Sovereignty, federated data and multi-rail bolster EU payments

At NextGen Nordics in Stockholm in May 2026, Madalena Cascais Tomé, Chief of Processing and Financial Institutions at Worldline, outlined three factors she linked to stronger resilience in European payments: national data sovereignty, federated data governance and multi-rail infrastructures.

Tomé pointed to the coexistence of instant payment schemes, card networks and traditional clearing systems across Europe. She said those overlapping rails give banks and processors options to reroute traffic, isolate incidents and keep services running when a single channel is degraded.

On data governance, Tomé described a federated approach in which data remains under the control of the originating institution or member state while systems allow authorized sharing of signals for fraud detection, compliance and operational monitoring. She presented federation as a way to preserve national control while enabling cross-border operational exchanges.

Tomé discussed how multi-rail setups affect fraud and security operations. With multiple rails, operators can validate and route payments through alternative networks if a particular channel shows suspicious activity or technical problems, reducing single points of failure. She added that common rules for data access and monitoring across federated nodes can widen the scope of investigations and make incident response more coordinated.

Regulators and industry players have been working on rules and technical solutions that keep sensitive payment data close to its origin while allowing governed exchanges for operational and security use. The stated aim of those efforts is to meet regulatory requirements and permit collaboration on fraud prevention and incident response without centralizing all data.

Tomé called Europe “one of the most resilient payment spaces in the world” and listed maintaining regional control over key assets, adopting federated governance to share essential signals, and keeping multiple payment rails in operation as measures she views as complementary for operational continuity and security.