If you are online shopping or travelling, chances are high you own either a Visa or a Mastercard.
Visa and Mastercard are the two largest card networks in the world. Outside China they process about 90% of card payments, a duopoly with almost no competition. That position is extremely profitable. In 2023 their operating margins reached 67% and 57%, the highest of any company in the S&P 500.
PayPal and Klarna have nibbled at the edges for years without threatening much. The national payment systems are a different problem, because they are usually free, often run by a central bank, and in several countries they have already won.
Where the card already lost
The Unified Payments Interface, built by the National Payments Corporation of India and based on QR codes, handles about 85% of digital payments in India and, on ACI Worldwide and IMF figures, roughly 49% of global real time payment volume. It runs in nine other countries with more in planning. Ritesh Shukla of NPCI International describes a roadmap that involves both linking existing systems and helping other countries build their own, and the pitch to governments is that they end up sovereign, running their own domestic agenda on infrastructure they control. On a personal note, UPI works flawlessly. Many of the drivers I paid relied almost entirely on UPI and no longer even carried enough change.
Pix, Brazil's version, is free, run by the central bank, and accounts for 22% of all online payments across Latin Americadespite operating only in Brazil. Inside Brazil it is the method people use most often, at 46.1%, ahead of cash on 22% and debit cards on 17.4%. Cash is still used by around seven in ten Brazilians, most heavily by the lowest earners.
Across the region, credit cards fell from 56% of online payments in 2019 to 42% in 2024, while account to account systems and digital wallets together reached 46%. Latin America is projected to hold the highest account to account share in the world and the fastest real time payment growth of any region, 29% a year between 2022 and 2027, and the number of fintech companies grew 340% between 2017 and 2024. Colombia launched Bre-B on 6 October 2025, in the Pix mold, and within six months it had cleared more than 670 million transactions and signed up 34 million users. In Peru, Yape and PLIN lead, with 54% of Peruvians using Yape in person. Argentina runs on Mercado Pago. Mexico is the laggard, still mostly cash and cards, with cash at 35% of in person spending.
In Africa the card was never there to lose. Most people never had one, and went from cash to mobile money, which in 2025 processed more than $1 trillion in transactions across over 800 million accounts. Sub Saharan Africa makes up close to three quarters of global mobile money volume. BCG expects African fintech revenue to grow around 13 times to $65 billion by 2030, much of it lending scored off transaction history, and M-Shwari alone has issued over $10 billion in micro loans at default rates near 2%.
A question of sovereignty
In July 2026, US trade representative Jamieson Greer imposed a 25% tariff on Brazilian goods after a year long Section 301 investigation. The finding covered six areas, from ethanol access to deforestation, but the first one listed was digital trade and electronic payment services, and Pix sat at its centre: a free state run system that Washington argues erodes the fee base of American card networks. Lula rejected the pressure. Even his opponent on the right, Flávio Bolsonaro, would not drop the system, proposing only that Brazil not link Pix to cross border infrastructure that competes with America. Inside Brazil the system is politically untouchable. What Washington can still reach is Pix abroad.
Russia lost access to the dollar system overnight in 2022, and finance ministries everywhere took the lesson.
UnionPay is the world's largest card network by cards issued, though Nilson Report data show that in 2025 Visa's debit and credit cards overtook UnionPay's on worldwide purchase volume for the first time in fifteen years. China's cross border system, CIPS, is the rival to SWIFT, and in March it carried a record 920bn yuan, about $134bn, in average daily flows, up 20% on the year, before single day volume hit a record 1.2trn yuan in April. Bank of China has added dozens of countries to its digital yuan system for cross border exchange. Alipay and WeChat Pay handle the domestic retail layer.
Europe has also began working on its financial independence. Wero lets people in Germany, France and Belgium send money and pay online instantly, and is now migrating Luxembourg's Payconiq users across, with the Dutch iDEAL migration due by 2027. A coalition of European banks and fintechs is behind it, stitching together the national systems that already exist, and it markets itself, pointedly, as made in Europe. It passed 50 million users in February 2026 and reached 55 million by June. SEPA, the euro payment area, counts 41 member countries, and the ECB still hopes to launch a digital euro by 2029. In January, Aurore Lalucq, who chairs the European Parliament's economic and monetary affairs committee, warned that a hostile America could cut Europe off from payments infrastructure and called for an "Airbus of payment systems." Weeks later, British bank bosses reportedly met in London to discuss a British rival to Visa and Mastercard. In May 2026, 31 banks and fintechs, including Barclays, NatWest, Lloyds, HSBC, Monzo and Revolut, agreed to fund the UK Payments Initiative, an FCA regulated scheme to push account to account payments that bypass the card networks, and it launched the following month at Money20/20 in Amsterdam. US card networks process 95% of UK card transactions.
Fighting back
Visa and Mastercard both now name preferential treatment of domestic payment systems as a business risk in their annual reports. Europe is a big source of their international business, and those margins above 50% are the exposure. Investors have been lukewarm despite good earnings, and the shares have been choppy after a sustained rise from 2023.
As Rest of World reported in 2024, the two had by then put around $700 million into African payments, buying equity in mobile money rather than competing with it. Mastercard took a 3.8% stake in MTN's mobile money arm for $200 million and holds a similar position in Airtel Africa. Visa has plugged its network into M-Pesa, which runs 99% of the Kenyan market, and pledged $1 billion for Africa over five years.
The Economist reported that Visa put €500m into European infrastructure in May, including a technology centre in Poland opening in 2027, and in April teamed up with UnionPay to offer real time payments inside China. Mastercard is building three data centres in France for €250m, on top of a dozen it already runs in Europe. Its European head, Kelly Devine, argues the continent already has a European network, and that network is Mastercard.
The Financial Stability Board reckons fragmentation will probably stop the G20 from hitting the cheaper, faster cross border payment goals it set in 2020, remittances especially. A report sponsored by SWIFT, which loses if the system splinters, puts the cost at 2.6% of global GDP by 2030. Take the number with the source in mind. The countries building these systems will carry the cost of their independence, and the United States may find it carries some of that cost as well.