ECB designates Visa Europe a systemically important payment system

What did the ECB make public on 2 October?

On 2 October 2026 the ECB published its overview of Governing Council decisions from August and September. It states that on 24 August 2026 the Governing Council adopted Decision ECB/2026/22 designating the Visa Europe Payment System as a systemically important payment system, under Regulation (EU) 2025/1355. The decision was notified to the German branch of Visa Europe Limited as operator for the euro area. From now on the Eurosystem oversees the system, with the ECB as lead overseer. What the differences between the two card schemes mean for merchants is covered in the guide Visa or Mastercard.

Who is on the list now?

According to the ECB there are six systems: TARGET (T2), EURO1, STEP2-T, the Mastercard Clearing Management System, CORE(FR) and now Visa. Mastercard was added after the 2019 review; at the time the ECB cited its large market share of euro payments and its cross-border relevance. The criteria are size, market share, cross-border activity and settlement services for other infrastructures. The overview gives no reasoning for Visa.

Why this is a resilience question for merchants

The designation is above all a statement about dependence. When the central bank treats two private card schemes like its own large-value platform, it is saying: if one of them goes down, a large part of retail stops. For merchants that is good news at first. Stricter requirements on risk management, operational stability and cyber defence make an outage at the till less likely.

But this is not price supervision. The regulation governs how safely a system must run, not what it may cost. Scheme fees and card scheme surcharges are not affected. That is exactly why European alternatives such as the new European Network for Payments are more than politics. But as long as Wero and the others publish no merchant pricing, as I wrote in my commentary on the Wero decision, dependence on two US networks remains the norm.

What merchants should check now

1. Keep at least two independent payment methods active on the terminal, for example girocard alongside Visa and Mastercard, so that a network outage does not take down the whole till.
2. Check the statement for whether scheme fees are shown separately. The new oversight does not lower them; merchants have to demand transparency themselves.