Payment sovereignty without walls: the case for Europe’s multi-rail ecosystem

The debate on European payment sovereignty has intensified amid geopolitical tensions and growing concerns about the dominance of non-EU card schemes. However, the political discourse frequently conflates fundamentally different actors and layers of the retail payments value chain, treating card schemes, digital wallets and account-to-account overlay services as interchangeable threats.

This ECRI Policy Brief unbundles the payments value chain into its constituent layers, identifies where genuine dependencies exist, clarifies the distinct roles of international card schemes, processing infrastructure, digital wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, and European account-to-account initiatives. It argues that strategic resilience is best achieved not through protectionism or excluding global players but through constructing a competitive, multi-rail ecosystem where European initiatives – the digital euro, EPI/Wero and interoperable national A2A schemes – coexist with and compete against international card networks.

Several policy recommendations are provided, which aim to ensure regulation supports the ecosystem’s development without sacrificing the benefits of global interoperability or consumer choice.

Judith Arnal is Associate Senior Research Fellow at ECRI and CEPS.