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Comment by markus92 | Hacker News Reader

SEPA is well established all across the eurozone though, even in countries with considerable legacy infrastructure.

Right but those countries are comparable in size and GDP to US states. The US had wire transfers since the 19th century, credit cards as we recognize them today since the 70s, online shopping since the 90s and online money transfer like Paypal since the 2000s. That eurozone countries would want to standardize on something and happen to largely escape regulatory capture is fairly predictable.

Many European countries had online banking in the 80s. Largely because banks were focused on efficiency, and they wanted to replace checks with wire transfers and domestic debit cards. In order to do that, they had to make wire transfers as convenient as possible.

When online shopping first appeared, wire transfers were the obvious form of payment. Few people had credit cards, because most shops didn't accept them. And shops didn't accept them, because they were too expensive.

(When I got a credit card in the early 2000s, one of the things they emphasized in the marketing was that you could withdraw money from foreign ATMs. And you usually got a better rate than by exchanging cash. It's kind of funny that you are not supposed to use an American credit card for that.)

And then how do you reverse a wire transfer? What's the liability split?

You don't reverse it. It's like a cash transaction in the sense that it's irrevocable, which means people understand it intuitively. But unlike cash, there is an effectively permanent record of the transaction, connected to the participants' legal identities. That tends to discourage scammers. And it all happens within a single jurisdiction.

This is not true, you can reverse SEPA transfers via your bank. You do need a reason though and there are time limits but if a seller just runs away with your money you don't have to go through the courts in the general case.

So as a consumer this sounds like it sucks compared to using Visa.

As a consumer, certain businesses not existing because Visa doesn't like them sucks infinitely more.

Everything you list existed in Europe at the same time or few years later in the worst case scenario.

> the world's biggest payments network, saying it propped up an illegal monopoly over debit payments by imposing "exclusionary" agreements on partners and smothering upstart firms.

Is it the size of the US or the exclusionary agreements? I think without these agreements new payment systems would proliferate faster

The size allows for these kinds of cartels.

The size of the us also allows PR organizations (paid for by these cartels) to influence both voters and law makers all the time.

It’s called “lobbying.”

> Right but those countries are comparable in size and GDP to US states

Yes? So in theory it should be significantly harder to implement a EU wide system when it’s much more decentralized than the US. Yet it only took a few years for SEPA and later instant payments to become universally supported across the EU.

Also developed European countries had all of those things you’ve listed in similar timeframes.

The US is very behind on a lot of areas financially, but their gdp is bigger than all of Europe combined

https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/gdp?continent=euro...

Cool. And how is that even remotely relevant to anything related to the topic of hand?

If your argument made any sense, you'd be using GDP per capita. And there the US is beaten by e.g. Switzerland, Ireland, Norway (skipping microstates) and all of them are around a decade ahead of the US in banking, at least.

The comment above said that there are EU countries with comparable GDPs to the US.

There aren’t any.

I don’t think per capita matters in this particular case since the difference in gross gdp is so dramatic.

There is a much bigger incentive to monopolize in the US because the pie is so damn huge that it offsets the cost of overcoming regulatory hurdles.

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