden), Blik (Poland) and IRIS (Greece).

EPI, through the brand Wero, covers payments in countries such as Germany, Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

The aim is to enable cross-border payments in future without changing app. A French Wero user, for example, could send money to a Spanish contact using Bizum as if it were a domestic transaction.

Outside the euro area, a project is taking its first steps in the United Kingdom. In June, the UK Payments Initiative, a new company backed by the UK's biggest banks, went live with the aim of undermining the dominance of US card networks in payments.

Supported by some of the country's largest lenders, including Barclays, NatWest, Lloyds and HSBC, the payment scheme, regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), has been launched to accelerate the adoption of account-to-account payments that bypass card schemes.

Around 95% of card transactions in the UK are processed through payment systems owned by Mastercard and Visa, according to a 2025 report by the UK's Payment Systems Regulator. That dominance has become even more significant as cash use continues to decline across the country.

This reality is even more visible in Brazil, where the most common form of payment is PIX, a fast and free digital system that began as a tool for instant money transfers and has become one of the payment methods most widely used by Brazilians.

In just a few years, PIX has risen to the top of the league table of transactions in the country, already accounting for 54% of all transactions carried out in Brazil, according to the Brazilian Central Bank, and it has now also become a focal point in a trade dispute between Brazil and the United States.

With only a few months to go until Brazil's presidential elections, the payment system created by the Brazilian Central Bank has become one of the points of friction between President Lula da Silva's government and Donald Trump's administration.

Washington accuses Brazil of favouring a state-run payment system and engaging in unfair competition with US companies operating in the sector, especially credit card operators.

The US criticism of PIX hit a sensitive nerve in Brazil, making it seem more like an attack on its sovereignty, even prompting Colombian president Gustavo Petro to come out in defence of PIX.

The leader of the South American country expressed support for Brazil's instant payment system and suggested adopting the model in his own country.

Colombia, for its part, has its own success story, Bre-B. The Colombian instant payment systemclosed its first six months of operation, with 34.6 million customers and 638.6 million transactions processed, highlighting the system's growing relevance in Colombians' everyday payments.

Roaming-style models?

As more systems are created and consolidated, the need to interconnect them grows.

PagBrasil, a Brazilian fintech specialising in cross-border electronic payment solutions, is working on a system that will allow consumers to pay abroad in real time using their banking apps or digital wallets as if they were at home.

Called RoamingPay, the solution supports QR code payments through local payment systems and is currently available in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.

PagBrasil's CEO and co-founder, Alex Hoffmann, believes the future lies in allowing all electronic payment systems to talk to one another, cutting costs for both consumers and merchants.

Following a roaming-style model, as already exists in telecommunications, consumers keep their national provider but use services abroad within shared technical and legal frameworks.

"The reduction of tariffs negotiated in trade agreements, such as those between the EU and Mercosur and India, only generates real economic impact if firms and consumers can settle cross-border payments flexibly. Without interoperable infrastructure, the risk is that tariff benefits run into an invisible charge at the moment of payment," argues the head of the Brazilian company in a note sent to Euronews.

PagBrasil's solution could cover 10 countries by the end of this year and the company has its sights set on expansion into Europe, especially in light of Europe's desire to have its own system for real-time payments and transfers as a form of protection and sovereignty in an increasingly hostile world.

"In the current context of geopolitical tensions, global integration has been instrumentalised by the world powers through financial infrastructure," says Alex Hoffmann, stressing that 'depending excessively on external infrastructure has stopped being an efficiency choice and has become a strategic risk'.

According to PagBrasil's CEO, the real opportunity for the euro lies in creating interoperable infrastructure for regional payments and in connecting that infrastructure with other interoperable networks on different continents, reducing structural vulnerability in bilateral trade.

"The lack of interoperability acts as a hidden tax, arising from the inefficiency of having to adapt to non-local payment methods in international transactions," he reiterates.

In that sense, he explains, interoperability emerges as the most pragmatic answer.

"Instead of imposing a single system, you build a foundation that links national infrastructures, preserving sovereignty while enabling more efficient flows. Without that, international transactions cease to be a natural extension of the economy and become a point of friction that limits the growth of production chains."

The Brazilian company is currently seeking an agreement that would allow integration with MB WAY, which is controlled by Portugal's SIBS. The aim is to enable Portuguese users to use Portugal's leading mobile payments app in Brazil to make payments.

This could be the first step towards integrating the existing European platform, which already links, among others, payment methods such as Wero, Bizum and Bancomat, with the payments network created by PagBrasil. From Hoffmann's perspective, it makes little sense for Europe to develop its own system of electronic payments if, when its citizens travel outside the continent, they still depend on credit cards from US companies such as Visa and Mastercard.

"Governments and the private sector should prioritise connecting existing regional infrastructures instead of trying to impose centralised systems," he concludes.

Reporting from euronews contributed to this story.