Every tap pays a toll
You buy a coffee in Lisbon, a train ticket in Munich, a pair of shoes in Milan. You tap your card, the terminal beeps, and the money moves. It feels like a purely European transaction: a European customer, a European shop, euros changing hands.
It isn't. Most of the time, that payment travels over rails owned by one of two American companies, Visa or Mastercard. According to France's and Germany's data-protection authorities, 61% of euro-area card payments run through these two firms. When the ECB last counted, before Bulgaria joined the euro in 2026, 13 of the then 20 euro-area countries had no national card scheme at all and depended entirely on international ones.
Every one of those payments carries a fee. Europeans pay it billions of times a year, mostly without noticing. It's a toll on our own money, and a large part of it ends up across the Atlantic.
The digital euro is how Europe stops paying it. The legislation is in its final negotiations right now, and the ECB says it can issue the currency in 2029 if the law is adopted by the end of 2026. This is the moment to get it done.
A €9 billion toll nobody voted for
Call it what it is: a private tax on European commerce. Every time a card payment runs over Visa's or Mastercard's network, the network charges a "scheme fee" for it. This is separate from the interchange fee, which goes to the cardholder's bank and which EU law has capped since 2015 at 0.2% for debit cards and 0.3% for credit cards. Scheme fees have no cap, and since the interchange cap came in, they have been rising.
A study for the European Commission found that the average net fee charged by card schemes in the EU almost doubled between 2018 and 2022, from 0.27% to 0.44% of the value of each payment. The ECB estimates that card schemes' revenue from these fees in the euro area grew by more than €7 billion over the same four years. In 2024 the Commission opened an inquiry into the fees. Retailers say the increases have wiped out the savings the interchange cap was meant to deliver.
Now add it up. According to the ECB, people in the euro area made 91.8 billion card payments in 2025, worth about €3.5 trillion. International card schemes carry around 61% of the region's card payments. At a scheme fee of 0.44%, that comes to roughly €9.4 billion a year paid to Visa and Mastercard. That's more than €25 for every person living in the euro area, every year. (Using a more conservative estimate of Visa and Mastercard's share of payment value, 47%, it's still over €7 billion.)
You never see this on your receipt. You pay it anyway, because shops build their payment costs into their prices. Whether you pay with a card or with cash, the toll is already in what you pay.
The ECB's own report on the payment ecosystem explains why the networks can raise prices: European payment providers effectively "have to accept both major international card schemes" to offer a card product that works. When a market only works if you sign up with both firms in a duopoly, the duopoly sets the price. The payment itself takes milliseconds and costs almost nothing to process. The fee isn't the price of the technology. It's the price of having no alternative.
We would never accept this in any other part of our infrastructure. Imagine if every kilowatt-hour sent over a European power line, or every letter sent by post, carried a levy paid to a foreign company that sets the rate as it pleases. There would be outrage in every parliament from Helsinki to Valletta. Payments are infrastructure just as much as power lines are. Our economy runs on them. That we have handed control of them to two foreign corporations, and pay them billions for the privilege, is unacceptable.
The people paying this toll know it. Merchants who took part in the ECB's consultations said the main reason they welcomed the digital euro was the expectation of lower fees. Consumers are clear too: in a ten-country survey for the European Consumer Organisation BEUC, 87% said paying digitally should be free.
Public cost, not private profit
Someone has to pay for payment infrastructure. Servers, security and fraud prevention cost money, and the digital euro won't run for free either. The question is who that money goes to, and what it's for.
The money paid to Visa and Mastercard is profit for private companies. It goes to their shareholders, it's taxed largely outside Europe, and the price is set to make as much money as the market will bear. That's what listed companies are supposed to do. But it means Europeans are paying a toll whose size is set in the interest of someone else.
The digital euro works differently. The ECB says the Eurosystem will pay for building and running the scheme itself, "just as it does for the production and issuance of euro banknotes." It estimates development at around €1.3 billion and running costs at about €320 million a year once the digital euro is issued. The Eurosystem "would not charge scheme and processing fees," and "would not charge or benefit from any digital euro transaction fees." Merchants would still pay their bank or payment provider for the service, but under a legal cap.
