Could Visa’s Restrictive Paris Olympics Sponsorship Bolster The EU’s Payment Autonomy Plans?

Last week, I caught up with one of my friends for dinner and he was keen to tell me all about his time in Paris for the olympics. He got out his phone to show me the badminton match he’d been to see, as well as highlights from the Rugby 7s. 

We were talking for a while before he touched upon a downside. He had a Revolut card while his girlfriend had Monzo card, and in this instance his partner had not been able to pay at all during their time at the events. After this, I contacted another friend who said he’d had the same issue, and this had twice resulted in him and his partner buying nothing.

Visa's exclusivity deal with Paris Olympics

Spectators who only had another method, such as Mastercard, and wanted to buy food, drinks, or merchandise were directed to a Visa Prepaid Card kiosk staffed by Visa employees. They could choose between receiving a physical card or loading a virtual card on the VisaGo app. If they opted for a physical card, staff then configured the payment using the card details and a payment terminal, allowing the spectators to select the amount to load onto the card as a one-time load. Once the prepaid card was ready, it could be used at Olympic venues and anywhere in France that accepted Visa. Any unused balance would be refunded to the original card at the end of August, after which the prepaid card would expire.

Now apart from an inconvenience, this got me thinking about how such an exclusivity deal would go down in Brussels, where the duopoly of the card schemes and the EU’s lack of skin in the game in payments keeps regulators and lobbyists alike up at night?

A negative reaction from Olympics spectators

On LinkedIn, I saw a fair few Brussels lobbyists making terse comments about the situation, one even exclaiming “what a mess!” Another complained about having to weigh up going twenty minutes to an ATM to withdraw cash, meaning that precious game time was lost, while another spoke of seeing puzzled faces. For me, as someone who has followed the thinking of the European Commission, European Parliament and European Central Bank, this felt like a straw that could break the camel’s back. Brussels is only a short train journey away from Paris and no doubt many of the bureaucrats, policy specialists and government affairs representatives that call the city home will have headed on down to the Olympics. The question now is, how difficult would they have found this experience? 

How does this sit with the EU payments roadmap?

The Paris Olympics come at the start of a new mandate for the EU. Incoming regulation like the Instant Payments Regulation (IPR) is being banked on by the EU’s political institutions as a way to make instant payments the new normal, opening up use cases like account-to-account. Meanwhile, legislative decisions need to be taken regarding revisions to the Payment Services Directive, which in its next iteration will become the PSD3 and Payment Services Regulation and also the digital euro. 

The latter, alongside the market-led European Payments Initiative, which has now begun to roll-out its mobile payment Wero solution, may have spurred scepticism from banking and payment professionals, but EU policymakers are pinning their hopes on these finally sparking strategic autonomy in the EU and ending its reliance on overseas solutions, such as Visa and Mastercard. 

And so, when the Olympics eventually returns to the EU, what could paying look like, and will we see signs saying “Wero only accepted?” 

Brussels can only dream…

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