LONDON — Senior executives from Britain’s biggest banks are due to meet on Thursday in London to begin formal work on what could become a UK-grown alternative to the card-payment networks dominated by Visa and Mastercard, amid rising anxiety in Europe about “economic sovereignty” and reliance on US-controlled financial rails.
The gathering is the first convened under “DeliveryCo”, a new industry-created vehicle tasked with developing the project and chaired by Vim Maru, chief executive of Barclays UK, according to reports. The initiative is being funded by the UK financial sector and sits within a broader government-backed push to upgrade the country’s retail payments infrastructure, with oversight and technical input linked to the Bank of England’s National Payments Vision programme. People familiar with the meeting said Visa and Mastercard are expected to be represented. UK Finance, the trade association providing administrative support to DeliveryCo, declined to comment, as did Barclays, the Treasury and the Bank of England, according to coverage of the plans.
At the heart of the proposal is an account-to-account payment option that would allow shoppers to pay in-store or online by transferring money directly from their bank account to a merchant’s account—without routing the transaction through the global card schemes. Advocates argue this could provide a domestically anchored “rail” that improves resilience, adds competition and potentially lowers costs for merchants. The dominance of the US card giants is one of the drivers. Britain’s Payment Systems Regulator has said Mastercard and Visa account for about 95% of transactions using UK-issued cards, and has warned in recent market work that a lack of effective competition gives businesses little choice when fees rise.
Bank of England policymaker Sarah Breeden has argued that an account-to-account alternative “could provide a degree of extra resilience” as an additional payment rail in the rare event of disruption to existing systems, and could also reduce costs for businesses—benefits that might flow through to consumers. The renewed urgency, executives and commentators say, reflects a more unsettled transatlantic backdrop since Donald Trump’s return to office, with broader debates about how exposed European economies are to decisions made in Washington. Similar motivations sit behind initiatives elsewhere, including the European Central Bank’s work on a digital euro, while the Bank of England is separately exploring a potential digital pound.
