Editor's note:Brian Gaynor is the European CEO of BlueSnap, a global payment orchestration company under Payroc WorldAccess, headquartered in the Chicago suburbs, and is based in Dublin.

The UK banking sector's efforts to reduce reliance on Visa and Mastercard are reasonable, as these two card networks are widely perceived to exert excessive control over the payment market, posing a potential risk.

Such concerns are not unfounded. By acceptance scale, these two largest global payment processing networks exert enormous influence over the global payment system, creating economic and strategic vulnerabilities for the UK and Europe. Governments and financial institutions exploring alternatives are part of a broader European effort to reduce dependence on US technology and infrastructure, a direction worth commending.

However, identifying a problem and solving it are two different things—current plans to replace or gradually phase out Visa and Mastercard are unlikely to succeed.

Payments are fundamentally different from other technology sectors. Unlike enterprise software, there is no ready-made "open-source" alternative in payments. Building a viable alternative system that can compete with global card networks is not just a technical engineering challenge, but an ecosystem challenge.

To date, Europe's most credible move to reduce dependence on the US is Wero—a unified digital wallet and instant payment system being rolled out across European regions. But Wero's coverage remains limited: it is not yet available across the entire EU, has only recently begun supporting e-commerce payments, and does not yet offer key features such as near-field communication (NFC).

The core issue lies in adoption. For any new payment system to succeed, it must reach critical mass on both the consumer and merchant sides—that is, achieve network effects. Without a sufficient number of users on both sides, new payment solutions will struggle to compete with existing systems. UK and European consumers (and merchants) are deeply accustomed to card payments, and unless alternatives offer a significantly better experience, they have little incentive to switch.

At present, such a better experience has not yet emerged—card acceptance is ubiquitous, secure, and cost-effective, making it an incumbent that is difficult to surpass.

People often draw analogies with India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) or Brazil's Pix, but such comparisons are misleading. In both cases, adoption growth was driven primarily by the migration from cash to digital payments, not by replacing mature card networks. Both countries originally had relatively low card penetration. In contrast, the UK and Europe already have highly mature card ecosystems, making behavioral change much harder.

Meanwhile, businesses should focus on enhancing resilience rather than pursuing replacement.

Governments have already advised citizens to keep cash on hand for emergencies, reflecting widespread concerns about systemic vulnerabilities—whether connectivity outages or infrastructure risks. For merchants, this means diversifying payment options and partnering with providers that can offer backup routing to handle card network service disruptions.

In the long run, a more realistic outcome is not the replacement of Visa and Mastercard, but their evolution. Regulatory pressure may prompt the UK and Europe to strengthen localization of payment processing and data, thereby restoring a degree of regional control that existed in the past. This would enable governments to address sovereignty concerns while maintaining consistency with global payment networks.

The ambition to build alternatives is correct, but expecting them to truly replace existing card networks may not be realistic.