Macron Pushes Sovereign Payment Model as Carte Bancaire Seeks Visa and Mastercard Alternative

(PARIS, FRANCE) — President Emmanuel Macron stepped up his campaign on Tuesday for a European “sovereign payment model,” warning that France and Europe should not let the core of their transactions depend on U.S. groups such as Visa and Mastercard.

In a video message to the Carte Bancaire summit in Paris, Macron framed payments as a matter of national and regional control. “We need to build a sovereign payment model. Giving up control over payments would mean accepting that the core of our transactions depends on actors who are not necessarily aligned with us, who do not necessarily have the same interests.”

Macron also called payment systems an “essential part of French and European sovereignty,” arguing that dependence on foreign-controlled infrastructure leaves Europe exposed at a time of sharper transatlantic strains.

A broader debate over control and leverage

His intervention comes as European officials weigh how far U.S. policy can reach into the daily functioning of finance, travel and digital regulation. Payment rails, once treated largely as commercial plumbing, have moved closer to the center of that debate.

Pressure has grown since a series of U.S. actions in late 2025 and early 2026 that French and European officials viewed as an assertion of geopolitical leverage. Those measures did not target the payments sector directly, but they fed concern in Paris and Brussels that reliance on U.S.-linked networks creates vulnerabilities well beyond card fees and market share.

A central part of that backdrop was Presidential Proclamation 10998 and a related USCIS directive that took effect on January 1, 2026. According to USCIS Policy Memorandum PM-602-0194, the agency ordered personnel to “Place a hold on all pending benefit applications for aliens listed in Presidential Proclamation (PP) 10998, Restricting and Limiting the Entry of Foreign Nationals To Protect the Security of the United States.”

The memo also said: “USCIS remains dedicated to ensuring aliens from high-risk countries of concern. do not pose risks to national security. the flow of aliens from countries with high overstay rates, significant fraud, or both must stop.”

Those measures included visa bans on former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton and French experts involved in digital regulation. On December 24, 2025, Macron condemned them as “intimidation and coercion aimed at undermining European digital sovereignty.”

For European policymakers, the concern is not limited to visas. They see a broader pattern in which decisions made in Washington can affect access to systems that people and institutions use every day, from immigration processes to digital platforms and financial services.

That concern sharpened in February 2026, when ICC Judge Nicolas Guillou, a French national, had his Visa card canceled by his French bank following U.S. sanctions tied to his work at the International Criminal Court. European officials have pointed to the episode as an example of how American payment networks can be used to enforce U.S. policy against European citizens.

The case carried symbolic weight well beyond one card account. It suggested that financial dependence is not only about who processes payments, but also about who can interrupt them.

Europe’s push for alternatives

Against that backdrop, Macron’s call for a sovereign payment model reflects a push already underway in parts of Europe to build alternatives with less exposure to U.S. networks. That effort has gained urgency as policymakers and banks look at whether strategic autonomy can extend to checkouts, online payments and person-to-person transfers.

Visa and Mastercard now process about 61% to 66% of all card transactions in the Eurozone. In the UK, the figure reaches 95%, a level that shows how deeply embedded the two U.S. groups remain in European payments.

European backers of domestic and regional alternatives argue that such dependence affects more than resilience. It also touches pricing, data location and the ability of governments and regulators to act without outside pressure.

One of the most visible attempts to change that balance is Wero, the mobile payment service launched by the European Payments Initiative. As of March 2026, Wero had reached 48.5 million users across Belgium, France, and Germany.

Supporters present Wero as a way to bypass Visa and Mastercard in everyday payments, particularly where direct account-to-account transfers can replace card-based transactions. European consumers are being encouraged to adopt Wero and “Pay by Bank” options at checkouts, while merchants in France and Germany are being encouraged to favor those methods over U.S. networks.

That commercial argument runs alongside the sovereignty case. Merchants stand to cut interchange costs and reduce data transfers to U.S. servers if more payments move through local or regional channels.

The European Central Bank’s digital euro project sits in the same wider debate, though on a longer timeline. The ECB plans a full rollout of the digital euro by 2029, with the project designed as a digital legal tender that cannot be disconnected by foreign entities.

For now, cards still dominate much of the consumer economy, and Visa and Mastercard remain difficult to displace at scale. They benefit from vast acceptance networks, ingrained consumer habits and decades of integration into bank systems, mobile wallets and online commerce.

Political events give the issue new force

Even so, political events have given the European debate new force. What was once largely a market structure issue has become intertwined with sanctions, immigration controls and questions over who ultimately governs access to payment infrastructure.

Those questions have also resurfaced in the United States. On March 27, 2026, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson sent letters to Visa and Mastercard warning against “de-banking” individuals based on political views.

The letters focused on U.S. domestic concerns, but they were watched closely in Europe. For officials already alarmed by the reach of U.S. policy, the warning reinforced the idea that payment systems can become entangled in political disputes and regulatory pressure.

That has widened the audience for Macron’s message beyond central bankers and card executives. Consumers, merchants, regulators and companies exposed to cross-border rules all have a stake in how Europe answers it.

For individuals, the implications stretch from the supermarket checkout to immigration paperwork. Travelers and visa applicants affected by PM-602-0194 face delays in H-1B, L-1, and O-1 visa adjudications, adding to friction for European professionals seeking to work in the United States.

Costs have also risen. USCIS increased premium processing fees on March 1, 2026, reflecting inflation and adding to the burden on applicants who want faster decisions on work authorization.

That mix of higher costs, slower adjudications and closer screening has fed the sense among some European officials that dependence on U.S.-controlled systems carries practical risks, not just abstract strategic ones. Payments have become part of that conversation because they sit at the intersection of finance, regulation and daily life.

Macron’s choice of the Carte Bancaire summit for his remarks underscored the French dimension of that effort. France has long had a national card scheme and has often pushed harder than some other European countries for digital and financial autonomy.

His latest intervention also reflects a wider European habit of using moments of external pressure to accelerate integration projects that had struggled to gain political traction. Payments fit that pattern: a technical field that becomes politically charged when outside events expose what dependence can mean.

The challenge for Europe is that building alternatives takes time, investment and consumer adoption. A sovereign payment model cannot be declared into existence. It has to win users, merchants and banks away from systems that already work across borders and platforms.

That is why initiatives such as Wero matter even if they remain smaller than Visa and Mastercard. They offer a route for Europe to test whether sovereignty can be turned into a product people will use, rather than a slogan officials repeat.

For Macron, the case rests on control. His warning on Tuesday cast payments not as a niche banking issue, but as part of the wider contest over who sets the terms for Europe’s digital and economic life.

“We need to build a sovereign payment model,” he said, tying the argument to a broader fear in European capitals that a transaction approved today can become a point of leverage tomorrow.