Five major European payment systems - Italy's Bancomat, Spain's Bizum, the European consortium EPI Company/Wero, Portugal's SIBS-MB WAY and Scandinavia's Vipps MobilePay - have officially launched the European Payments Network (EPN). It will be headquartered in Madrid, and the goal was stated without much diplomacy: from 2027 it is meant to become Europe's alternative to the American giants Visa and Mastercard.

Together these systems serve around 130 million users in 13 European countries, more than 70 percent of the population of the EU and Norway. EPN will run a shared interoperability hub through which the national systems, which currently each work on their own, will be able to talk to one another. A user from one country will be able to pay in another through their existing system, without the transaction necessarily passing through the infrastructure of the American companies.

In the first phase the network will cover cross-border payments between individuals, then e-commerce and in-store payments, with instant account-to-account transfers. Behind the EPI Company/Wero consortium stand banking heavyweights such as BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole, Société Générale, Deutsche Bank, Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe, Erste Bank Österreich and Raiffeisen Bank International. The companies say other European payment systems could join the network later.

The motive is not technological, it is political. Visa and Mastercard today process almost two thirds of card payments in Europe, and European institutions talk more and more about "payment sovereignty" - the idea that geopolitical tension could put access to American financial infrastructure at risk. In parallel, the European Central Bank plans to introduce a digital euro by 2029.

Nobody has to swap their cards tomorrow - Visa and Mastercard are staying on the market, and the new network still has to grow. For Macedonia, which is not an EU member, this is news from the outside for now. The question is how long it stays that way: when Europe starts paying on its own tracks, will we be connected to them, or will we be standing at the station watching the trains go by?