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Comment by pdpi | Hacker News Reader

A European initiative intent on delivering a "pan-European payment solution", but out of 31 founding banks, 16 are Spanish, 7 French, and 3 German. Italy, Finland, Poland, Belgium, Netherlands each have a single participating bank, and no other country is represented.

Not sure what to make of that, but interesting nonetheless.

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Hard to draw conclusions without knowing the sizes of those banks. For example the 16 Spanish participating banks might be smaller or equivalent to the few French and German ones (likely true actually).

The bigger Spanish banks are surprisingly large. Going by Wikipedia[0], there's three Spanish banks in the top 20 largest in Europe, and only one German bank. And Santander is a chunk bigger than Deutsche at that. In fact, when measured by revenue, Santander is about as big as BNP.

Sizes aside, the fact that Spain got this many banks on board this project is in and of itself pretty noteworthy. The fact that there are so few participating countries is also pretty interesting.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banks_in_Europe#Larges...

Can only speak for Germany, but those 3 are certainly huge. Probably 2/3 of all bank accounts in Germany.

This is getting some negative attention and, on second look, it reads a bit like I'm suggesting there's something nefarious or conspiratorial about this without actually saying it directly.

I'm not. It's an interesting project, and I'm genuinely curious as to how they ended up with that roster of initial member banks (if nothing else, because it sort of informs my expectation of this plan succeeding)

Note that "nets" is on the list.

They represent 250 banks across Europe (according to their web-page): https://www.nets.eu/who-we-are

For example, Danske Bank (the biggest Danish bank) uses them.

Nets doesn't "represent" banks, they provide them with services. In this particular case, they're there representing themselves. If you're going to build a competitor to Visa/MasterCard, you need banks on board, but also somebody specialised in rolling out the infrastructure.

Nets is owned by Mastercard.

The two main banks in Finland are OP (the one included here), and Nordea which is a shitty bank anyway so who cares. Others are very small banks, like savings only.

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