Comment by superzamp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by superzamp | Hacker News Reader

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The problem with SEPA payment, is that it's great for the merchant and a net loss for the user, especially individual consumers.

From a UX perspective today, it will always be more cumbersome to initiate a SEPA transfer to the merchant. Some integrations offer a semblance of interactivity with your banking app in an attempt to streamline it, but nothing beats the simplicity entering your cards details or just showing your face to Apple pay. Then from a consumer protection perspective, if something wrong happen with your order or the merchant goes bust, you have no recourse if you initiated a SEPA CT. Card payments on the other hand give you a nice chain of large entities exposing themselves to the merchant's credit risk in front of you.

It can probably work in specific situations (e.g. if you have a niche website with a sophisticated audience ready to overcome the hurdles to acquire your widgets), but for these reasons alone I just can't see SEPA payments going anywhere near even a ridicule fraction of the market share held by legacy card networks yet.

There are multiple types of SEPA payments, I think you're talking about SEPA Credit Transfer (essentially making the bank transfer yourself).

On the other hand, for SEPA Direct Debit, not only is the interface quite reasonable (you enter your IBAN and confirm a mandate), but consumer protection is very high. You can chargeback no questions asked for 8 weeks, it will be immediately accepted and the merchant can't do anything about it. And as a customer, besides the 8 weeks no questions asked policy, you have 13 months to ask for a refund of an unauthorised transaction, with supporting evidence. In practice, the bank will always accept such a request too.

SEPA DD is suited for recurring payments as it relies on a mandate. It doesn’t make sense to set up a mandate for every one off txn, and at which point you’ve authorized the merchant to pull money from your account at anytime. The ball goes back to your court to contest afterwards, as well as keep track of all the mandates you’ve signed.

This. I would never do a SEPA payment vs a credit card transaction unless there's a significant advantage to me as a user to go with SEPA. And the merchant can't give me a discount for using a specific payment which is not allowed under EU rules, so there's not much the merchant can do there.

> And the merchant can't give me a discount for using a specific payment which is not allowed under EU rules

Charging a fee is not allowed, but giving discounts for specific payment methods are AFAIK.

SEPA Direct Debit has pretty good UX, I find. Just enter the bank account number, accept terms, done. In theory it's a bit more complicated as for B2C you're supposed to collect a real signature (which no one does) and for B2B there are additional rules (which most merchants also ignore), but in practice it works reasonably well. B2B SEPA direct debit is also much better for the merchant as money that has been successfully transferred cannot be refunded, unlike credit card payments where you can get chargebacks for 120 days...

In Finland with my fairly large bank the barrier is pretty much same if the card isn't already saved. Actually SEPA is easier as I only need to log in and confirm instead of having to provide CC details and log in to confirm the transfer.

Yeah this. SEPA (e.g. what is known in the Netherlands as Ideal) is easier than entering cc numbers. Unlock phone, open app, scan qr code, enter pin on phone, click OK. Much nicer and faster than entering 16 + 3 numbers, and don't even get me started on 3DSecure or whatever it's called bullshit.

For me, click pay, click bank, enter username+password, enter 1-time code, verify the details, get sms with second 1-time code and enter that. Done.

I hate trying to remember my cc number, expiration date, and CVS... And then doing that exact same thing above.

Nevertheless I choose to use a credit card almost all the time because of the purchase protections and rebates.

Brilliant. I hope we can get closer to this state side with FedNow instant payments coming soon.

If it's offered, I pay with the Danish Mobilepay app. The flow is:

1. Click "Pay with Mobilepay"

2. Enter phone number, or confirm it if if the merchant already knows this

3. Press notification on phone, fingerprint, and swipe right to approve.

I'm not sure how this appears to the business, but to me it looks like any other payment or transfer on my bank statement.

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