The Last Mile of Economic Sovereignty

Picture the Carrousel du Louvre on a crisp March morning — not its usual crowd of tourists orbiting the glass pyramid, but 3,000 bankers, fintech executives, and policy architects filling its hall for the 2026 CB Summit. A video address from the Élysée palace fills the screen. Emmanuel Macron, never one to undersell a moment, declares that payment is “the last mile of economic sovereignty” — and that surrendering it would mean placing the beating heart of France’s economic transactions in the hands of players with different interests.

That’s not a throwaway line from a president looking for a headline. It’s a declaration of geopolitical intent.

For the first time since 2021, the market share of France’s Cartes Bancaires (GIE CB) ticked upward in the second half of 2025, reaching 63.6% compared to 61.4% six months earlier MoneyVox — a modest number, but one that breaks a four-year losing streak. Between 2021 and early 2025, CB’s market share had collapsed from 89.6% to just above 63% — a loss of 26 percentage points that reflected a growing structural dependence on international payment rails. BDOR

That slide is now in reverse. And France — backed by its banks, its president, and an increasingly coherent European coalition — intends to make sure it stays that way.

The Duopoly Nobody Wants to Talk About

Let’s be precise about the problem before we assess the solution, because the scale of American payment dominance over European daily life is genuinely stunning.

Visa and Mastercard together process approximately $24 trillion in transactions globally every year, including roughly $4.7 trillion in Europe, where card payments account for 56% of all cashless transactions. ITIF Transactions in 13 out of 21 eurozone member states still run exclusively on international card schemes, and US card brands handle 61% of euro-area card transactions. Euronews

Every time a French bakery taps “accept” on a contactless payment, a Dutch e-commerce store processes an order, or a German consumer splits a restaurant bill, the data — the metadata of economic life — flows through infrastructure owned by American corporations, governed by American law, subject to American geopolitical pressure. As the ECB has noted, virtually all European card and mobile payments currently run through non-European infrastructure controlled by Visa, Mastercard, PayPal or Alipay. European Business Magazine

This was once considered a reasonable trade-off for the efficiency it bought. Today, in an era of tariffs-as-weapons and financial sanctions-as-statecraft, the calculus has changed entirely.

In February 2026, the ECB warned of a “strong reliance” on international card schemes that is “problematic due to data protection, traceability, resilience and market power concerns.” Euronews The institution that prints the euro is now officially on record saying European economies cannot afford this dependency.

Lagarde herself framed the journey ahead as “a march towards independence,” Business Today linking payment sovereignty explicitly to the broader Capital Markets Union project — the EU’s still-unfulfilled ambition to build a unified financial supermarket capable of mobilizing private capital at the scale needed to compete with the United States.

What Co-Badging Actually Does — And Why It Matters

To understand CB’s play, you need to understand the plumbing.

Most cards in France are “co-badged” — they carry two logos, typically CB alongside Visa or Mastercard. When a payment is made, the terminal (or the bank’s routing engine) chooses which network processes the transaction. For years, the drift has been toward the international networks, especially for online and mobile payments. Some banks, notably BPCE — which encompasses Banque Populaire and Caisse d’Épargne — briefly issued cards exclusively on Visa’s rails, bypassing CB entirely. So did digital challengers like Revolut, N26, and Qonto.

This isn’t just market competition. It’s infrastructure erosion. Each Visa-only card issued by a French bank is a small act of surrender in a larger strategic contest.

In 2025, GIE CB asked its members to abandon their exclusive partnerships with American networks. Boursorama BPCE reversed course and returned to co-badged issuance. The market data responded: CB stopped bleeding share for the first time in four years.

