Christine Lagarde wants EU to ditch Visa, Mastercard for own platform | Hacker News Reader

Christine Lagarde wants EU to ditch Visa, Mastercard for own platform

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Long overdue, but attempted a few times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_(debit_card)

There were other attempts.

There is no reason to outsource our entire payment infrastructure to foreign rent seeking entities.

Wero is the last attempt. We'll see how that goes...

https://wero-wallet.eu/

Wero is superseding iDeal and that has been massively successful in the Netherlands.

Interestingly, American express hired my uncle to help them integrate smart chips into credit card in the late 90s. He took the Concord twice a month on a Paris-NY. It was hell, a lot of different banks and a love of magnetic stripe despite the fraud being easier with those prevented any mass adoption. I think that while he was successful technologically (American express credit card had a chip i think? But honestly i'm not sure, don't take my word for it _at all_), but politically it was a sysiphian effort and they scraped the project. For him the reason was that the cost of fraud was lower than in France, and also pushed into users, and unless you made bank liable (i think that's the word) in case of fraud, so a more secure method of payment wasn't interesting for the banks (in that case why american express?).

Anyway, all that to say that from what i've heard from him, AmEx, Visa and masterCard had to be from the US because the banking sector was so fragmented, in so many ways (different actors, different regulations, different fraud tolerance), it was sorely needed.

Steve Kent from BBN told me how they bootstrapped the original trust anchor which signed over the card conpanies PKI using an HSM module. After they initialised the subsidiary CAs they destroyed the private key hardware, and some of them wanted to take bits home to put in lucite as a memento but others were worried it was a skymesh moment and enough information could be gleaned from chip remains they'd reveal the private key.

(The public key proof was all they wanted, no reuse intended of this keypair)

Eurocard? That’d be too obvious right? Visa, Mastercard, Eurocard?

Make a credit card, get a European bank to back you, slap a picture of some generic bridge or Romanesque building on it. No faces! Can’t offend any country in the eu by posting a face from some other country…

Sorry, just cynical. This is a great idea but would require a sort of teamwork and patriotism the eu doesn’t have in order for it to be successful.

Here is your Visa killer: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...

They used to have one. It was the E in EMV. It's now part of MasterCard.

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

What is the cause of Europe always needing a top-down effort for a European cloud, a European payment provider, a European Facebook and Google, a European X, Y, Z rather than European companies filling these gaps naturally? It's a wealthy union of 450 million people - surely there are benefits for local companies like knowledge of the local business environment, people who fluently speak local languages - why are American companies eating their breakfast?

Europe is too decentralized. Each country has its own languages, cultures, laws, and politics. If you leave things to the market, the chances are you get a large number of regional solutions tailored to the local conditions. None of which is clearly superior to the others, and all of which are too small to benefit from economies of scale.

And then bigger companies from countries with larger domestic markets come and buy the most successful ones.

I belive it's a chicken/egg problem. A new card won't be accepted anywhere so no buyers will want one, and vendors won't implement a new card unless there are enough buyers to be worth it.

I believe EU could think of making adoption mandatory among merchants (UE-based or not) doing business with UE citizens.

Take the following with a pinch of salt.

Wasn't Bull SAS, French IT now in Atos(Eviden) the initial patent owner for the chip we all carry on our cards and phones? IIRC USA didn't want to use it unless a US company owned it, so visa or master bought the patent from Bull and they extended it around the word.

I don't know how to feel about that.

Russia did it.

I’m sure EU could, if they wanted to.

The hard part about ditching Visa and Mastercard is keeping the ability to make international payments even outside of EU. If you still need Visa or Mastercard to buy anything from outside of EU, including any non-EU digital service, most people would still have a Visa or Mastercard.

Russia did it because they're blocked from everywhere anyway and can't get Visa or Mastercard anyway. So this isn't really a concern. For an EU credit card to be successful and actually displace Visa/Mastercard among EU citizens, we would have to convince every merchant from Philippines to Argentina to South Africa to accept it.

If Visa works everywhere, and Eurocard would work only in Europe, your options would be to have either only Visa or have both. And few people would would want to get multiple cards if one works universally already.

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