Gonzalo Alonso, CEO, Ditto
Sovereign payments infrastructure is no longer a fringe idea. Across the UK and Europe, policymakers and industry leaders are actively revisiting their dependence on global networks – driven by concerns around resilience, competition and regulatory control. The direction of travel is clear, but what remains less defined is what sovereignty needs to deliver.
Control over infrastructure alone will not give customers and businesses the privacy, data ownership or clarity they need. Without trust embedded at its core, a sovereign system risks replicating the same vulnerabilities and regulatory blind spots it was meant to solve, just under different ownership. Secure Identity is where that changes.
The trust gap in every transaction
Real-time payments have changed expectations permanently but speed also changes the risk profile. When transactions are settled in seconds and are difficult to reverse, there is less time to detect error, coercion or fraud before value has already moved.
In that environment, trust cannot be assumed. It must be verified.
Today, much of the payment experience still relies on fragmented signals. A user may authenticate to login to an app. A merchant may be checked at onboarding. A payment instruction may be screened for risk. But these controls are often separated across different systems, moments and providers. That leaves space for attackers to exploit the gaps between identity, authentication and transaction approval.
For sovereign payments infrastructure, this is the opportunity: to design trust into the payment flow from the start.
Identity cannot stop at onboarding. It needs to travel with the transaction. A modern payment system should be able to verify that the payer is legitimate, the payee or merchant is authentic, the device or session has not been compromised, and the user has approved the specific transaction being executed. Without that chain of assurance, faster rails simply move trusted money to untrusted destinations more quickly.
This is where wallet-based digital identity and cryptographic assurance become foundational. They allow individuals and businesses to prove who they are, and who they are interacting with, without repeatedly exposing unnecessary personal data. The result is not just stronger verification, but a more privacy-preserving model for trust.
Crucially, stronger checks do not have to mean more friction. The goal is not to slow payments down, but to remove uncertainty from the experience. Identity security should work quietly in the background, binding the right user, device, merchant and transaction together at the point of approval.
This also reframes a long-standing tension in financial services: the perceived trade-off between privacy and fraud prevention. With new identity security solutions, that tension melts away. By minimising data exposure while strengthening authentication, payment providers can make privacy and security complementary features of the same system.
The blueprint exists. Now Europe must build on it.
India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Brazil’s Pix have already proven what is possible. Within years of launch, both systems achieved mass adoption by making payments fast, accessible and frictionless.
But scale brings its own vulnerabilities. As payment systems become more central to everyday life, fraud vectors multiply and verification gaps widen. The cost of retrofitting trust into a system already running at volume is steep, both financially and reputationally.
The EU and the UK have the advantage here. Learning from these past models means embedding identity assurance at the architecture level before new payment systems reach scale, not after the first breach.
Sovereign systems also hand regulators genuine leverage. The ability to set identity standards, govern data flows and align security with competition policy from day one, rather than negotiating them into existence after the fact.
Sovereignty is not an end in itself, but a means to build something that delivers. What matters is what gets built on top of it – systems people can rely on, where security and inclusion move forward together.
That only happens if trust is designed from the start. And trust, in payments, begins with knowing who you are dealing with.