Germany has girocard, Belgium Bancontact, Denmark Dankort, Italy Bancomat, France CB. Most of these cards also carry Visa or Mastercard, and each payment picks a single winner. For you the result looks identical. For the merchant, it isn't. And for the country, even less so.
Every domestic scheme has the same job; France's CB, this episode's example, is Europe's largest. CB, for Cartes Bancaires, is a network in episode 1's sense: a grouping created in 1984 so that a card issued by one bank is accepted at another bank's merchants. It sets the rules, publishes the interchange schedule, arbitrates disputes and carries the brand.
Its particularity is its legal form. It is not a listed company selling a service to customers, it is a member-owned grouping whose members are both owners and users. Long an affair of French banks, it is opening up: J.P. Morgan has been a principal member since March 2024, Adyen since April 2026, becoming along the way a direct participant in STET, the system that clears interbank payments in France.
A co-badged card carries two logos and, above all, two payment applications in its chip, each with its own identifier, the Application ID (AID): A000000042 for CB, A000000003 for Visa. Two rule books, two fee schedules, two possible routes, on the same card and the same account. At the moment of payment, the terminal reads both and keeps one.
This double kit is not redundancy, it is a division of labour: the domestic application optimises everyday use at home, on a network whose members control the conditions, and the Visa or Mastercard application makes the same card accepted everywhere else. Daily life on the domestic scheme, travel on the international one.
A co-badged card: one chip, two payment applications, each with its own AID.
The EU Interchange Fee Regulation, applicable since June 2016, settles it: the merchant may pre-configure a default network on its terminal, the cardholder may override it. Neither the issuer nor the network is allowed to impose automatic routing that would remove that choice.
In practice, everything depends on the channel. With chip insertion, the selection menu exists almost everywhere, if you know how to open it. In contactless, brand selection arrived much later and remains unevenly deployed. Online, it comes down to clicking a logo, when the page offers one. The network itself is working on its visibility: CB's billboard campaign "Payé in France", launched for its fortieth anniversary, turns paying domestic into a selling point, tricolour logo included.
Online, the choice comes down to a clickable logo, when the page thinks to offer one.
Co-badging stacks two promises. Visa's or Mastercard's is obvious: the same card works everywhere in the world. The domestic scheme's shows less: conditions decided and controlled locally, and continuity of service that depends on nobody else. That second promise only really reads on a day of crisis.
And the border? If domestic cards rarely work abroad, it is not a legal fate but a technical inheritance: their contactless runs on proprietary software kernels, Visa's and Mastercard's, which do not export. A common European kernel now exists, CPACE, developed by the cooperation of the continent's domestic schemes, and it opens the door to a CB card being accepted abroad. Bancontact is on the same path in Belgium.
A payment notion that still escapes you?
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