When Alexa went silent: why Europe is building its own payment system
The digital euro represents Europe's answer to American infrastructure dependency — but the path to independence runs through difficult choices
Kimberly Prost came home to The Hague one evening this summer and called out to Alexa. Nothing. She tried again. Silence.
The Canadian judge had been added to the United States sanctions list. Her crime: voting to authorise an investigation into possible American war crimes in Afghanistan. Amazon, bound by US law, had cancelled her account. Her credit cards died the same day. E-books she'd purchased vanished from her device. Even her Kindle, it turned out, answered to Washington.
Prost had spent years at the UN imposing sanctions on terrorists and crime lords. Now she was on the same list. "I've worked all my life in criminal justice," she told journalists, "and now I'm on a list with those implicated in terrorism and organised crime."
She is not alone. Nine staff members of the International Criminal Court — six judges, three prosecutors — have been sanctioned by the Trump administration for investigating American and Israeli officials. French judge Nicolas Guillou described himself as "economically banned across most of the planet." These are European citizens, working in European institutions, performing legal duties. Yet American financial infrastructure reached into their homes and switched off capabilities most of us assume are as reliable as running water.
The ICC sanctions have become an unlikely catalyst. For years, European officials talked about payment infrastructure independence the way people talk about exercise — obviously important, perpetually deferred. Now the conversation has shifted. The theoretical vulnerability is no longer theoretical.
The plumbing you never see
When you tap your phone to buy coffee, you probably don't think about where that transaction travels. You shouldn't have to. That's the point of infrastructure — it works invisibly until it doesn't.
But here's what actually happens: your payment flows through American corporate networks. Visa and Mastercard together control the vast majority of European card transactions. In Britain, they process ninety-five per cent of all card payments. Across Europe in 2023, the two companies handled over seven trillion euros in transactions.
A European Central Bank report published in February revealed numbers that should trouble anyone who's thought about this for more than a moment. Thirteen of twenty eurozone countries have no domestic card scheme. None. If you pay by card in Ireland, Finland, or Greece, there is no European alternative to the American networks. And none of the four major cross-border card processors operating in the EU are fully European-owned.
Piero Cipollone, an ECB board member, put it bluntly: when it comes to retail digital transactions, the eurozone depends on "the kindness of strangers."
That kindness can be withdrawn. Visa and Mastercard suspended operations in Russia within days of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Domestic Russian payments continued because Moscow had spent years building its own system — precisely for this eventuality. Europe had no such backup. Still doesn't.
How Europe sleepwalked into dependency
The puzzle isn't why Europe wants alternatives now. It's why Europe never built them before.
The answer is boringly rational. American payment networks worked. They operated across borders. They were already everywhere. Why spend billions creating European infrastructure when you could just plug into someone else's?
This logic made sense when transatlantic relations seemed stable and American companies seemed like neutral commercial actors rather than instruments of foreign policy. It makes less sense now.
The current European Payments Initiative isn't Europe's first attempt at this. The Monnet Project launched in 2008, backed by twenty major banks, aiming to create a pan-European card network. It collapsed in 2012. Banks from Poland, Spain, Germany, and Finland dropped out. The expense seemed unjustifiable for solving a problem that didn't feel urgent.
Regina Doherty, an Irish MEP on the European Parliament's economics committee, recalled her first briefing on the digital euro. She scratched her head. Don't I already have a digital euro? The money in her banking app seemed digital enough.
What she hadn't grasped — what most Europeans don't — is the difference between the money and the rails it travels on. Europeans use euros, but the infrastructure that moves those euros increasingly belongs to American corporations. It's as if Europe built its roads but let a foreign company control every traffic light.
The two-track solution
Europe is now pursuing payment independence along two parallel tracks, each with different timelines and different implications.
The first is Wero, a private initiative backed by sixteen major European banks. Launched in July 2024, it enables instant bank-to-bank transfers using phone numbers or QR codes, cutting card networks out entirely. The numbers after one year: forty-three million users, seven billion euros transferred. That's meaningful adoption, not a pilot project.
Wero began with person-to-person payments — splitting dinner bills, paying back friends. It's now expanding into commerce. German merchants started accepting Wero at checkout in November 2025. France, Belgium, and the Netherlands follow next year. For merchants, the appeal is simple maths: card networks extract fees at every stage. Wero doesn't.
The second track is the digital euro, being built by the ECB itself. This is more ambitious and more complex. Unlike Wero, which is sophisticated plumbing for existing bank money, the digital euro would be a new form of public money — the digital equivalent of physical cash, backed directly by the central bank.
The ECB signed contracts worth over one billion euros with European technology companies in October 2025. Target launch: 2029. The two systems are designed to complement each other. Wero solves the immediate problem; the digital euro reimagines what money should be in a digital age.