The return of co-badged cards at BPCE, combined with CB’s integration into Apple Pay, is among the key drivers of the 2025 rebound, as mobile payment continues to embed itself more deeply into French consumer behavior — with 2.4 billion mobile payment operations recorded by the Banque de France in 2024, a 53.6% annual increase. MoneyVox

And CB isn’t stopping there. GIE CB president Gérald Grégoire confirmed in 2026 that the network’s momentum is continuing, with Samsung Pay and Google Pay now docking into the CB ecosystem — and Wero Pay integration coming soon. Boursorama

That last sentence matters enormously, and we’ll come back to it.

Why France Is Uniquely Positioned to Lead This Fight

A Rare Beast: The Cooperative Card Network

CB’s structure is its secret weapon. Created in 1984 as a groupement d’intérêt économique — a form of economic interest group without profit motive — it’s an industry cooperative rather than a publicly traded corporation with quarterly earnings pressure. Its governance body includes BNP Paribas, Société Générale, Crédit Agricole, and HSBC France among its 12 principal members. That cooperative alignment of incentives is what enabled the 2025 push on co-badging: CB could ask its members to act in collective interest, whereas Visa and Mastercard’s incentive is always to deepen their own market penetration.

The JPMorgan Signal

In March 2024, a striking thing happened: JPMorgan became the first American “principal member” of CB, joining the 12-member governance body that sets the terms of France’s domestic payment network. Finextra The world’s largest bank by market capitalization chose to route its French merchant clients through CB — not because it was forced to, but because it sought to “provide competitive transaction costs and leading local processing performance,” skirting the more expensive products of Visa and Mastercard. Finextra

Read that again. An American bank joined a French card network specifically to avoid paying Visa and Mastercard’s fees on behalf of its clients. If the commercial logic works for JPMorgan, it works for any institution with a cost-conscious merchant book in France.

This is the hidden economics of CB’s push. Interchange fees are real money. Every basis point that stays within the CB ecosystem is a basis point that doesn’t cross the Atlantic. For Europe’s retailers — already squeezed by inflation, logistics costs, and rising customer acquisition costs through digital advertising — this is not an abstract sovereignty argument. It’s a margin lever.

77 Million Cards, and Macron’s Political Cover

CB has 77 million cards in circulation and, as Macron noted at the CB Summit, represents 80% of domestic transactions in France MoneyVox — an extraordinary base from which to build. No other European country begins this fight with that scale of domestic infrastructure. Italy’s Bancomat, Spain’s Bizum, Portugal’s MB WAY — they all exist, but none commands the market density that CB does at home.

Macron’s direct involvement matters beyond optics. At the CB Summit 2026, his video address framed the conference around three themes: sovereignty, resilience, and innovation, with payment described as the central question of how to guarantee continuity and independence of transactions in a geopolitically fractured world. Nepting When a head of state addresses an industry conference with a video message — a format typically reserved for climate summits and NATO councils — it signals that this is now politique d’État, not just fintech strategy.

The Wero Alliance: When 130 Million Users Change the Equation

CB is not fighting this battle alone. And that might be what makes 2026 different from every previous failed attempt at European payment unity.

Wero, the mobile payment service built by the European Payments Initiative, already has over 47 million registered users across Belgium, France, and Germany, has processed more than €7.5 billion in transfers, and counts over 1,100 member institutions. Retail payments launched in Germany at the end of 2025, with Lidl, Decathlon, Rossmann and Air Europa among early adopters. France and Belgium follow in 2026. European Business Magazine

But the watershed moment came on February 2, 2026. EPI signed a memorandum of understanding with the EuroPA Alliance — a coalition of national payment systems including Italy’s Bancomat, Spain’s Bizum, Portugal’s MB WAY, and the Nordics’ Vipps MobilePay — instantly connecting approximately 130 million users across 13 countries, covering roughly 72% of the EU and Norway population. Cross-border peer-to-peer payments are set to launch in 2026, with e-commerce and point-of-sale payments following in 2027. European Business Magazine

This is the crucial architectural shift. Previous European payment initiatives — most notably Project Monnet, which launched in 2008 and collapsed by 2012 — tried to build a single pan-European network from scratch, and fell apart on the rocks of national pride, conflicting bank interests, and the sheer commercial difficulty of dislodging entrenched incumbents. The EPI-EuroPA approach is structurally different: it’s building a network of networks, federating existing schemes rather than replacing them.

