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Comment by rplnt | Hacker News Reader

Having visited NL, my card was practically useless. Any other country no problem, but Netherlands? So I don't understand you really.

That being said, direct payment gateways are common, but they require cooperation with banks. There's probably hundreds of them and only make sense on local market where you can have on or two implemented to satisfy 80%+ of customers (and others will just use regular card).

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That's the whole point, in the Netherlands we use debit cards (known as 'PIN cards' to the locals) instead of credit cards. Usually these are Maestro cards. I don't know the exact number, but as a Dutch resident I guess that >99% of all POS transactions are done using such card, not a credit card.

Cashiers in most common shops probably don't even know how to accept a payment by credit card, so the'll just refuse.

Meastro cards are usually protected by a PIN and require a POS system to be used. This was a problem for e-commerce, so the Dutch banks participated in iDEAL. It's basically a redirect from the merchants website to the bank site of the customer, where they use their own cardreader and debit card to validate the transaction before being redirected back to the site of the merchant.

In many countries (such as where I'm from, Sweden, or where I live now, Japan), debit cards and credit cards are interchangeable, and you can't even tell by looking at the card if it's debit or credit. They're both VISA or MasterCard branded, and what's backing it is only the business of the cardholder, not the merchant.

I remember Maestro cards in Sweden as being for under-18's, and then when you become an adult you get a VISA/MasterCard debit card instead, but I don't know if that's true anymore.

In Canada, a distinction is made because the fees on debit are much lower (comparable to cash handling costs) and the banks have put tremendous marketing efforts in pushing for debit cards and branding them "Interac."

That said, the cards themselves use exactly the same technology, look the same and debit cards are usually Maestro/Cirrus or Visa/Plus compatible so we can do debit transactions in europe.

The online version of debit however has yet to catch on.

Canadian here, and I find that most of my peers (30s) use their credit cards for almost everything and their debit cards collect dust. The reasons are several:

1) CCs offer rewards (travel, cash back), usually in the range of 2% of purchases

2) CCs offer insurance and extended warranties on some purchases.

3) CCs help you build a good credit rating, which is important for someone who intends to apply for a mortgage at some point.

4) CC offer superior protection to debit cards. Yes, CC fraud may be easy, but as the card holder you will almost never be on the hook.

I've had my CC compromised, the bank detected it immediately and issued me a new one. Never was there any question who would bear the cost of the 5-figures that the fraudster spent. My brother had his debit card compromised once and the story was completely different. The bank wanted him to prove that the fraudulent transactions were not his and he had to go to great lengths to do so.

My personal preferred order of payment is:

Cash

Debit (last resort)

I do to for similar reasons. But I will use debit if the merchant extends me a discount, one of the gas station here for example gives me 2 cents off per liter which works out as more than the rewards.

However, I never do cash cause I never have cash on me. It's Credit for reward and then debit.

That said, I know a lot of people who don't do the rewards maximizing. Programmer/engineer crowd tends to self-select for people who are logical and number inclined.

On the other side of the fence, also Canadian, my debit card has been compromised many times. Bank always shuts it down immediately and lets me know, then returns the money. I have never been asked to prove anything. Usually they ask me to double check and see if any other charges than the ones they caught were fraudulent.

This has been as simple as someone using a copy of my card to buy candy and video games, something I could have done but didn't in this case.

Really impressed with the services of my banks when it's come to debit fraud.

To be fair, my brother's incident was quite a few years ago by now, so it's quite possible that the response has improved.

Yeah, I have a debit card that works as a Visa card if you choose to use it that way. I never use it though because if someone steals the number it is way harder to deal with fraud on a Debit card than on a Credit card. The consumer protection laws on Debit cards are much weaker than the ones for Credit cards.

We probably have old misbehaving banks to thank for our relatively consumer friendly credit card laws. In countries where the banks weren't quite so abusive the laws could be much weaker and give Debit cards an advantage.

Same is true for Belgium, though the Belgian infrastructure is a little more up to date (most terminals can accept credit cards, if the shop has payed for the quite expensive creditcard processing service with the company issuing the terminals): debit cards are the norm, credit cards are much less common.

Netherlands was also one of the few countries in the world that didn't take union pay (China's atm network), so my debit card was useless. If I didn't have my credit card I would have been totally screwed.

> my card was practically useless

That's because merchants pay 3% or more for a creditcard payment, and something like 0.8% for a local bank card payment (with the online equivalent iDeal). On top of that, there is much more risk accepting the creditcard with chargebacks, while the banks guarantee normal/iDeal payments. So most merchants here really dislike creditcard payments, it "costs them" much more.

Of course I understand that this is not a solution for accepting payments internationally. What I say is that the whole creditcard payment system, as it currently works, should be replaced by something saner, something that looks more like iDeal.

The EU is introducing a cap on credit card interchange fees of 0.3%, and 0.2% for debit cards. This is expected to lead to much lower fees for merchants that accept credit cards (and ultimately, consumers).

The new regulations apply from 09 December 2015:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/credit-and-debit-card-fee...

What's with the EU and bringing in new financial regulations for Merchants around Christmas time??

Last year it was VATMOSS on 1 January (when lots of people are on leave and lots of purchases are made due to stores running sales, especially online).

ONS retail sales per week in the UK are £9B in December vs. £7B in April or June (last 12 months figures, http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/rsi/retail-sales/index.html).

You can ask your payment processor and they will say their prices will stay the same.

Check this response from paypal: PayPal told us that the “European Union’s regulation of Multilateral Interchange Fees (MIF) does not apply to PayPal as we are not an inter-bank card scheme and the fees PayPal charges businesses are not interchange fees”. http://tamebay.com/2015/03/new-eu-caps-on-credit-and-debit-c...

Source for the 0.8% for local bank card payment? Last I read it was a fixed 4-6 cents per payment. See [1], for example.

[1] https://www.abnamro.nl/nl/zakelijk/betalen/tarieven/sepa-bet...

Given that a huge number of transactions will be near 1-2 euros, the average cost in terms of percent could really be 0.8%. Not that I've seen the numbers mind you.

iDEAL covers nearly all the dutch banks (10 of them) so no 'per bank' payment systems. Creditcards are not accepted by brick and mortar stores except for some very tourist heavy areas, most people do not have a creditcard here.

Try Japan. Credit cards won't be accepted half the places you go and only a small percentage of ATMs will allow you to withdraw money from a foreign account at all.

Credit should be accepted in stores where you're expected to spend over 10,000JPY/$100, but anywhere small is cash-only. In Tokyo you might be able to NFC pay from your transit card balance, and the taxis take cards.

As for ATMs, go find a 7/11 or a Post Office and those will work.

Well, yes. I didn't want to get into all the minutiae to make a point.

You might find it pretty useless in japan, other than at 7/11 ATMs. They have some kind of weird specific payment system as well.

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