Europa versucht, sich aus der Kontrolle von Visa und Mastercard zu befreien – aber nicht alle sind damit einverstanden
https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/05/01/europe-moves-to-break-visa-and-mastercards-grip-but-not-everyone-agrees
Von NumerousTax8165
35 Kommentare
>The fate of the digital euro now rests largely with one person: Fernando Navarrete Rojas, a Spanish centre-right MEP from the European People’s Party (EPP) who is steering the file through the European Parliament, the only EU institution yet to move it forward.
Europe literally had its own equivalent to Visa, namely Visa Europe (fully owned by European banks), but European banking regulations made it so unprofitable that these European banks just sold it to Visa. If they want this to exist, either subsidize it (which they currently can’t, EU regulations prevent it) or make it more profitable
I wondered what would happen to Euronews now Orban is out of power.
I’m all for not giving our data to the US or having it any control over our payments.
here’s another link
>[Europe vs Visa & Mastercard: The $24 Trillion Payments Shift](https://europeanbusinessmagazine.com/europes-24-trillion-breakup-with-visa-and-mastercard/)
>The Problem No One Thinks About
>Every time a European taps a card, pays online or splits a bill with friends, the transaction flows through infrastructure owned and operated by American companies. Card payments account for 56% of all cashless transactions in the EU. The data — who bought what, where, when and for how much — leaves European jurisdiction every time.
>“It’s important for us to have digital payment under our control,” Lagarde told The Pat Kenny Show. “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 US or China.”
(reposting a comment I shared on another post)
I don’t understand something : CB (Cartes Banquaires) is French, and they have already been issuing physical debit and credit cards for decades. They mostly work just in France, so they have to be „co-branded“ with Visa or MasterCard to work in the rest of Europe (that depends on the company who issued the terminal, SumUp for example supports it out of the box anywhere in the world). Why can’t we juste scale support of CB to Europe? Know how and base infrastructure is already there ! Because in the end, realistically, I pay 90% of my purchases in person, on a card terminal and neither the Digital Euro or Wero is ever going to change that (unless Wero also decides they will issue payment terminals and physical cards but that seems unlikely).
Wero and Digital Euro are _not_ a replacement to MasterCard and Visa for everything – yes for online payments, yes for bank transfers, but not for physical payments which accounts for the majority of operations in Europe.
Am I getting something wrong here?
Lmao at all the people worried about privacy. I guess we should continue letting all our payment be handled by the Americans. As for government tracking your payments, they already know everything, trust me. But they would hardly give a shit if you’re not laundering money.
Fucking finally. It’s ridiculous that US government and companies and just decide if EU citizens are able to pay wirelessly or not while in the EU.
E6 please do something and don’t wait
So the big banks are against it because they don’t want competition or a system they can’t control and squeeze for profits.
This must be good then.
I’m so fucking happy we have Blik payment system in Poland which allows me to pay for shopping (stationary and online), bills, taxes and even fines. This way I limit usage of debit/credit cards.
I don’t think any of them understand the actual value of Mastercard and Visa or where the money is made.
The money is predominantly made in cross-border activities. Being able to use your cards all over the world is not only a big attraction but also where they collect most fees.
The value for consumers is in being able to raise disputes and get money back if goods/services don’t get delivered or fraud occurs as well as the dynamic security checking which uses risk assessments to put different transactions in different categories for how much authorisation and authentication needs to happen. This means a majority of low risk transactions are easy to do for consumers.
Saying it’s like cash is nice and all but the problem with spending digitally is that you can do it over the internet at long distances and for future goods/services, what are you going to do when you use the digital euro to buy something online and it doesn’t ever arrive? That’s money lost. What happens when you pay for a flight using it and the airline goes bankrupt? That’s money lost. What happens if someone steals your details and spends your money? That’s money lost.
Getting it just to replace in person cash/card transactions within the eurozone is not much of dent to Mastercard or Visa.
There are advantages and disadvantages to doing this and opportunities it will bring but it looks like it’s being dressed up as something it is not in order to get it through. Using the anti-American sentiment and the desire for independence from American corporations in order to push through against some legitimate concerns.
# The digital euro could arrive by 2029 — but a bitter battle between Brussels and the banks stands in the way.
Europe’s payment system is on the brink of its biggest shake-up in decades.
A digital euro, a push for sovereignty from US payment giants and a bitter fight between banks and Brussels are all coming to a head — and the outcome could affect how Europeans conduct even the simplest day-to-day payments.
The digital euro is electronic cash, backed by the European Central Bank (ECB) and designed to sit alongside banknotes and the services offered by commercial lenders.
Under the European Commission’s proposal, users would get a digital wallet — with a spending limit yet to be defined — that works for both online and offline payments, with transactions designed to be untraceable.
