Europe must have more payment options – Dutch central bank
De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) says Europe must broaden the range of options in the payment landscape to make its payment system more resilient and less dependent on non-European players.
Payment cards. Image by Anna Barclay/Getty Images
De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) says Europe must broaden the range of options in the payment landscape to make its payment system more resilient and less dependent on non-European players.
Geopolitical tensions, in which allies like the US could also turn against Europe, pose new risks for the continent’s banks, the DNB states in its Payment Strategy 2026-2028 report, which sets out its priorities and ambitions for the coming years.
“Agreements are no longer necessarily honored. If a foreign government decides, for whatever reason, that services can no longer be provided to Dutch banks, then we have a problem. For example, a company could be asked by the government to share data. Those are the risks we’re talking about,” says Steven Maijoor, Director of Supervision at the DNB, in an interview with Dutch news outlet RTL Z.
Therefore, it’s crucial to identify which non-European IT companies the banks depend on and mitigate those risks where possible.
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The DNB’s first order of business is to strengthen its resilience and autonomy in the payment chain, thus reducing its dependence on non-European players. This concerns not only financial service providers such as Visa and Mastercard, but also software and cloud service suppliers.
The supervisor’s second priority is to encourage innovations in the payment landscape, such as Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), artificial intelligence (AI), and the digital euro. This will strengthen Europe’s payment systems and address the needs of consumers, retailers, and other end users.
“In the future, consumers should be able to opt for European-originated digital payment instruments that can be used to pay anywhere in the euro area,” the DNB suggests in its report.
The financial supervisor is also in favor of promoting stablecoins. Currently, stablecoins are primarily used for buying and selling cryptocurrencies. At the same time, more and more traditional financial institutions in Europe and beyond are seeing and exploring opportunities to incorporate them into their own services, including cross-border payments or digital asset payments.
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This isn’t the first time that the DNB has voiced its concerns about the increasing reliance on a small number of non-European players in the European Economic Area (EEA). In October 2025, the watchdog warned that our dependence could lead to large-scale disruptions or “systemic risks.”
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