If Visa or MasterCard went down tomorrow, what's Plan B?

The UK “sovereignty” debate is really a replaceability debate… and AI agents will force the same question.

Visa and Mastercard process a large share of card payments. If one or both networks suffered a major technical outage, cyberattack, regulatory restriction, or geopolitical disruption, many businesses and consumers could temporarily lose the ability to pay or receive payments.

Payment Expert asked our CEO Evin McMullen: Can the UK’s payment system safely depend on companies headquartered outside the country (such as Visa and Mastercard) without becoming dangerously dependent on a small number of foreign-owned payment networks? The debate is not exclusive to the UK. It points to something larger and connects to AI agents and agentic commerce.

Evin said:

"Payments sovereignty is a meme unless you can point to the technical implementation that actually delivers it."

She also points out that "a US-headquartered network is not automatically a sovereignty risk, and a fully domestic system is not automatically resilient."

If it’s less about where a company is headquartered and more about how much control the country has if an important part of the payments system becomes unavailable, then account-to-account payments directly from the bank accounts can be an open banking alternative for consumers and merchants as it can potentially lower the costs merchants face when accepting payments.

Payment Expert concludes it’s not about sovereignty for its own sake, it's about "ensuring no single network becomes impossible to replace."

The same idea that drives the sovereignty debate applies to AI agent commerce:

• If every agent transaction has to go through one network, that network becomes a bottleneck.
• If the payment rails are proprietary and closed, agents can't programmatically access them.
• If there's no credible alternative, the system isn't resilient - whether you're a country or an AI agent.

The infrastructure for payment sovereignty and the infrastructure for agent commerce need the same open, competitive, replaceable rails.

Agent commerce needs open payment rails. We’ve been building the missing identity and payments infrastructure since 2019 so that your agent browses, shops, and purchases on rails that work for any agent, any network, anywhere.

Global banks like HSBC, Sony Bank, and Deutsche Bank trust our infrastructure and our growing network of 2.5M+ verified users and agents is ready to provide verified trust online to unlock the $1.5 trillion agentic economy.

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