Britain's biggest banks will hold their first formal meeting on Thursday to establish a national alternative to Visa and Mastercard, as concerns grow that President Donald Trump could use his influence over the US-owned payment systems to destabilise the UK economy.

The meeting, chaired by Vim Maru, Barclays' UK chief executive, will bring together a group of City funders tasked with fronting the costs of a new payments company — known as DeliveryCo — that would keep the UK economy running if the dominant card networks were disrupted.

About 95 per cent of UK card transactions are processed through Mastercard and Visa, according to a 2025 report by the Payment Systems Regulator. That concentration has taken on new significance as cash use continues to fall and Trump's threats against Nato allies over Greenland have renewed concerns about over-reliance on US infrastructure.

One executive familiar with the project told the Guardian that "if Mastercard and Visa were turned off, it would send us back to the 1950s," adding: "Of course, we need a sovereign payments system." The potential scale of disruption is not hypothetical: in Russia, US sanctions forced both companies to withdraw their services, leaving ordinary people unable to access funds or purchase goods, despite Visa and Mastercard handling 60 per cent of the country's payments at the time.

The initiative is City-funded but government-backed, and has been under discussion for years. Both Visa and Mastercard are included in the new funders group alongside Santander UK, NatWest, Nationwide, Lloyds Banking Group, the ATM network body Link, and Coventry Building Society. Mastercard said it "has been fully invested in the UK for decades," while Visa said it welcomed "industry progress on account-to-account payments" and that competition "will deliver choice, innovation and economic growth in the UK."

Bank of England deputy governor Sarah Breeden said in a recent speech that the new system "could provide a degree of extra resilience in the UK payments landscape, as an additional payment rail on the rare occasion of operational disruption to existing rails." UK officials have stopped short of publicly citing American political threats as the driver behind the project.

Joe Garner, the former Nationwide chief executive who led a 2023 independent review on payments and advised the government on Rachel Reeves' national payments vision, told the Guardian: "Regardless of any political developments, the UK needs to do this. We needed to before, we need to now."

The Bank of England will develop infrastructure blueprints to hand over to the City group next year, with the new system expected to be operational by 2030. Similar pressure is building in Europe: Aurore Lalucq, chair of the European parliament's economic and monetary affairs committee, warned last month that "Trump can cut everything off," calling for "a European Airbus for payment systems."

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