In a public policy paper published at the end of February, the European Credit Research Institute (ECRI) argues that European sovereignty in payments should not be built in opposition to international players, but alongside them, by developing competitive European alternatives within a “open and interoperable” ecosystem.
The Institute, founded by a group of banking and financial institutions - whose current members include the American companies VISA and ACI Worldwide, the German credit agency Schuffa and the Spanish bank Santander - advocates a ‘multi-rail’ European ecosystem, where several infrastructures coexist: international card networks, European direct payment systems from bank account to bank account (‘A2A’), and eventually, a future ‘digital euro’.
While recognising the legitimate concerns of European sovereignty, ECRI considers that the political debate tends to overestimate the continent’s dependence on US players by confusing different levels of the payments value chain.
“When policymakers place Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal in the same category of ‘American payment systems’, they obscure critical distinctions that should inform regulatory responses”, notes the institute.
“Conflating interface with infrastructure leads to misdiagnosis, and misdiagnosis leads to misguided policy”, he points out.
See ECRI’s note: https://aeur.eu/f/l0v (Original version in French by Bernard Denuit)