InMarketing Today

America's chief trade negotiator, Jamieson Greer, accused Brazil's Pix payments system of unfairly disadvantaging Visa and Mastercard, and proposed a 25% tariff on Brazil in response. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva refused to back down, and his right-wing rival Flávio Bolsonaro backed him. It is a small skirmish in a much bigger shift: as US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent frames access to the dollar as "no longer unconditional", countries from Europe to China are building payment rails that route around Washington entirely.

For Visa and Mastercard, this is a direct threat to operating margins of more than 50%, built almost entirely on being the assumed default. Any brand whose dominance rests on infrastructure rather than active preference should read this as a warning: being unavoidable is not the same as being trusted, and geopolitics is now willing to test the difference. The same logic applies well beyond payments. A category leader who has stopped explaining why customers should choose them, rather than assuming they will, is exposed the moment a credible alternative appears.

Financial services leaders should audit which parts of their business depend on assumed access rather than earned preference, and start building the public case for why customers and regulators should keep choosing them, before a rival or a government makes that case for them.

Visa and Mastercard process around two-thirds of card-payment value across the eurozone, and up to 95% of it in the UK. Rather than trying to replace them outright, Europe is building three parallel systems: Wero, a digital wallet backed by the European Payments Initiative; EuroPA, which links national schemes such as Spain's Bizum and Italy's Bancomat; and a digital euro, still awaiting legislative approval. ECB board member Piero Cipollone put the stakes plainly: "If we lose control of our money, we lose control of our economic destiny."

The most telling admission comes not from a challenger but from the European Payments Initiative's own chief executive, Martina Weimert, who says the bloc's alternatives lack a unified cross-border story: "We have nice national assets... but we don't have anything cross-border." That is a branding failure as much as an infrastructure one. Fragmented systems cannot out-market a duopoly that has spent decades making itself invisible and indispensable at the point of sale. Meanwhile Visa's Oliver Jenkyn is touring governments in person, and Mastercard is publicly laying claim to being a European payment network through its own investment announcements, incumbents defending share with a coordinated human story, not just capital.

Any fintech trying to displace an entrenched incumbent should learn from Europe's stumble: infrastructure alone does not win adoption. Before scaling technically, agree the one sentence that explains, in plain terms, why a merchant or consumer should switch, and make sure every national partner is telling the same story.

Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy and one of Britain's most recognisable marketing figures, has joined the free-market think tank the Adam Smith Institute as a senior fellow. He will advise on how the Institute communicates its research, drawing on the behavioural science practice he founded at Ogilvy in 2012. "The best solutions to society's problems come from human ingenuity, not bureaucracy," he said.

This is a think tank hiring for communication skill, not policy credentials: chairman James Lawson called Sutherland "an undisputed master of communication", not an economist. It is a useful reminder that the hardest part of most institutions' work is not having the right answer; it is making anyone care enough to listen. Marketing expertise is increasingly treated as a strategic asset well outside marketing departments.

Any organisation whose message is not landing should ask whether the gap is substance or delivery. If it is delivery, the fix might be a communicator, not another policy paper.