Wero’s Integration with CB: The Technical Endgame

Here’s the piece that most English-language coverage has missed. The integration of Wero Pay into the CB network — confirmed by GIE CB’s president at the 2026 Summit — means that France’s domestic card infrastructure and Europe’s emerging pan-continental payment wallet are being stitched together into a single ecosystem.

EPI CEO Martina Weimert described the objective as covering “all customer use cases including invoice payments, at a European scale” — the goal being that Wero becomes indispensable rather than merely available. La Gazette France CB provides the physical card rails; Wero provides the cross-border digital layer. Together, they’re assembling something that begins to look like a full-stack European alternative to Visa and Mastercard.

Weimert’s urgency about the timeline is telling. At the CB Summit, she said plainly that Europe does not have the luxury of waiting for the ECB’s digital euro to strengthen its payment sovereignty — Wero has both the vocation and the capacity to reach 100% of the European population. Nepting The digital euro, a central bank-backed digital currency, is now projected for 2029 MoneyVox, and the European Parliament has not yet passed the required legislation. Wero is the near-term sovereign option. CB is its French anchor.

Why This Attempt Might Actually Succeed

The Geopolitical Accelerant

Past European payment initiatives failed primarily because geopolitical urgency was absent. Banks would talk about sovereignty at conferences and then sign Visa partnership deals before the coffee went cold. That calculus has shifted profoundly.

Increasing EU-US tensions have heightened fears of 450 million European citizens being potentially cut off from international financial infrastructure. Euronews Ukraine-related sanctions already showed how quickly payment networks can be weaponized — Visa and Mastercard suspended Russian operations within days of the 2022 invasion. European policymakers took note. The April 2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout, which briefly paralyzed payment systems across Spain and Portugal, demonstrated with devastating clarity what infrastructure failure means at the scale of an entire country. Nepting

These are no longer theoretical risks. They are operational case studies in what happens when payment infrastructure turns out to be fragile.

The Commercial Logic Is Now Genuine

For the first time, the commercial case for switching aligns with the political case for sovereignty. Merchants save on interchange. Banks reduce fee outflows to US networks. Consumers gain a redundant payment option that functions even under geopolitical stress. The digital euro — when it eventually arrives — will slot into the same architecture.

JPMorgan joining CB wasn’t charity. It was arbitrage. That signal will not be lost on other international acquirers eyeing Europe’s merchant base.

The Data Sovereignty Dividend

Card payments account for 56% of all cashless transactions in the EU, and the data on who bought what, where, when, and for how much has always remained outside of European jurisdiction. GIGAZINE For a continent that invented GDPR and is acutely aware of the commercial and political value of behavioral data, this is an argument that resonates well beyond the fintech community. When payment data stays inside European infrastructure, European law governs it. That is a materially different legal universe from having it processed under US jurisdiction.

The Real Risks: What Could Still Go Wrong

A balanced reading of this story requires acknowledging what might prevent this from working — and the risks are real.

Adoption fragmentation remains the structural enemy of pan-European payment ambitions. Wero works brilliantly in Germany. But French and Belgian retail adoption in 2026 is still being ramped. Consumer habits, once formed around Visa’s seamless contactless experience, are stubborn. The network effects that Visa and Mastercard have spent decades building will not evaporate within a four-year roadmap.

Bank commercial incentives are not fully aligned. Digital-native banks like Revolut and N26 continue to issue exclusively on international rails, and they serve precisely the young, high-frequency spenders who drive transaction volumes. CB may recover market share among traditional bank customers while losing the digital generation.

