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Comment by em500 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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...

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

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?

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