If legislation passes before the end of 2026, it could be available for retail payments by 2029.
The push is political as much as it is financial.
Visa and Mastercard, both American, account for 61% of card payments in the eurozone and nearly all cross-border transactions, according to ECB data.
US President Donald Trump’s return to the White House and his hostile approach to both foreign policy and trade accelerated the debate, and at the European Council in mid-March, EU leaders set a deadline to approve the legislation before the end of 2026.
The ECB’s push to launch one is partly a response to the rise of privately issued stablecoins, which have steadily eaten into the payments landscape.
The message from Brussels and institutions across the continent is clear: Europe wants to control its own money.
The contrast with other major economies is stark. The US has moved in the opposite direction, advancing the GENIUS Act to give private stablecoins a regulatory footing, while China has already rolled out its digital yuan at scale.
Europe is charting a middle path — state-backed, tightly regulated and designed to keep monetary sovereignty out of private hands.
# Who’s fighting it and who is making the case for it?
Not everyone is convinced. As the legislation advances, opposition from commercial banks has intensified.
At an industry event in Brussels in mid-April, French Banking Federation chairman Daniel Baal took direct aim at the project.
„The retail digital euro, as currently designed, disrupts this balance by turning central bank money into a direct competitor of commercial bank money,“ he said.
Wero, the European payments platform backed by major banks, is also wary.
Its CEO, Martina Weimert, acknowledged a use case for offline payments but warned the legal tender status, which would oblige merchants to accept the digital euro just as they must accept cash, would create a „distortion of competition“.
Supporters say the banks are missing the point entirely.
„It’s as if cash did not exist, and the industry argued it was unfair because merchants have to accept it, and users don’t pay a fee,“ Peter Norwood, a researcher at Finance Watch, a European non-profit that aims to reform finance in the public interest, told Euronews.
„Cash is a public good. That is what the digital euro is meant to preserve in the digital age.“
Without legal tender status, he argued, the project would never reach critical mass.
„If merchants do not have to accept it, it won’t have a high uptake and will not ensure the continued availability of public money,“ Norwood added.
The ECB is trying to minimise tensions over the digital euro by arguing that the private sector will be involved in shaping and managing it.
The bank says commercial lenders will act as the ultimate service providers and will be compensated for doing so.
Opposition to the digital euro, however, extends well beyond the banking sector.
Privacy advocates and decentralisation campaigners have raised concerns that a state-issued digital currency could give governments unprecedented visibility over citizens‘ spending — and, potentially, the power to restrict it.
The planned cap on individual holdings has done little to ease those fears.
Crypto industry voices, though a smaller force in Europe than in the US, have also pushed back, wary of a digital currency that competes with decentralised alternatives while operating under full institutional control.
# The man who holds the keys
The fate of the digital euro now rests largely with one person: Fernando Navarrete Rojas, a Spanish centre-right MEP from the European People’s Party (EPP) who is steering the file through the European Parliament, the only EU institution yet to move it forward.
He did not respond to requests for comment from Euronews.
His conduct in parliamentary negotiations, his public speeches and his appearances at industry events all suggest a preference for private-sector solutions over the digital euro.
Navarrete has an extensive background in the banking sector. He held several high-level positions at the Bank of Spain and served as the director of finance at the Spanish Official Credit Institute.
He also led the economic and public policies at the Foundation for Social Analysis and Studies (FAES), a right-wing think tank linked to the former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar López.
According to his public meeting records, he held more than a hundred meetings specifically on the digital euro since he took over the file in December 2024.
With EU governments strongly backing the project, the Parliament is where the battle will be won or lost.
At an industry event in mid-April organised by the French Banking Federation, Navarrete was candid about his scepticism, describing the digital euro as not an urgent priority.
„I’m sorry that we started maybe with not the most urgent parts of the building,“ he said.
He made it clear he favours the private sector, describing it as „much more efficient“.
And like the commercial banks, he warned that legal tender status, which he called an „atomic weapon,“ could fatally undermine private alternatives. „Even if (the digital euro) is no good, you’re forced to use it,“ he said.
# Behind the scenes
According to several people familiar with the negotiations, the Spanish MEP used closed-door meetings to slow the process down, pushing his views into the text and campaigning hard for a key concession: limiting the digital euro to offline use only, on the grounds that an online version would compete directly with Wero, Visa, Mastercard and other private players.
The meetings grew increasingly polarised.
On one side, the Socialists (S&D), liberals (Renew Europe), the Greens and the Left broadly backed the Commission’s proposal.
On the other, Navarrete — representing the EPP — took an opposing minority stance, occasionally joined by far-right parties, though their attendance was inconsistent.
