Europe's Bold Plan to Break Visa and Mastercard's Grip

Michael Johnson · 2026-10-01

### A New Player Enters the Payments Game Imagine paying for coffee in Portugal using your Spanish mobile app. No currency conversion headaches. No international card fees. That's the vision behind the European Network for Payments (ENP), a coalition of payment providers working to connect national systems across the continent. The goal? Build a common technical layer so participating systems can talk to each other. Instant account-to-account payments, cross-border transactions, the whole thing. For example, a customer could use Spain's Bizum to pay a merchant using Portugal's MB WAY. Simple, right? Well, not exactly. ### Who's Behind This? The venture has serious backing. Wero digital wallet, Italy's Bancomat, and Vipps MobilePay (which operates across the Nordic countries) are all on board. Together, these providers serve about 130 million customers across 13 countries. That's more than 70% of the EU. ### Why Europe Wants Its Own Rails Here's the thing: U.S.-based payment rails process over 60% of card transactions in Europe. And 13 of the 21 eurozone member states rely exclusively on international card schemes like Visa and Mastercard. That dependence has been bugging European policymakers for years. "Europeans have been chasing the thought of their own payment network since the first Payment Services Directive in 2007," said Brian Riley, Co-Head of Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research. "The objective is to create a network similar to Mastercard and Visa, but that is easier said than done." He's not wrong. Political boundaries might be unified, but harmonizing financial institutions? That's awkward at best. Consumer and merchant behaviors differ wildly from country to country. ### The Road Ahead The ENP grew out of a memorandum of understanding signed in February 2026. But the groundwork started earlier. In March 2025, Bizum connected with Bancomat and MB WAY, enabling mobile transfers among more than 50 million people across Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Andorra. The rollout will likely begin with cross-border peer-to-peer payments, then move to e-commerce and point-of-sale. No target dates yet. Expanding interoperability across multiple national systems takes time. > "There is likely a decade before something is viable in the EU market," Riley said. "And by then, as payments constantly reinvent themselves, who can imagine what payments will look like." So, will this actually work? That's the million-dollar question. Europe has the will and the players. What it needs now is patience and cooperation. If it pulls this off, the payments landscape could look very different in ten years.