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Comment by rcruzeiro | Hacker News Reader

Systems like these are very common in Europe. Here in Norway, you can pay for almost anything, anywhere with Vipps. It works very similarly to Brazilian Pix. Another system I have used in the past is the Portuguese MBWay which although similar to Pix and Vipps, doesn’t seem to be as widely adopted as the former.

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The problem is that most European schemes are country specific. As soon as you cross the border even to another European country, your options are pretty much cash or Visa/MasterCard.

Yeah, the ECB just published[0] the latest report on the digital euro which is supposed to solve this across the eurozone and seems potentially quite cool, but it'll be years before it's reality.

0: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/progress/html/ec...

There is nothing for the Euro zone?

There are maestro cards, bank cards that work very conveniently including with nfc, including with Apple Pay. Given that Apple Pay supports multiple kinds of cards.. my phone probably works almost anywhere..

Maestro is owned by Mastercard (and are now being phased out for explicitly Mastercard branded cards). So like I said, cross border options are basically cash or Visa/Mastercard.

Same as pix then?

We also have the same problem: technically, PIX is only inside our borders. The thing is our borders are huge!

In practice, people have started to accept it in Portugal, Argentina, Uruguai and some other places where people tend to have accounts both in their countries of residence and Brazil.

Russia is bigger and has its own system of instant payments SBP, which has now completely substituted Visa, Mastercard etc and has some presence in 8-9 other countries (depending on whether you count Abkhazia as a country or not) with 50 foreign banks supporting it.

Russia is bigger in area but not in population.

Can’t argue with that, but I was replying to a comment about area specifically :)

Some places in France also accept Pix!

Also, Verifone PoS in the US will also accept Pix as well.

Vipps now works across the Scandinavian countries, but I doubt it will be adopted by any other countries.

Interestingly, I've spotted a few places in Portugal already accepting Pix as a form of payment, catering to a large demographic of Brazilian immigrants and tourists.

There is no PIX in Portugal, or places other than Brazil.

What they have there is a Brazilian person receiving payments from another Brazilian person, only through Brazilian accounts, all happening remotely in Brazil(at least for now)

What they have is a payment gateway that integrates the Portuguese and Brazilian payments by doing a transfer at each side.

It's the same thing as buying stuff from China with PIX, but the gateway is more hidden from the Portuguese accounts.

There has been some talk of actually internationalising Pix, but from what I understand, those uses that exist now outside of Brazil are a kludge for the benefit of Brazilian tourists.

Vipps and MBPay are a pale shadow of Pix. No aliases, no mandatory participation, much lower merchant fees, and instant settlement not dependent on the merchant bank.

MBWAY has card aliases, I believe it had been a thing since the 90s (previously know as MBNET).

I don't think I know a single person that doesn't have MBWAY, but I'm younger than 30, so that might have something to do with it.

Even then, everywhere you go, unless they're really small or old places that still don't accept anything other than cash, you can pay with MBWAY, through a QR code or NFC. All POS terminals support that nowadays. You can even add an email address and VAT number and newer terminals automatically skip printing the customer receipt, send it to your email and give the VAT number to the merchant (not entirely sure how that last one works, but it's there).

Now you know! :)

Interesting these platforms have existed for so long now (MBWay from 2014 and Pix 2016 if I’m not mistaken). I recall, back when it was launched, explaining it to friends in other countries (ie. UK) how good it was, not only the seamless payment network shared with friends, but also to be able to spin virtual cards with fixed value for online payments, and getting a puzzled reaction, “is that even legal?”

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