Europe Quietly Stopped Paying Visa

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Visa and Mastercard are projected to lose 17% of their European transaction volume this year.

Twenty-five percent next year. Forty percent by 2028.

The dependency Europe identified was not a security risk or a data sovereignty concern. It was a fee.

American card networks charge European merchants between 1.76% and 2.13% per transaction in interchange fees. That is the cost of using infrastructure that Europe did not build, does not control, and cannot renegotiate. Every sale a European merchant processes through Visa or Mastercard sends a percentage to a company headquartered in San Francisco or Purchase, New York.

The EU's response was regulatory and structural at the same time.

The regulatory piece: the SEPA instant credit transfer mandate. Under this rule, every Eurozone bank was required to receive instant bank transfers by January 2025 and to send them by October 2025. This made direct account-to-account payment the baseline infrastructure across the continent, not a premium feature offered by some banks and not others.

The structural piece: Wero. Sixteen major European banks formed the European Payments Initiative and launched Wero in July 2024. It is a unified cross-border payment platform built entirely on the SEPA infrastructure. The Netherlands' iDEAL, one of the largest national payment systems in Europe, began migrating into Wero in January 2026. Full absorption of regional systems is targeted for 2027.

The cost to a European merchant using Wero instead of Visa: 30% to 70% less per transaction.

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The mechanism is worth naming precisely because it is not a boycott or a political statement. No European institution announced that it was leaving Visa. The EU simply mandated that the cheaper, faster, domestically controlled alternative had to exist and had to work. Merchants adopted it because the economics were obvious. Wero expanded because the banks backing it had every incentive to make it succeed.

Visa and Mastercard are losing market share to a system that was built specifically to make their fees unnecessary. They were not banned. They were made optional. In markets where a cheaper option works reliably, optional becomes rare.

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The European account-to-account e-commerce market is forecast to surpass 850 billion euros by 2026.

That market needs infrastructure that Visa cannot provide and that most existing payment platforms were not designed for. The builders already moving into this space are building single-integration platforms that handle regional account-to-account payment systems under one API, so a merchant serving Germany, France, and the Netherlands does not need three separate integrations. Wero's roadmap extends into buy-now-pay-later, loyalty programs, recurring payments, and subscriptions, which means the checkout experience itself is being rebuilt from the bank account outward rather than the card outward.

The procurement gap is not theoretical. Any European merchant building or rebuilding their checkout flow in the next 24 months needs payment infrastructure that treats direct bank transfer as the default and card networks as the fallback. That is a design decision and an integration decision. The builders who understand the SEPA rails, the Wero expansion timeline, and the regional system migration schedules are the ones who will be positioned to serve that market as it consolidates.

404 Found covers AI developments from a European Insider, three times a week. Next issue: Friday.

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