European lawmakers are sounding an alarm over the continent’s near-total dependence on American payment networks, warning that President Donald Trump could weaponize Visa and Mastercard to cut off transactions across Europe with little warning.
“Visa, Mastercard… the emergency is our payment system. Trump can cut us off completely,” Aurore Lalucq, chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, said in a video posted Tuesday that has drawn over 177,000 views. “The rest is poetry.”
Lalucq and fellow French MEP Raphaël Glucksmann are calling for a “European Airbus for payment systems” — invoking the consortium created in 1970 to challenge Boeing’s aerospace dominance — to break what they describe as a dangerous American stranglehold on Europe’s financial infrastructure.
The two US companies processed an estimated 80% of all card payments worldwide, excluding China, in the first quarter of 2024, according to OECD data cited by the European Central Bank. In Europe specifically, Visa and Mastercard handle approximately 61% of card transactions, with Visa claiming 51.3% of European purchase volume in 2024 and Mastercard holding the remainder.
“It goes very far into your personal life,” Glucksmann said on France 2 television January 19, describing Europe’s reliance on American payment rails as “a situation of vassalisation” that is “profoundly unbearable.” “The payment methods you use constantly, daily, belong to the United States of America and if the Americans want, they can suspend payments in Europe.”
Lalucq added on social media January 18 that “Trump has no limits. He can cut everything off. He has already done so,” citing previous US pressure on the International Criminal Court and other institutions.
The warnings intensified after Trump’s Greenland tariff threats sent markets plunging 2.1% Tuesday, wiping out $1.2 trillion in value. Though Trump suspended tariffs on eight European countries on January 21, the volatility heightened European concerns about US economic coercion and exposed vulnerabilities in the continent’s payment infrastructure.
Read: Trump Backs Down on Europe Tariffs After Market Rout, Reviving ‘TACO’ Trade
The US possesses “judicial and operational levers” to restrict European banks’ access to American payment networks, according to French public radio France Info. However, economist Anne-Laure Delatte told the outlet such action remains “highly unlikely.”
Frédéric Guyonnet, president of France’s National Union of Banks and Credit, dismissed Lalucq’s warnings as political theater designed to promote the digital euro. “It’s a false argument from Madame Lalucq to promote the retail digital euro,” he said.
Europe has launched two initiatives to reduce payment dependence on US networks, though both face significant hurdles.
The European Payments Initiative rolled out Wero in July 2024, a mobile payment system allowing instant bank-to-bank transfers without card network intermediaries. Currently operational in Germany, France, and Belgium, Wero has 14 million users as of November 2024 and is expanding to the Netherlands and Luxembourg this year.
Sixteen major European banks, including BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, and Worldline, back the system, which replaces domestic solutions like France’s Paylib and Germany’s Giropay. Wero enabled its first e-commerce transaction in December 2024 and plans to expand to physical point-of-sale payments.
However, Wero remains far from matching Visa and Mastercard’s ubiquity. Adoption faces challenges as merchants need participating bank relationships to process Wero payments.
Neither Visa nor Mastercard has indicated any intention to curtail European operations, and both companies continue expanding aggressively across the continent. In the United Kingdom, Visa and Mastercard process 95% of all card payments. Visa converted more than 20 million cards from domestic European schemes to Visa-branded cards between 2018 and 2023, with millions more in migration.
“The position as an oligopoly of the two large American companies Visa and Mastercard may be concerning,” concluded a November 2025 report commissioned by the European Parliament and authored by two Italian researchers.
EU finance ministers agreed on a roadmap for the digital euro in September 2025. Lagarde described the initiative as “not just a means of payment, it is also a political statement concerning the sovereignty of Europe and its capacity to handle payment, including on a cross-border basis, with a European infrastructure and solution.”
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