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Comment by kalleboo | Hacker News Reader

When discussing Europe, you can't leave out the rise of mobile payments that work similar to India's UPI.

For instance, in Sweden, "Swish"[0] has quickly taken over the market for casual payments, with free, instant, irreversible bank transfers between individuals using only the recipients phone number (or a QR code).

They are a bunch of these systems, but currently they are all fractured into national systems, although work has started on adding interoperability[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_(payment)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Mobile_Payment_System...

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Tikkies are the Dutch equivalent.

https://dutchreview.com/expat/tikkie-netherlands/

I'd say they have become obsolete ever since all major banks now support similar functionality (payment requests) + the enablement of instant payments across Dutch banks

Hate that neither of them support non-Dutch banks (well, I think maybe Rabo has an extra paid service that does, but I don't bank there). Bunqs service did also accept CC, but I had to quit them over their never ending 'innovation'.

I desperately need something that works at least in the entire Eurozone.

It's pretty great. These transfers sometimes arrive within <1s. The speed and ease of use is something that cryptocurrencies are "trying" to "solve" (Among other things). Most aren't aware of the wide adoption here already, of course there are other aspects crypto's score better on. But if all bank transfers would be a Tikkie, then what would Crypto's, in terms of ease of use and speed have to offer?

Nothing, those were never claimed as cryptocurrency strenghts, the opposite in fact, were accepted as weaknesses that were still worth it considering the other benefits.

From the time I entered the world of Crypto (2012) until now. Both speed and ease of use were major selling points for many, if not most alt-coins. Sure, it's not the core promise of ALL those alts, but I remember a period (Raiblocks/Nano), where no crypto could even dare to under deliver on the promise of speed.

Ah, for me the cryptocurrency story is still mostly about bitcoin and the overall concept of the blockchain.

Promises aren't worth zilch. (We now do have additional features that some altcoins actually deliver on, the most famous one being of course Ethereum with its smart contracts... but trying to beat the ease of use and speed of in-country traditional banking is a lost cause.)

There was a time when Bitcoin was super fast, you send it and it's there. We didn't really care about double-spends, so no-confirmation transactions where good enough. I kind of long back to that time :). But yes, at this point, I don't think Bitcoin does neither have a speed or ease of use issues, we are long passed the stage where it was of importance.

It definitely was in the early days, back when the movement was more idealistic and people were making posters comparing Bitcoin, Western Union & wire transfers to spread the word. I think around the block size debate/BCC fork era most of that rhetoric went away.

Not just casual payments.

I bought concert tickets last week, for almost 1000DKK (130€). I'd already entered my phone number, so paying by MobilePay was faster and easier. I usually use this if I have the option.

To use it, I pressed the MobilePay button on the website, pressed continue since my phone number is already present and correct. I unlocked my phone, and there was a notification waiting for me, with the amount and recipient stated. Fingerprint and swipe to approve.

I didn't need to type in any card details, or authenticate within the web browser. A 1000kr debit or credit card purchase would require me to enter my 20+ digit bank password, then do a similar process to unlock the phone for 2FA.

Yes. In Switzerland it's Twint. It's easy to use, instant and free for the user. It started out as an easy way to move small amounts of money around among family and friends without the hassle of doing a bank transfer. Now large grocery stores and online shops support it too. I don't see it overtaking the whole payment market because of the exclusivity to Switzerland. It'd be great if something like Twint would exist but usable and prevalent all over the world.

> free for the user

Overall it's not free, the receiving party will still pay the fee (so, probably not that different from Debit/Credit Cards for merchants), and shops might increase the price preemptively to account for that.

See this drama for more: https://www.twint.ch/en/press/digitec-galaxus-spreading-fals...

PS: However, it's probably free for user2user payments, using phone no as identifiers. And it's useful to settle lunch debts among friends. I guess they (banks) want users to install twint apps for that, make it then easy to pay at businesses.

In Poland we have "Blik" [1]. It's immensely popular here, especially for online transactions and p2p transfers. Recently it started expansion to physical stores too. Seems to be quite similar to Swish.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blik_(payment)

Swish works for person to person transactions, physical store payments, and I've also seen some companies starting to use it for monthly bill payments (ie, send out a paper with qr code, user scan it with app and signs it, and bill is paid).

There is paym in the UK, which works the same way, using phone numbers, but it is not used that much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paym

MBWay in Portugal https://www.multibanco.pt/operacoes/mb-way/

PayNow in Singapore: https://www.abs.org.sg/consumer-banking/pay-now

MobilePay in Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobilePay

Also in Finland.

There's also Siirto to some extent. It doesn't work with all banks, but I think that the banks that are part of it are like 70% of the personal banking market share.

Vipps is the Norwegian equivalent, I guess...? [1]

[1] https://vipps.no/

Vipps in Norway. https://vipps.no/

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