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Comment by jurmous | Hacker News Reader

We in The Netherlands are one of the most cashless societies in Europe. We mostly pay with our mobiles or contactless with banking cards. We even are "going Dutch" sharing our bills with what we call a Tikkie: One person pays the bill and then we send over instant messaging our payment request for money which can be payed directly with one click and authentication in banking app.

One thing that is annoying for foreigners with credit cards is that they are barely accepted here. We work mostly with Maestro and almost all Dutch e-commerce sites work with Ideal which directly link to the banking apps of the local banks.

My wallet does not contain any cash anymore and just an ID and OV card.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dutch-payment-landscape-one-m...

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For Americans visiting the Netherlands one word of caution: many of the pay terminals (especially the parking ones) do not seem to like U.S. cards, and even some the vendors from Europe. When we were on vacation there a few years ago it was a roulette game to figure out if parking meters would take my card or that of my father in law (from Hungary).

The problem is that they have a local exchange there, and do not have cross agreements with all of the payment vendors (not at the Visa level, but bellow that). It was annoying, and caused us a lot of hassle. I am not sure how we could have avoided it.

Most shops in the Netherlands work with maestro of mastercard and vpay of Visa. It is directly linked to our bank credit and has low transaction fees. Maestro and vpay is accepted all over the world. We work directly with IBAN numbers and not with credit card types like mostly in the world.

Normal Mastercard/visa credit don’t work here since shops have to pay way higher transaction fees while almost nobody uses them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestro_(debit_card) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_PayPlease

It will be phased out though in 2023 to Mastercard debit and visa debit so likely in the future Netherlands payment system will be more aligned with what other countries use.

> It will be phased out though in 2023 to Mastercard debit and visa debit

That sounds like an absolutely terrible idea. Why would we give these two rotten-to-the-core companies such power over our payment systems?

I don't really understand your point, neither do I understand the change:

Maestro and V-PAY already _are_ owned by those two companies, and are debit cards. What changes with Mastercard/Visa debit?

That it erodes the position of EU banks in favor of Visa and Mastercard. I have no problem with them facilitating the tech, but I do have a problem with them usurping the position of the banks. The EU is already too dependent on the United States in this manner, no need to make it worse.

It sounds it will work the same as maestro but be usable in places where you need credit card numbers. https://www.mastercard.com/news/europe/en/perspectives/en/20...

For Canadians - they've got no issue with almost all of our cards. It's just the American ones that run into issues, so your chip & pin and tap features will work splendidly abroad.

Now you know why so many dutch ride bikes!

:-)

Can’t speak for other countries, but in France and Northern Italy this is the same: contactless cards everywhere. I live in France and --I have to check my banking app to check this because I don’t remember-- the last time I went to a cash machine was almost one year ago.

I'm in the US and the only time I can remember going to an ATM in the past 5 years is because farmers markets sometimes give you discounts > credit card rewards for cash and weed shops cannot use banks so you have to pay cash.

IMO farmers markets would disappear if they stopped using cash. It's basically synonym for tax avoidance sprinkled with some fraudulent claims how your honey cures everything.

I totally agree farmers markets are all about tax avoidance. They would charge me the flat dollar amount for cash but then add in the tax when I used a card. No way they are paying taxes on that cash transaction.

Ditto for Finland. Contactless cards or mobile phone payments work everywhere.

I haven't touched cash ever since covid hit, and very rarely before it.

Same for Poland, and what I've heard, Sweden.

Hopefully we can get rid of our OV cards soon. Annoys me a lot that I have to take it out of my wallet every time.

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