Set those two numbers side by side. Running the entire digital euro would cost about €320 million a year. Visa and Mastercard collect around €9 billion a year in scheme fees in the euro area. That's nearly thirty times as much.
The running costs don't pay for themselves, of course. They come out of the central banks' income, which in normal years flows back to national treasuries. So Europeans do pay for the digital euro, just indirectly and at cost. That's the difference: the money pays for the system, not for a profit margin. It's spent by a public institution that answers to European law and the European Parliament, and every euro of it stays in Europe.
It's not just money. It's sovereignty.
The fee is the part you can measure. The bigger risk is the dependency itself.
Visa, Mastercard and PayPal are American companies, and so they are subject to American law, including the CLOUD Act, which lets US authorities compel them to hand over user data. The digital-rights network EDRi gives a concrete example. In early 2025, after US sanctions, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court lost access to his email account, which was run by an American provider. As EDRi puts it: "What happened with email can happen with payments."
It already has. In August 2025, the US sanctioned French judge Nicolas Guillou of the International Criminal Court in The Hague over the court's arrest warrant for Israel's prime minister. Eleven ICC judges are now under US sanctions. Guillou says he can no longer use most payment cards, because Visa and Mastercard dominate the market. A European judge, living in Europe and working at an international court in the Netherlands, has been cut off from everyday payments by a decision taken in Washington. That is utterly unacceptable.
Worse, Europe can't respond. In any other market, a company that cut off Europeans on a foreign government's orders would face real consequences, up to being shut out of it. But we can't ban Visa and Mastercard from Europe, or even credibly threaten to, because our economy would stop working the day we did. That we're too dependent on two American companies to defend our own judges is a disgrace. Guillou himself has called on the EU to build "sovereign tools, including the digital euro."
This isn't a hypothetical scenario from a think-tank report. It's what happens when a continent's critical systems are run from somewhere else. A political dispute in Washington, a sanctions decision, a technical outage at a single US data centre: any of these could disrupt how 350 million Europeans pay for their groceries. A Europe that wants to make its own decisions on trade, defence and foreign policy can't leave its payment system as a lever in someone else's hands.
The ECB states the problem clearly: there is currently "no European digital payment option that covers the entire euro area." We have a single currency, but we don't have a single way to pay with it digitally. That's an absurd gap at the heart of the monetary union, and only a public solution can close it across all 21 countries at once.
What the digital euro actually is
The digital euro is cash for the digital age: money issued by the European Central Bank itself, held in a digital wallet and accepted everywhere in the euro area. Here is how the current design works, according to the ECB and the Commission's legislative proposal:
Free for basic use. Individuals would pay nothing to hold and spend digital euros. No hidden percentage on every purchase.
Accepted everywhere. Shops in all 21 euro-area countries would have to accept it, with exemptions for the smallest merchants. For the first time, there would be a single European way to pay that works from Dublin to Sofia.
A common European payment layer. The ECB's ecosystem report describes the digital euro as a "common acceptance layer" with harmonised standards and no scheme or processing fees. That's the infrastructure Europe has been missing, and banks and fintechs can build their own products on top of it.
Works offline. You could pay with your phone or a card even without an internet connection, as you do with cash.
Never programmable. The ECB says outright that "the digital euro would never be programmable money." Nobody can put an expiry date on your savings or restrict what you buy.
Alongside cash, not instead of it. The Commission paired the digital euro proposal with a second regulation to protect cash as legal tender.
This is what the payment system looks like once the toll is gone. Merchants get a payment method whose fees are regulated in Europe and expected to come in lower, with no scheme fees owed to a foreign network. Consumers get the free digital payments that 87% of them say they want. Europe gets payment infrastructure it owns and governs itself. The ECB report also notes a role for national schemes such as Girocard and Bizum, which can grow on top of this shared base. Rather than replacing Europe's payment industry, the digital euro gives it a foundation that doesn't belong to Visa or Mastercard.
