EU Urged to Ditch Visa and Mastercard

US tech dominance has increasingly worried the EU amid rising tensions with Washington since US President Donald Trump’s return to office.

Weimert, CEO of the European Payments Initiative [EPI], warned the EU is “highly dependent on international [payment] solutions,” according to the Financial Times.

“We have nice national assets like domestic [payment] card schemes... but we don’t have anything cross-border,” she said, adding that “we need action urgently.”

Commenting on the ‘digital euro’ promoted by the European Central Bank [ECB] and expected to be launched in 2029, Weimert said that “we are a little bit out of time.”

According to ECB data cited by FT, Visa and Mastercard accounted for nearly two-thirds of card transactions in the Eurozone in 2022.

Last month, Miguel De Bruycker, director of Belgium’s Centre for Cybersecurity [CCB], warned that the EU has “lost the internet,” unable to fully store data domestically due to US tech dominance.

In an effort to reduce dependence on US tech, the French government said last month that it intended to phase out American videoconferencing services, such as Teams and Zoom, within a year and replace them with domestically developed apps

In August, Germany said it would boost European and open-source software use in government, while last year the EU fined US tech giants like Meta, X, and Google for antitrust and data-rule violations.

Trump blasted Brussels’ decisions as “unfair” and “discriminatory,” threatening the EU with tariffs.