Britain plots Visa rival over fears Trump could pull the plug on payments

Britain’s major banks and authorities are accelerating plans for a domestic card and payments scheme (codenamed DeliveryCo) as a back‑up to Visa and Mastercard, driven in part by concern that President Donald Trump could use US‑based networks as geopolitical leverage and “turn off” access for the UK or Europe.

What is being planned

• UK banks are working on a new national payments platform meant to handle roughly the 50 billion transactions processed annually in Britain, which today overwhelmingly run on Visa and Mastercard rails.

• The project, internally called DeliveryCo, has been under discussion for years but is now being pushed forward, with an “emergency summit” of bank chiefs convening to define governance, funding and technical design.

• UK Finance is coordinating industry efforts, while the Bank of England is steering work on the underlying “next generation” retail payments infrastructure via a Retail Payments Infrastructure Board.

Why Trump is part of the risk story

• Around 95% of UK card transactions run through Visa and Mastercard, both US firms, creating a concentration and jurisdictional risk if a US administration were to restrict or weaponise those networks.

• Officials and executives explicitly cite Trump’s willingness to use financial tools, plus past US actions (for example, cutting off Russian banks from US card networks under sanctions), as evidence that payment rails can be used as a foreign‑policy instrument.

• A senior UK executive warned that if Visa and Mastercard were “turned off”, the UK would be pushed “back to the 1950s” in payments, forcing a reversion to cash in an economy that has become heavily card‑ and digital‑dependent.

How the new scheme would work

• DeliveryCo is envisaged as a UK‑controlled retail payments system that could process domestic card‑like transactions and account‑to‑account payments, providing “extra resilience” if existing international card rails are disrupted.

• The Bank of England plans to develop the technical rails and then transition the system to private‑sector operation, with an indicative timeline that could see the new infrastructure live around 2030.​

• Interestingly, Visa and Mastercard themselves are expected to be among the investors in the new entity alongside major UK banks and the ATM network LINK, framing it as resilience and competition rather than an overt anti‑US move.

Broader European context

• Similar debates are happening across Europe, where policymakers have called for “urgent” development of homegrown alternatives to US card networks and Big Tech wallets to reduce dependence on US infrastructure.

• European initiatives (such as work toward shared payment schemes and, separately, a digital euro) aim to ensure that core retail payments cannot be unilaterally switched off by a foreign government.

What this signals for payments and policy

• For the UK, this is as much about systemic resilience and sovereignty as about competition or fees: ensuring that a single foreign jurisdiction cannot paralyse everyday transactions for households and businesses.

• For Visa and Mastercard, UK and European moves add to the longer‑term risk that large markets build credible domestic alternatives, potentially eroding volume and bargaining power over time, even if the incumbents stay deeply embedded in cross‑border and premium segments.