On 1 July, Ireland took the helm of the EU Council Presidency. For six months, Irish ministers and officials will chair negotiations, set the pace of the legislative agenda, and hold the pen on some of the most consequential policy decisions Europe's digital economy will face.

Competitiveness, Values and Security — these three pillars will define what Ireland does with that platform. And for anyone working in payments and financial services, all three matter enormously.

For TrueLayer, it is something more personal. Ireland is our EU home. We are regulated here, headquartered here, and we have grown our European payments business from Dublin. We hold a 90%+ market share for open banking payments in Ireland. Ryanair, Revolut and Flutter trust us to move their money.

Based in Dublin, TrueLayer’s Irish team manages multiple functions under our regulated European entity licensed by the Central Bank of Ireland and from where we proudly oversee operations across 22 countries.

A lot has changed for payments in Ireland since we last held the Presidency in 2013.

In 2013, Ireland was still transitioning from the old domestic payments system to SEPA. Instant payments were a distant ambition. Stripe was a four-year-old startup. Revolut was launching to its first users. The fintech ecosystem that today employs tens of thousands of people across Europe was, in 2013, a small handful of companies with big ideas.

More importantly for us, open banking did not exist. And TrueLayer, the company I now lead as EU CEO, had not yet been founded.

What's changed?

Fast forward 13 years and the picture looks very different. Open Banking is live and pan-European, giving more than 400 million Europeans access to a new generation of payment services.

SEPA Instant is rolling out across the continent. Pay by Bank, using the SEPA instant rails and open banking technology, is now available at checkout on Ryanair, eBay, Amazon and Just Eat.

TrueLayer is a key part of that story. We were founded in 2016 as a direct result of PSD2 when our founders Francesco Simoneschi and Luca Martinetti had a simple vision: payments could be better, faster and cheaper than the card systems that dominated.

In those 13 years, Ireland has also cemented itself as a tech and financial services hub. It’s home to the European operations of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Stripe, PayPal, Wise, Revolut, Coinbase, TrueLayer, Monzo and Block. It's arguably the most concentrated cluster of fintech, payments and AI expertise in the EU. The concentration of regulatory expertise, engineering talent and pan-European perspective in Dublin is now genuinely world-class.

TrueLayer chose Dublin as our European headquarters in 2021, and is authorised by the Central Bank of Ireland. Our Irish entity holds the licences that allow us to serve customers across Europe.

Payments in Europe in 2026 look nothing like payments in Europe in 2013. The infrastructure is faster, the ecosystem is broader, and consumers have real choice for the first time in a generation.

But the job isn't done

Approximately two-thirds of European card payments are still processed by non-European networks. In many member states, that share is over 90%. When a single US-headquartered scheme experiences an outage, commerce stops from Dublin to Athens. When geopolitical tensions rise, European payment sovereignty is not a theoretical concern, it's a live vulnerability.

The Draghi report on European competitiveness was blunt about it. Strategic dependencies in critical infrastructure are a competitiveness problem, not just a political one. Payments infrastructure is about as critical as it gets.

That's why the next 13 years matter as much as the last 13 did. The foundations have been laid. The question now is what gets built on top of them.

What we hope for the next 13 years

By the time Ireland next holds the Presidency — some time around 2039, if the current rotation holds — the payments landscape will look very different again. Three things, in particular, need to be true.

1. Competition

The single biggest driver of the progress we've seen since 2013 has been competition. Competition between account-to-account and cards. Competition between incumbents and challengers. Competition between different European solutions.

Competition is what has driven lower prices for merchants, better experiences for consumers, and the sheer pace of innovation that has transformed European payments in a little over a decade. It has to remain the organising principle of European payments policy.

That means building a level playing field between payment methods, so that account-to-account payments can compete on their merits with cards, and neither is favoured by default. It also means ensuring that new initiatives like the Digital Euro build on the open banking foundations that already exist, rather than reinventing them behind closed doors. And it means recognising that agentic commerce — the next frontier of digital payments — cannot be allowed to become card-native by default.

Ireland's Presidency, with competitiveness embedded across its programme, has a genuine opportunity to set that direction.

2. Payment sovereignty

Sovereignty is the word Europe has rediscovered over the last few years. Recent developments have demonstrated how crucial it is in payments.

Real sovereignty means a payments ecosystem where consumers and businesses have genuine choice.

Pay by Bank reduces reliance on a small number of global card networks and increases diversity in Europe's payments architecture. That is sovereignty in practice, built on infrastructure Europe already has.

In the near future, the goal has to be to build on that foundation. The Digital Euro has a role to play, if designed well. But it should be a complement to private innovation, not a substitute for it. Ireland will be chairing the Digital Euro trilogue negotiations, a significant responsibility and a significant opportunity. The Digital Euro can be a genuine step forward for European payments, but only if regulated payment providers, banks and fintechs alike, have equal access from the outset.

Financial Data Access (FiDA) also has a role to play, if delivered with genuinely open access rather than gated behind commercial schemes. Instant payments have a role to play, if the infrastructure keeps up with the ambition.

By the next Irish presidency, European payment sovereignty should not be a policy aspiration. It should be a statement of fact.

3. Resilience

The third test is resilience. The events of the last few years — from the CrowdStrike outage in July 2024 to a string of card scheme incidents that have taken payments offline across entire regions — have made clear that resilience is not a nice-to-have. Payment outages, cyber incidents, infrastructure failures are happening more frequently. And as a result, organisations across Ireland are treating resilience as a board-level priority. It is the foundation of consumer trust in digital payments.

The answer isn't replacing global schemes with a single European scheme. The answer is actual diversity: multiple payment methods, on separate infrastructure, so that when one goes down, commerce keeps moving. Pay by Bank, running on entirely different rails from cards, is a critical part of that resilience picture. And it can help to ensure that new schemes such as Wero don't become another single point of failure

By 2039, no European merchant should be one outage away from losing a day of trading.

Ireland's moment

Every Presidency has its own character. Some are remembered for a single legislative achievement, others for setting a direction of travel. Ireland has a real chance to be remembered for both.

13 years ago, when Ireland last held the Presidency, we could not have imagined the payments landscape we operate in today. A pan-European open banking framework. Instant payments. Pay by Bank at the checkout of some of Europe's biggest merchants. The pace of change has been extraordinary. The infrastructure that exists now — instant, open, competitive — simply didn't exist then.

The next 13 years will bring change on a similar scale. What we build during that time will shape European payments for a generation. Ireland, with its unique combination of Presidency influence and homegrown fintech expertise, has an outsized role to play in getting it right.

If we get the next chapter right, if Ireland uses this Presidency to create a genuine level playing field, complete the open banking framework, build openness into the Digital Euro and prepare Europe's infrastructure for AI-enabled commerce, then the next 13 years could be just as transformative.

The task now is to connect ambition with action, regulation with innovation, policymakers with practitioners. As the Irish Presidency motto puts it: "Ní neart go cur le chéile" which translates to no strength without unity.

We're proud to be part of that story, competing at scale across Europe from our base in Ireland, and playing our part in building payment infrastructure that is more competitive, more sovereign and more resilient than the one we inherited.

The last 13 years show what's possible. The next 13 will show whether we've learned the important lessons.