TrueLayer warns that the UK’s reliance on foreign-owned payment networks creates a national risk, although others say the problem is the lack of credible alternatives.
Sovereignty is a term that you will have heard a lot in modern politics. It was abundant during the Brexit referendum in the UK, when those in favour argued the country needed to “take back control”.
Without unpacking the rights and wrongs of Brexit, you may have seen the word used more and more in payments.
The European Central Bank (ECB) has been one of the main culprits in recent years. In 2025, Piero Cipollone, Member of the ECB’s Executive Board, said that Europe’s payments market had become dependent on foreign providers, warning that dependence has implications for competitiveness and sovereignty.
“Currently, nearly two-thirds of euro area card-based transactions are processed by non-European companies,” Cipollone said at the time.
“There is no true sovereignty without sovereign money. Our overreliance on foreign payment providers makes us dependent on the kindness of strangers at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions.”
Since then, the word has repeatedly been used in press releases and quotes amid ongoing work on the digital euro and Wero, a European alternative to card networks.
A similar debate is developing in the UK, with some arguing that the country is too dependent on foreign-owned payment networks and infrastructure, leaving it exposed if geopolitical tensions ever interfere.
This concern was raised by TrueLayer CEO Francesco Simoneschi, whose company provides open banking payments that compete with cards in some use cases. Simoneschi questioned the UK’s reliance on Visa and Mastercard and said the ownership of critical infrastructure such as Vocalink should be viewed through the lens of national interest.
His views were published at an important moment for UK payments, with policymakers deciding what the next generation of retail infrastructure should look like, and no, we won’t be voting in a referendum.
His comments also raise a question about what sovereignty means in payments and if foreign ownership is the problem.
Commercial interests vs national risk
Simoneschi’s concern starts with how concentrated the UK’s retail payments market has become. He tells Payment Expert that around 95% of UK retail payments run through Visa or Mastercard, meaning much of the country’s day-to-day commerce depends on two companies headquartered in the US.
“Sovereignty risk in payments is the structural dependency a country has on foreign-owned or controlled entities to accept, clear, route, and settle transactions on behalf of businesses and consumers,” Simoneschi says.
“For the UK, that risk is real, concentrated, and largely unacknowledged in public debate.”
Visa and Mastercard have operated in the UK for decades and, despite criticism around card fees and market concentration, geopolitical disruption has rarely featured in the day-to-day experience of businesses and consumers using their networks.
However, Simoneschi is more concerned about what could happen if the political environment changed.
“If geopolitical tensions ever disrupted access to these networks, the economic impact would be huge, leaving many businesses unable to accept payments and consumers unable to pay for essentials,” he adds.
He also describes payments as “critical national infrastructure”, stating that building greater resilience into the system is essential.
Before speaking to Payment Expert, Simoneschi made a similar case in a letter published by the Financial Times, questioning who should control infrastructure such as Vocalink as the UK prepares for the next generation of retail payments.
Whether fairly or unfairly, his outspokenness on the topic has led to commercial questions.
TrueLayer is among the companies pushing account-to-account payments as an alternative to cards. Open banking payments have grown significantly in the UK, although they are some distance from matching cards across merchant acceptance and overall retail payment volumes.
Greater adoption of card alternatives would therefore benefit companies operating in the open banking sector.
Payment Expert asked Simoneschi if open banking firms risk placing greater emphasis on sovereignty because the argument strengthens their case for more competition and domestic control of payment rails.
“We have been pushing for more competition and choice in payments for many years now,” he says. “But this has now been elevated from a market competition debate to a matter of national interest.”
Simoneschi adds that “sovereignty and competition go hand in hand”, noting that greater control over payments infrastructure gives countries more freedom to set the rules and encourage competition.
What does sovereignty mean?
The difficulty with the term payments sovereignty is that it can cover different risks, such as who owns infrastructure and if a payment system can continue operating during an outage or political dispute.
Evin McMullen, Co-founder and CEO of Billions Network, believes this has made it difficult to define.
“Payments sovereignty is a meme unless you can point to the technical implementation that actually delivers it,” McMullen tells Payment Expert.
“Foreign ownership of the card networks and infrastructure like Vocalink is a real dependency, but naming it is not the same as solving it, and a domestic label is not the same as control.”
The distinction is important when considering what foreign ownership would mean during a geopolitical dispute. A company can have significant operations, infrastructure and regulatory obligations in the UK while still sitting within a global group headquartered elsewhere.
A source close to the card payments industry tells Payment Expert that foreign ownership shouldn’t automatically be treated as a resilience weakness, with greater attention placed on the ability of networks to continue operating reliably.
There is, however, evidence that geopolitics can interfere with global payment networks.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Visa and Mastercard suspended their operations in the country, restricting the ability of Russian-issued cards to operate internationally and foreign-issued cards to work inside Russia.
Russia may seem like an extreme comparison for the UK, though its domestic payments system was better insulated because local card transactions could continue through domestic infrastructure.
Chris Jones, Managing Director at PSE Consulting, believes there is a geopolitical risk for the UK, although he sees another weakness as more immediate.
“I think the bigger issue is the UK’s lack of alternatives if one of the US networks were no longer available,” Jones tells Payment Expert.
Open banking is put forward as one of those alternatives, but Jones explains it is some way from offering a direct replacement for cards across in-store payments, international transactions, recurring payments and consumer protections.
He says the debate risks “bundling several different issues together under the sovereignty argument”, with ownership, resilience, competition and concentration presenting different vulnerabilities.
McMullen makes a similar point, arguing that “a US-headquartered network is not automatically a sovereignty risk, and a fully domestic system is not automatically resilient”.
The question then becomes less about where a company is headquartered and more about how much control the UK has if an important part of the payments system becomes unavailable.
The Bank of England’s pragmatic stance
The UK authorities have structured the future of retail payments around different priorities than the sovereignty debates taking place in Europe.
When Payment Expert asked the Bank of England if foreign ownership of critical infrastructure or reliance on US-headquartered card networks presented a sovereignty or geopolitical risk, the central bank failed to answer.
Officials pointed to a speech from Deputy Governor Sarah Breeden highlighting competition, merchant costs and operational resilience as the main reasons to expand payment options.
Breeden said giving consumers the ability to pay retailers from their bank accounts could improve competition and potentially reduce the costs merchants face when accepting payments.
She also argued that an additional payment rail could provide “a degree of extra resilience in the UK payments landscape” during periods of operational disruption.
Industry observers share this perspective, with one source telling Payment Expert that the UK debate has focused more on resilience and competition than sovereignty, unlike parts of Europe where strategic autonomy has become a much more prominent part of payments policy.
Building true redundancy
The debate around payments sovereignty has successfully drawn attention to the UK’s reliance on a small number of payment networks, although the nationality of their owners doesn’t account for every vulnerability in the system.
As several industry voices highlighted, resilience ultimately depends on having credible alternatives. If one part of the payments system becomes unavailable because of an operational failure, cyber incident or political intervention, businesses and consumers need another route that can operate at scale.
Greater domestic control may help achieve that, but changing ownership alone doesn’t create redundancy.
Whether account-to-account payments, cards or a combination of both underpin the next generation of UK retail payments, the more immediate challenge is ensuring no single network becomes impossible to replace.
