UK banks are collaborating on a government-backed domestic card payments rail to reduce reliance on Visa and Mastercard, which currently process around 95% of UK card transactions. The initiative, driven by the UK’s National Payments Vision, aims to build resilience, optionality and redundancy into the national payments infrastructure.

French banks retained Carte Bancaire to deliver a dual-rail system that offers sovereignty over transaction costs and regulatory leverage. The CB model highlights the importance of seamless integration, commercial viability and scalability for any new payment rail.

Open Banking payments reached nearly 200 million transactions in 2024 but lack the ubiquity, consumer protections and feature set—such as cross-border, recurring and in-store payments—that card rails offer. Profitability challenges and limited commercial incentives hinder its ability to act as core national infrastructure at scale.

A successful domestic rail could divert a portion of transaction volume away from Visa over time, though actual impact will depend on execution, bank adoption and interoperability. Visa’s 2016 acquisition of Visa Europe consolidated European operations, underscoring the challenge of displacing entrenched global networks.