Two people familiar with the negotiations described his conduct as unpredictable and determined to stall the legislation.
„We are going nowhere,“ was the message at the end of several meetings.
German Minister of Finance Lars Klingbeil said in February that those opposing the digital euro were harming Europe — a pointed message aimed at Navarrete and the EPP group, which is divided over the file.
The offline-only position was ultimately dropped from the text, clearing a significant hurdle.
# Where do things stand now?
Negotiations are not yet over and remain complex, but the process is moving forward.
Draft texts and meeting minutes seen by Euronews point to a more balanced dynamic than in previous months.
A plenary vote originally scheduled for May has slipped. The parliamentary committee is now expected to vote at the end of June, with the full plenary to follow.
Once the Parliament signs off, interinstitutional negotiations between EU member states, the Parliament, and the Commission will begin, with the final adoption of the legislation targeted for the end of 2026.
Why is it always Spain…
What is this nonsense? There are much easier ways to get rid of cards.
All EU banks are already obligated to have an API open to allow customers to send and receive payments via third party apps.
So all they have to do is build an app that uses those API endpoints for all major european banks, and offer it to merchants free of commission. This can be done in one year max.
It won’t make credit cards disappear completely but it’ll reduce their revenue from European businesses by 90% if not more.
There are two big hurdles that you have to jump over to create a Visa/MC competitor:
– make it work across the EU: it can be a card that works across the borders, or you can make every bank app be able to scan a payment QR, but this can be achieved with legislation alone. You can mandate that every shop that takes Visa/MC must accept this new EuroPay by 2030.
– make it work across the world. Legislation might help here as well: GNSS chips in your phones support GLONASS because it’s easier to add support for it to all new chips than to make Russia-specific chips. The same applies to card terminals. Demand that all terminals sold in the EU must have EuroPay support, and all new terminals worldwide will have it.
As always: We would rather be dominated by americans than by other europeans
The banks disagree I would imagine
What we need is a payment system that can handle fraud allegations like Paypal or Visa/MC themselves.
Fragmented or not, none of the existing systems or the proposed ones offers such a feature.
> Crypto industry voices, though a smaller force in Europe than in the US, have also pushed back, wary of a digital currency that competes with decentralised alternatives while operating under full institutional control.
Of course. Being on the wrong side of an issue and crypto – name a more iconic duo ….
The idea behind this is not bad but I fear this is in fact a step towards getting rid of cash.
Well… I agree!
another daily reminder that Russia is a part of Europe
They’re detaching using a system reliant on AWS.
Well screw those who don’t agree, its a great solution and it’s ENTIRELY OPTIONAL! If you want to stay chained to US companues you’re free to do so!
Idiotic headline. On what issue does everyone ACTUALLY agree? Decoupling from US corps can’t happen fast enough
This action will make it difficult for non-EU tourists to make local purchases when visiting.
My name is Mr… Dracretsam, yes, that’s it, and I think this is a terrible idea.
> Its CEO, Martina Weimert, acknowledged a use case for offline payments but warned the legal tender status, which would oblige merchants to accept the digital euro just as they must accept cash, would create a „distortion of competition“
God forbid the government provide a public good that is up to date with the digital world. Cash is literally supposed to be an absolute state monopoly, what do they want, competition between private cash like coal mine scrip? What a stupid argument to make.
I know its not that easy, but couldnt we just buy a copy from the payment software that Brazil is using?
Obviously not, the banks didnt implement that one on their own either. If anything, the banks etc allow some version here only because they want to be in charge/ the one replacing MC/Visa.
Implement a EU wide payment system which is accepted at all, or the majority of POS, make the card a dual card so it can use MasterCard or visa when said payment system isn’t available.
I’m in Uzbekistan and they have a local payment system called Uzcard. Here you can get Uzcard/visa dual cards that can use the local payment system but also use the mainstream Visa in or outside of the country.
We got BLIK as a payment option
Dan weiter so Spanien
Message your banks, ask them if they have initiatives to break the duopoly, pressure them to act. It’s ridiculous that all card options from major banks in Europe are Visas and MasterCards. Android/Apple pays, banks‘ own, Click to Pays etc. are all dependent on these cards, not real innovation but an extention of the cards.
They should have made the Danish dankort into the euro version many years ago and capped the amount of fees and forced fees to always fully be on users/buyers so users wants to use cheapest and best product always
Another approach is simply then to say, fine. If you want equal footing, then private payment processors are not allowed to charge fees anymore and must operate exactly the same way as a public legal tender.
Ends that debate in a hurry
Ever nook and cranny on the planet accepts Master / Visa. I am curious how it would be with these alternatives. Would it forever to reach that level.