France’s CB Payments Network Aims to Take on Visa/Mastercard in EU

French payments network CB reportedly hopes to lead a Europe-based campaign against Visa and Mastercard.

That’s according to a report Sunday (April 19) from the Financial Times (FT), which says this effort is happening as European Union (EU) officials express concern that the two payment companies’ dominance could be used against the region.

Philippe Laulanie, CB’s director general, told the FT the company has begun to reverse a long-term downswing that had slashed its share of payments in France from more than 90% five years ago to 75%.

Laulanie said CB, which operates on a “co-badging” system that lets French bank cards run both on international and local networks, had around 30 candidates to join its network.

“CB has become very attractive again,” Laulanie said, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine underlined “strategic dependencies” and the need for payment system sovereignty.

“Current tensions with the U.S. under Donald Trump have underscored the idea that some services could be cut off or subject to conditions,” he added.

CB was established in the 1980s with the support of France’s biggest banks to share some of their costs, and is a nonprofit. The company has lost market share, the FT added, as its American rivals lured banks with exclusive deals and offered FinTechs incentives that allowed them to give users free cards.

French President Emmanuel Macron has lent his support to CB’s co-badging program, calling the French payments network the “last kilometer of our economic sovereignty,” the report said.

The FT noted that there is no cross-border card system in the EU that serves as an alternative to Visa or Mastercard, although there is now a European rival to Apple Pay known as Wero.

Launched in 2024 by the European Payment Initiatives, Wero had 48.5 million members in Belgium, France and Germany as of February, and plans to expand to online and in-store payments by 2027.

As PYMNTS wrote last year, there is some debate in Europe about the best way to respond to the dominance of American payment companies.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has championed the digital euro as a way to protect “our freedom, autonomy and security,” as ECB executive board member Piero Cipollone said in September. But the EPI argues that a digital euro could hinder private sector payment systems.

“The current design of the retail digital euro largely addresses the same use cases as private solutions, without offering any clear added value for consumers,” the banks said before a November hearing on the matter.