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Comment by wenyuanyu | Hacker News Reader

I was a little bit surprised that there are no EU-based/originated payment networks. How comes?

At least, in Japan, there is JCB, and in China there is UnionPay / Alipay?

Europe used to have two significant card networks of its own: Maestro (owned by Mastercard) and Visa Europe (previously owned by various European banks). But Maestro is dead now and, a few years ago, Visa Europe merged into Visa.

There were a bunch of national networks but they're slowly dying I think. The UK's Switch debit card network got rebranded as Maestro and then killed, for example. The UK still has something called Link however (used for ATM withdrawals and I think nothing else).

>There were a bunch of national networks but they're slowly dying I think.

True. It's CB in France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupement_des_Cartes_Bancaire...

Fewer and fewer banks supports it. It's obvious when looking at the neobanks' offers: https://www.zupimages.net/up/24/07/zbua.png ("Réseau CB: Oui [yes] / Non [no]"). A shame as the whole French payment network now relies almost solely on Visa, a $500T US giant.

the italian "pagobancomat" system[0] (pay from your CC with an ATM card) is still alive and well, all ATMs and POS support it together with visa/mastercard. There's also an online payment system but I've not seen it used.

Most plastic you get these days supports both that and visa/maestro.

[0] an extension of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancomat_(interbank_network)

There used to be Eurocard, but it merged with MasterCard a couple of decades ago. Most countries had domestic debit card networks. Some still have, while others replaced theirs with Visa / MasterCard debit cards.

How much is the credit card fee and debit card fee in Europe? In China, it is capped to 0.6% and could be as low as 0.3% or less I believe.

Capped at 0.3% for credit card transactions, 0.2% for debit card transactions

See https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2015...

That's somewhat deceiving because these regulations don't include bank fees (about 1% in total is pretty standard)

SEPA is basically free and instant. There are some shortcomings but even with them there is hardly demand for for any other service (why would consumers decide to use anything but banks transfer and/or credit/debit cards when the fees are so low?)

The banks already work just fine there, the little edge some startup may have is not worth the hassel

This podcast explains the history pretty well.

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/visa

Some countries have their own local ones but currently none that work across the entire EU AFAIK. EMPSA is working on uniting them

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