Mastercard’s strategic counter-moves are already underway. Mastercard’s $1.8 billion acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK signals that incumbents are not standing still — they’re buying the next generation of payment rails, including European fintech assets. European Business Magazine The race is not simply between European ambition and American incumbency. It is between competing visions of what payment infrastructure looks like in a world of digital currencies, AI-driven commerce, and geopolitical fragmentation.

What to Watch in 2026 and Beyond

For merchants: The CB co-badging push means you should be actively discussing with your acquirer whether CB routing is being preferred on domestic transactions. For a mid-sized French retailer processing €10 million a year in card payments, the difference in interchange can be meaningful. Ask the question.

For banks: The BPCE reversal on Visa-only issuance is a market signal, not just a regulatory response. Banks that hold out on co-badging face both regulatory scrutiny and political exposure in an environment where Macron is personally invoking sovereignty. The risk calculus on Visa-only issuance has changed.

For investors: EPI’s progress toward a 130-million-user network is not yet fully priced into European banking equities. If Wero executes its 2027 e-commerce and POS rollout, the interchange economics of European retail banking shift measurably. The knock-on effects on Visa and Mastercard’s European revenue — roughly a quarter of their global transaction volumes — deserve closer modeling than they currently receive.

For policymakers: The Capital Markets Union conversation and the payment sovereignty conversation need to be formally joined. Lagarde has already drawn the connection. The EU’s financial independence strategy is incomplete without sovereign payment rails, and sovereign payment rails are commercially unviable without deeper European capital markets integration.

The Fireside Verdict

Europe has tried this before and failed. But 2026 is not 2012. The geopolitical environment has turned hostile enough that political will is now genuine rather than performative. The technical architecture — CB for domestic card infrastructure, Wero for cross-border digital payments, EuroPA for continental scale — is the most coherent layered approach Europe has ever assembled. And the commercial incentives, for the first time, are pointing in the same direction as the political imperatives.

France’s CB is not going to dethrone Visa and Mastercard by 2027. No honest analyst would claim otherwise. But it is doing something more subtle and ultimately more durable: it is re-establishing the habit of European payment sovereignty at the point of sale, one co-badged card at a time, while the larger architecture is assembled around it.

Payment is, as Macron put it, the last mile of economic sovereignty. France just started repaving it.

FAQ (FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS)

Q1: What is France’s Cartes Bancaires (CB) and why is it challenging Visa and Mastercard?

Cartes Bancaires (CB) is France’s domestic payment network, established in 1984 as a cooperative of French banks. With 77 million cards in circulation, it processes around 80% of French domestic transactions. In 2025–2026, CB began pushing its member banks to prioritize co-badged card routing — directing transactions through the CB network rather than Visa or Mastercard — as part of a broader European effort to reclaim payment sovereignty from US-controlled infrastructure.

Q2: What is co-badging and how does it help reduce Europe’s dependence on Visa and Mastercard?

Co-badging means a bank card carries two network logos — for example, CB and Visa — and the merchant or cardholder can select which network processes the payment. When a French merchant routes a co-badged transaction through CB rather than Visa, the transaction stays within European infrastructure, fees go to CB rather than an American corporation, and the transaction data remains under European legal jurisdiction. CB’s push in 2025 to require member banks to restore co-badging (after some had issued Visa-only cards) is the central mechanism of its market share recovery.

Q3: What is Wero and how does it connect to CB’s European payment sovereignty strategy?

Wero is a mobile payment wallet developed by the European Payments Initiative (EPI), backed by 16 major European banks. It currently has over 48.5 million users in Belgium, France, and Germany. In February 2026, EPI signed a memorandum with the EuroPA Alliance — connecting Wero to Italy’s Bancomat, Spain’s Bizum, Portugal’s MB WAY, and Nordic system Vipps MobilePay — bringing its potential reach to 130 million users across 13 countries. GIE CB confirmed in 2026 that Wero Pay will integrate into the CB ecosystem, effectively combining France’s domestic card network with Europe’s emerging pan-continental payment wallet into a layered alternative to Visa and Mastercard.