EPI chief urges reduction in Europe’s dependence on Visa and Mastercard

Europe needs to chopped its reliance connected US outgo groups including Visa and Mastercard “urgently”, according to comments reported by the Financial Times from the caput of a European banking consortium.

The remarks travel arsenic policymakers pass that the marketplace dominance of US providers could beryllium utilized arsenic leverage if transatlantic relations were to worsen.

“We are highly babelike connected planetary [payment] solutions,” said Martina Weimert, main enforcement of the European Payments Initiative (EPI), which brings unneurotic 16 European banks and fiscal services companies.

“Yes, we person bully nationalist assets similar home [payment] paper schemes . . . but we don’t person thing cross-border.

“If we accidental independency is truthful important and we each cognize it’s a timing contented . . . we request enactment urgently,’’ she said.

The European Central Bank has antecedently said Visa and Mastercard made up adjacent to two-thirds of paper transactions successful the Eurozone successful 2022.

The ECB besides noted that 13 subordinate states had nary nationalist alternate to the US networks, portion existing home schemes were seeing falling usage.

As currency payments proceed to decline, officials person stepped up warnings astir the grade of Europe’s vulnerability to US outgo companies and the hazard that specified power could beryllium exploited successful the lawsuit of a superior governmental rupture.

The contented is being framed alongside different areas wherever officials reason the EU has go heavy reliant connected American firms. Belgium’s cyber information main precocious said Europe had “lost the internet” owed to the power of ample US exertion groups.

“Deep integration created dependencies that could beryllium abused erstwhile not each partners were allies,” warned Mario Draghi, erstwhile ECB president, successful a caller speech. “Interdependence, erstwhile seen arsenic a root of communal restraint, became a root of leverage and control.”

EPI, whose members see BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank, launched Wero successful 2024 arsenic a European alternate to Apple Pay.

The integer payments work present claims to person 48.5 cardinal users crossed Belgium, France and Germany, and it plans to widen into online and carnal retail payments by 2027.

Weimert said banks and merchants broadly had ‘’awareness” of the lawsuit for gathering a cross-border European payments network, adding that the “geopolitical context” had pushed the taxable into the mainstream.

However, the ECB has pointed to the challenges of gathering standard done backstage initiatives, noting that erstwhile attempts - including an earlier EPI effort to make a competing paper strategy - “have shown the trouble of scaling”.