The Digital Euro and the Banks’ New Payment Network Are Racing to Replace Visa in Europe

Europe’s banks and its central bank want the same thing, fewer European payments running through American card networks, and they disagree on who should own the replacement. On Saturday 24 October the European Central Bank (ECB) published an interview in which Executive Board member Piero Cipollone set out the case for the digital euro as Europe’s own alternative. He argued that Europe leans on non-European card schemes, which according to Eurosystem figures handle almost two thirds of the euro area’s card payments, and that small shops can be charged as much as four times what large retailers pay.

The interview never mentioned the European Network for Payments, the company five bank-owned payment services set up in Madrid on 30 September to connect 130 million users in 13 countries.

What Cipollone told Milano Finanza

Cipollone compared payments to energy and defence, two areas where Europe has learned it cannot rely only on outside suppliers. He cited Italy’s Bancomat as the exception in a euro area where most countries have no domestic scheme for paying in shops. He also noted that the online share of Italian payments quadrupled between 2019 and 2024 to almost a quarter, mostly by card, and that two thirds of online card payments run on non-European schemes. His proposed remedy is a digital euro distributed by banks and authorised intermediaries, with costs for merchants capped by law.

He gave a timetable without committing to a launch year. A pilot with real transactions starts in 2027, and 36 market operators, seven of them Italian, already work on its preparation, the group the ECB recruited before any law. Asked about 2029, Cipollone said in the published interview that issuance depends on Brussels adopting the regulation, which he hopes happens by the end of this year.

What the banks built while the law waited

The European Network for Payments joins Italy’s Bancomat, Spain’s Bizum, Portugal’s MB WAY, the Nordic Vipps MobilePay and Wero, the wallet run by the bank-owned European Payments Initiative (EPI). The five founders hold equal shares, and their services together reach more than seven in ten people in the EU and Norway. Users keep their own apps, and the network links them through a common layer of instant account-to-account payments, starting with transfers between people in different countries and adding online and in-store payments later.

The founders presented their cooperation in a February memorandum of understanding as proof that European banks already have the infrastructure and scale to deliver an alternative quickly. The alliance linking Bancomat, Bizum and MB WAY had already moved €6 million across borders during 2025 without any promotion, according to the same document. Shareholders will cover the network’s operating costs in its first years, EPI’s chief executive, Martina Weimert, told Reuters.

That design answers a question The Bright Minded left open when Wero arrived at Money20/20 in June, namely whether Europeans would change a payment habit that already works for them. Under the bank network, nobody has to switch app.

Two answers to one dependency

Banking associations in France and Germany have argued openly that their own products make the digital euro unnecessary in its current form. Daniel Baal, chairman of the French Banking Federation (FBF), told a payments sovereignty event in Brussels on 15 April that the ECB’s design does not solve the sovereignty problem, would cost European banks an extra €18 billion, and would set public and private solutions against each other. The same speech presented Wero as Europe’s concrete, working answer.

German savings banks made a similar case. Ulrich Reuter, president of their association, the DSGV, wrote in a November 2025 opinion piece that sovereignty can only come from strong, competitive European providers, named Wero as the better route, and warned that a digital euro could pull deposits out of banks.

The ECB’s reply has stayed consistent. Cipollone told the European Parliament’s economic committee in April 2025 that the digital euro was not designed as a rival to private initiatives and that its common standards would help them operate across the whole euro area. At a hearing in November 2025, the Parliament’s rapporteur, Fernando Navarrete, asked whether the ECB would weigh the private sector’s progress on sovereignty before deciding to issue, and Cipollone described the digital euro as a public railway on which private trains could run, according to Ledger Insights.

The disagreement sits inside a wider political turn. In August, The Bright Minded read Lagarde’s WEF remarks as a signal that Europe intends to build its own growth engine and depend less on Washington. Banks and the ECB both accept that direction, and their dispute is over who controls the infrastructure once it exists.

The same split runs through euro money

The pattern repeats beyond payment apps. Banks are building their own euro token through Qivalis, a 37-bank consortium preparing a euro stablecoin for a market where dollar tokens hold about 99% and the euro about 0.24%. Regulators, meanwhile, set the terms for foreign money, and the ESMA opinion on stablecoins showed that Europe accepts dollar tokens only when their issuers come under European supervision.

For anyone working in fintech, the result is a market where private European products and public rules are being built at the same time, by institutions that agree on the goal and compete for control of the outcome. EPI said in December 2024 that it is willing to carry the digital euro inside the Wero wallet, which shows the two projects can share one channel.

Where the decision now sits

Legislators hold the deciding vote. The European Parliament voted 416 to 169 in July to open negotiations with member states on the digital euro, and EU leaders set the end of 2026 as the deadline for agreement. Merchants hold the commercial vote, and their choice will turn on fees, where Cipollone’s offer is a cap written into law.

Europe is going to have its own payment system either way, and the open question is whether it belongs to the banks that already run European payments or to a central bank that wants legal caps on what merchants pay.

Editor’s note

Every piece goes through careful verification, but mistakes can happen. Readers who spot an error or have additional information can write to rosalia@thebrightminded.com.