EU needs to wean itself off Visa and Mastercard – banking chief

The bloc must find alternatives to US payment systems as relations with Washington sour, Martina Weimert has urged

The EU needs to “urgently” reduce its dependence on US payment systems Visa and Mastercard, the head of the bloc’s leading bank consortium, Martina Weimert, has urged.

The dominance of US tech solutions and services has increasingly become a concern in the EU over the past year as tensions between Brussels and Washington have risen since President Donald Trump returned to office.

Weimert, chief executive of the European Payments Initiative (EPI), which is made up of 16 European banks and financial services companies, cautioned that the bloc is “highly dependent on international [payment] solutions,” as quoted by Financial Times on Monday.

“We have nice national assets like domestic [payment] card schemes... but we don’t have anything cross-border,” she said, adding that “we need action urgently.”

Commenting on the ‘digital euro’ promoted by the European Central Bank (ECB) and expected to be launched in 2029, Weimert said that “we are a little bit out of time.”

According to ECB data cited by FT, Visa and Mastercard accounted for nearly two-thirds of card transactions in the Eurozone in 2022.

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Last month, Miguel De Bruycker, director of the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium (CCB), warned that the EU has “lost the internet” and is unable to fully store data in the bloc, given US tech companies’ dominance over key digital infrastructure and online services.

In an effort to reduce dependence on US tech, the French government said last month that it intended to phase out American videoconferencing services, such as Teams and Zoom, within a year and replace them with domestically developed apps.

In August, Germany’s Federal Ministry for Digital Affairs said that it planned to increase the use of European solutions and open-source software in government operations in lieu of Microsoft software.

Last year, the EU also slapped hefty fines on several US tech giants, including Meta, X, and Google, accusing them of violating the bloc’s antitrust laws, as well as regulations on data-driven advertising and content-moderation.

Trump blasted Brussels’ decisions as “unfair” and “discriminatory,” threatening the EU with tariffs.