Tareq Shaheen, Director of Payment Solutions at Eastnets, explains why Europe’s drive for greater control over payments could leave financial institutions managing a more fragmented and operationally demanding ecosystem
Europe wants greater control over its payment infrastructure. But achieving it could initially leave banks managing more infrastructure, not less.
That is the tension at the heart of Europe’s push for greater digital sovereignty. For decades, European payments have relied heavily on US-owned infrastructure. According to the European Central Bank, US companies currently process 61% of European card payments.
Until recently, that dependence attracted relatively little concern. But geopolitical relationships have changed and policymakers are increasingly questioning what happens when critical infrastructure sits outside their direct control. Some in the European Parliament have even raised concerns that Washington could potentially ‘cut off’ access to key systems.
Payments are therefore being treated less like a background utility and more like the critical infrastructure they have become.
The response is already taking shape. The European Central Bank is developing the digital euro, designed to give European citizens access to sovereign digital money. The European Payments Initiative has launched Wero, a pan-European wallet intended to support instant payments across the continent. Domestic instant payment schemes are also continuing to evolve.
Politically, the direction makes sense. Operationally, it creates a new challenge.
Europe is adding payment rails, not replacing them
New regional systems will not make existing global networks disappear overnight. Banks will still need to work with established schemes such as SWIFT, Visa and Mastercard while also supporting the digital euro, Wero, domestic instant payment systems and potentially further regional networks as they emerge. And that creates a much more complicated environment.
Each system can bring different technical requirements, APIs, rules and messaging standards. Connecting to them takes time and investment, while maintaining those integrations creates an ongoing cost. Differences between schemes can also slow product development and make cross-border payments harder to manage.
The result is a payments environment built around multiple rails rather than a small number of dominant networks.
For financial institutions, the challenge is therefore not simply connecting to new sovereign infrastructure. It is being able to manage old and new payment systems side by side without creating a patchwork of separate processes. And that complexity does not stop at the infrastructure itself.
Fragmented rails create fragmented risk
Connecting to every payment rail is only useful if a bank can still understand what is happening across them. A payment might start on one system, pass through another and arrive in a different format. Along the way, information can be translated, reformatted or, in some cases, reduced.
This makes it harder to follow the full journey of a transaction.
A payment that appears unremarkable within one channel may form part of a much more concerning pattern when viewed alongside activity elsewhere. Funds could be split across several payment types. Transactions could be routed through different channels to disguise their origin. An indirect connection to a sanctioned entity might only become apparent once relationships across multiple payments are considered together.
Standards such as ISO 20022 help by creating a richer and more structured approach to payments data. But implementation is not identical across every system. Some rails carry detailed information, while others may truncate fields or use different naming conventions.
Those inconsistencies matter for compliance. Sanctions screening depends on accurate names and identifiers. Transaction monitoring depends on being able to recognise patterns. When the underlying information varies from one system to another, financial institutions can either miss genuine risk or compensate with controls that generate more false positives.
The problem becomes even greater when each payment type is monitored separately. If card payments, instant payments, account-to-account transfers and wallet transactions all sit in their own environments, compliance teams may only ever see individual pieces of the picture. What looks normal in one system could become suspicious when combined with activity elsewhere.
Financial institutions therefore need more than connectivity. They need to be able to follow the information and risk across different rails as easily as the payments themselves.
Banks need one view across many systems
As the payments ecosystem fragments, the answer is not to build another silo for every new scheme.
Instead, financial institutions need a common layer that can bring payment activity together across systems.
A centralised payments hub can help orchestrate transactions from multiple sources and translate different messaging formats into a consistent structure. This gives institutions a way to analyse activity across payment types rather than treating each rail as a separate environment.
The same principle applies to compliance.
Bringing data together allows transaction monitoring and sanctions controls to work across channels. Instead of asking whether a single payment looks suspicious, institutions can examine whether it forms part of a wider pattern spanning several systems.
That is particularly important as sovereign and regional payment networks continue to grow. The more fragmented the infrastructure becomes, the more valuable a common data and intelligence layer will be.
Technology alone, however, will not solve the problem.
Banks also need operating models, architectures and data strategies designed for a world in which payment types continue to proliferate. Adding new rails without thinking about how information, compliance processes and decision-making will work across them simply moves fragmentation from the external market into the institution itself.
Sovereignty will not mean simplicity
Europe’s push for payment sovereignty is rooted in a legitimate concern. Payments are now critical infrastructure, comparable in importance to energy, transport and communications, and governments understandably want greater control over the systems on which their economies depend.
But greater sovereignty does not automatically mean greater simplicity.
In the short term, it is likely to mean more networks, more standards and more payment journeys for banks to manage. The institutions that navigate this transition successfully will be those that can support that diversity without allowing their own operations, data and compliance controls to become fragmented alongside it.