An ECB official made a prediction about merchant behaviour: "The merchant will probably say to the customer: please pay by digital euro, or else you pay an extra fee." That's how payment systems change — not through public enthusiasm, but through the incentives facing the people who accept payments.
What India figured out
Europe is not pioneering this transition. India already did it.
In 2016, India launched UPI — the Unified Payments Interface — a real-time bank-to-bank network built on mobile phones and QR codes. Today it processes over 650 million transactions daily. That's more than Visa handles globally.
The impact has been seismic. Credit cards' share of Indian digital transactions fell from forty-three per cent in 2018 to twenty-one per cent last year. India's domestic RuPay network, which gained exclusive rights to process credit card transactions through UPI in 2022, now handles twenty-eight per cent of all credit card volume.
Mastercard's chief financial officer called India's UPI "an incredibly painful experience for ecosystem participants." Painful for Mastercard, perhaps. Less painful for the ten million Indian shopkeepers now accepting digital payments through terminals that the American networks previously considered too small to bother with.
The Indian example proves something important: payment infrastructure transitions can happen faster than incumbents expect. But Europe faces complications India didn't. India built UPI primarily for domestic use. Europe needs a system that works across twenty-seven countries and stays connected to global networks. India could focus on reaching the unbanked; Europe needs to convince people already comfortable with cards to change behaviour.
Russia offers a different lesson. Moscow built its Mir payment system after the 2014 Crimea sanctions, forcing banks to process domestic transactions through a state-controlled switch. When Visa and Mastercard left in 2022, Russian domestic payments continued uninterrupted. Mir now handles fifty-six per cent of domestic transactions.
But Russia achieved domestic resilience at the cost of global isolation. The US Treasury threatens secondary sanctions against any foreign bank that accepts Mir cards. That's not the model Europe wants.
The surveillance problem
Not everyone is cheering. And the objections go deeper than American corporations protecting market share.
Critics argue the digital euro would be surveillance infrastructure disguised as money. Patrick Schueffel, a professor at Fribourg's School of Management and former Swiss bank executive, has been among the loudest. A central bank digital currency, he warns, enables "surveillance and control like no other in human history."
This isn't paranoid. Unlike cash, a CBDC creates a permanent, searchable record of every purchase. The architecture enables surveillance in ways physical money cannot. The question is whether the ECB's privacy promises will hold.
The ECB insists it won't see what you buy. Transactions would show only anonymised codes; commercial banks would hold identifying information. For those wanting more privacy, an offline digital euro would function like cash — no database, no trace. Lose your phone, though, and your money's gone.
But laws change. Institutions evolve. The infrastructure that enables convenient payments could theoretically enable account freezes, spending limits, purchase restrictions. China's digital yuan experiments have included some of these features. European officials insist they have no such intentions. Critics note that capability matters more than intention.
This is the genuine dilemma. The status quo — American corporate infrastructure — carries real risks. Judge Prost can testify to that. But the alternative — European governmental infrastructure — carries different risks. The choice isn't between surveillance and freedom. It's between surveillance regimes.
Germans, with cultural memory of state surveillance, have proven particularly sceptical. The ECB is trying to address this with privacy features that go beyond what current digital payments offer. Whether that's enough depends on how much Europeans trust their institutions — and how that trust might erode in future crises.
The infrastructure becomes visible
Judge Prost remains at the ICC. Her judicial work continues, she says, "absolutely undeterred and unfettered." The sanctions created practical difficulties but didn't stop her from doing her job. If anything, they reinforced her conviction that international law must operate independently of any single country's politics.
The lesson for Europe is both simple and complicated.
Simple: the dependency is now undeniable. American payment infrastructure is not neutral plumbing. It's a lever.
Complicated: the solutions involve real trade-offs. Building European alternatives requires billions in investment and uncertain adoption. It requires choices about surveillance that Europeans haven't fully confronted. It requires answering a question that has no clean answer: whose oversight do you prefer?
Wero's forty-three million users suggest appetite exists. The ECB's billion-euro commitment signals seriousness. Christine Lagarde has called this "a march towards independence." Though marching from one surveillance regime toward another isn't everyone's definition of liberation.
What seems certain: the invisible infrastructure is becoming visible. The payment networks most people never think about are now contested terrain — subjects of geopolitical competition, not just commercial convenience. Whether Europeans embrace the digital euro, prefer private alternatives, or simply keep using American networks, they'll increasingly be making a conscious choice rather than accepting a default.
Next time you tap your phone to pay for bread, consider the journey that transaction takes. Through which countries, which companies, which laws. For most of history, buying bread meant handing over coins minted by your own government. The digital age made that transaction faster and vastly more complicated.
Somewhere in The Hague, a judge's Alexa remains silent. Europe is trying to ensure that silence doesn't spread.