Visa and Mastercard handle nearly half of Europe’s card payments. The digital euro aims to change that

The European Central Bank’s €1.3 billion bet offers an alternative to the U.S. payments giants, but it faces an uphill battle to win over consumers, merchants, and banks.

“Payment systems are not neutral; they are instruments of power,” Gilles Boyer, a French member of the European Parliament, said in June. “We Europeans have had many wake-up calls about our dependence on the U.S. We are fully awake now.” That same day, the European Parliament’s economic affairs committee voted 43 to 14 to back the digital euro.

The new form of digital central bank currency, proposed by the European Central Bank (ECB), will act as an electronic alternative to the physical money issued by the bank, offering people and businesses in the euro area a free and universally accepted option for making payments.

A 12-month pilot is scheduled to start in the second half of 2027, and 36 finance firms, including Deutsche Bank, Revolut, Adyen, and UniCredit, are signed up to participate. Businesses will need to accept digital euros, in-store and online, by 2029.

Finance is one of several fronts where EU officials fear the bloc has become dependent on U.S. companies. Almost half (47%) of the eurozone’s card payments value was processed by Visa and Mastercard in 2025, according to GlobalData. In the U.K., the concentration is even higher, with 95% of card transactions relying on payment systems owned by the two U.S. companies. Fifteen of the euro area’s 21 countries still lack a domestic digital payment solution, according to the ECB, and no current European payment scheme works seamlessly across the entire bloc.

European policymakers are wary of the disruption that could occur if access to the two U.S. payment networks were cut off. Under U.S. President Donald Trump, whose administration has leaned harder on financial sanctions as a foreign-policy tool, that urgency has grown.

“It won’t be easy to replace any of the existing payment methods overnight if one of the big networks decides to shut down in Europe,” says Radi El Haj, chief executive of RS2, a payments technology firm involved in the pilot. “The ECB wants Europe to have its own foothold rather than depend entirely on foreign-built infrastructure.”

Physical cash, the one form of money the ECB still fully controls, is fading from daily use. The share of companies in the eurozone not accepting cash has tripled to 12% over the past three years, according to the ECB, and it has already stopped issuing €500 notes.

47%Percentage of eurozone card payments value processed by Visa and Mastercard in........

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