Payment networks: reliance on Visa and Mastercard exposes Europe to vulnerabilities amid concerns for payment sovereignty

Large numbers of the world’s countries rely on the two largest payment networks for their card payments: Visa and Mastercard. And while for many years this may have been satisfactory, in a world dogged by instability and by cyber threats, the prospect of an outage of these systems should encourage states to establish back-up systems, as well as individual national circuits. Across Europe, the degree of dependence on international payment schemes varies considerably.

The current national operators

According to research undertaken by the European Central Bank (ECB), in the euro zone, thirteen countries rely entirely on international card schemes for card transactions, and in 2022 international card schemes accounted for approximately 61 per cent of euro area card payments, with national schemes making up the remaining 39 per cent.

The large Euro-zone countries, Germany, France and Italy, all have their own national payment networks, and in each of these countries, these domestic processors account for a significant portion of total payments. In Italy, 2022 figures estimated that 36 per cent of payments were made with the native Bancomat processor, meaning that 64 per cent of card payments were made through the large international processors, either Mastercard or Visa. In Germany, the Girocard processor is deeply embedded, and is the most used of the payment networks in that country, accounting for 8.3 billion transactions in 2025.

Importantly, while almost all of the national card payment processors are headquartered in the EU, the large international processors, which account for 61 per cent of total payments made, are headquartered outside of the EU. Many of the smaller eurozone countries, but also some larger ones such as Spain, the Netherlands and Austria don’t have national networks. Additionally, most the EU’s non-Euro-zone countries rely entirely on international payment processors.

Both the Netherlands and Spain, larger EU economies, have developed their own online payment methods, IDeal and Bizum respectively, which bypass the international processors but only in the case of online payments, leaving physical card payments to the large multinational circuits.

International card processing networks

The effects of this, while not immediately apparent, could be crucial in the case of a cyber-attack, or in the case of a geopolitical shift with the US, where the three largest processors, Visa, MasterCard and American Express are all based.

In an increasingly turbulent world, this dependence on foreign-owned payment infrastructure raises important questions about economic sovereignty and strategic resilience. A major outage affecting Visa or Mastercard, whether caused by a cyber-attack, technical failure or geopolitical dispute, could severely disrupt day-to-day economic activity across much of Europe, in a continent that has now become dependent on card payments for over 100 billion payments annually.

Recent years have already demonstrated how financial systems can be controlled under geopolitical pressure. Russia’s exclusion from parts of the global payment ecosystem following the invasion of Ukraine illustrated how access to payment networks can rapidly become politicised. While European states are close allies of the United States, growing uncertainty in global politics has encouraged policymakers to reconsider the risks of excessive external dependence in sectors that could be deeply critical.

The Future

European institutions are increasingly considering the need for greater “strategic autonomy” in the financial sector. European policymakers have made payment sovereignty a priority, as a fractured international order raises the risk of access to payments systems being weaponised, and new forms of money, such as crypto currencies, challenge the euro’s role. The ECB is looking to introduce a digital euro by 2029, which will essentially be an online wallet guaranteed by the ECB but operated by private companies including banks.

The uncertainties of the future, however, mean that the European institutions are eager to act on reassuring individual European countries, as well as citizens, of the reliability of card-payment services. As cash usage declines and digital payments become central to daily life, control over payment infrastructure is increasingly becoming a question not only of convenience, but also of national sovereignty and defence.