Answering the critics
The digital euro has opponents, and some of their concerns deserve a serious answer.
"It's a surveillance tool." This is the loudest objection, and it gets the comparison backwards. Today, your card payments already sit in the databases of private banks and American networks, which can be compelled by a foreign government and can be monetised commercially. The digital euro is designed to be more private than that. The ECB says it "would not be able to identify who you are or what you are buying" from the payment data it receives. Data would be pseudonymised. It could never be used for commercial purposes. Offline payments would be known only to the payer and the payee, just like cash. Your bank would still identify you for anti-money-laundering checks, exactly as it does today with your current account.
That doesn't mean the design is finished. France's CNIL and Germany's BfDI have flagged real gaps: pseudonyms that stay fixed and could in principle be re-identified, and a central access point that has to be secured properly. They recommend rotating identifiers and a guaranteed "privacy threshold" for small everyday payments. These are good ideas and the final law should include them. But the data protection authorities support the project. They criticise it in order to make it better, not to stop it. The European Parliament's economic committee has already strengthened privacy compared with the Commission's draft.
"It will kill cash." The opposite. Cash is losing ground because private digital payments are replacing it, not because of anything the ECB has done. The digital euro legislation comes as a package with a regulation that protects cash as legal tender. Of all the digital options, the digital euro is the only one built to work like cash: public money, offline-capable and free.
"It will hurt the banks." So what? Why do we believe banks are entitled to a cut of every commercial transaction in Europe? Today they earn interchange on every card payment, and they share the market with Visa and Mastercard by default. Nothing in a market economy says this arrangement has to last forever. Competition is supposed to be healthy. If a free public payment option wins customers away from the banks, that tells us the banks' offer wasn't good enough. That's how markets are meant to work, and it's not a reason to protect anyone from it.
The design also keeps the impact in check. There's a holding limit, currently under negotiation somewhere between €500 and €3,000. Balances earn no interest, so the digital euro is a way to pay, not a place to save. The ECB's analysis, done at the legislators' request, finds that even a €3,000 limit would lead to outflows of around 1.2% of bank sight deposits in normal times. Banks will lose some payment revenue. They won't lose their business.
"The market will solve it." The banks do have their own answer, and it's called Wero. Built by the European Payments Initiative, a group of European banks and payment providers, it launched in Germany in July 2024 and passed 50 million users by February 2026. Online shop payments started in November 2025, with in-store QR payments planned for 2026 and tap-to-pay for 2027. That's welcome, and it's a direct result of the pressure the digital euro has put on the industry.
But Wero has to earn its place. If the banks want Europeans to pay with Wero rather than the digital euro, they'll need to build something cheaper, faster and better. Either way, Europeans win. Whether we end up paying with Wero, the digital euro or both, the payment runs on European infrastructure, under European law, and the money stays in Europe. The only losers are Visa and Mastercard.
Now or never
The Council and Parliament are negotiating the final text right now. If the law passes by the end of 2026, the ECB plans a pilot with 36 payment providers from late 2027 and could issue the currency in 2029. If the talks drag on, the timeline slips, and with it another year of paying the toll.
Even the project's sharpest friendly critics see this. EDRi, which has pushed hardest on privacy, writes that this is "an opportunity Europe won't get again soon." They're right. The choice isn't between the digital euro and some perfect alternative. It's between the digital euro and the status quo: around €9 billion a year in fees paid to two American companies, on infrastructure we don't control and that could be turned against us.
Only 11% of Europeans say they feel well informed about the digital euro. That needs to change, because this is one of the most important decisions the EU will make this decade. Write to your MEP. Ask your national government where it stands in the negotiations. Insist on strong privacy guarantees, and insist just as firmly that the project doesn't get watered down or delayed.
We built a single currency together. It's time we owned the means of paying with it.