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Comment by seabass-labrax | Hacker News Reader

This point - that EMV cards have the effect of siphoning money out of many countries to the USA in payment processing fees - is one of the primary motivations behind the development of Wero[1]. For those that haven't come across it yet, it's a new payments system based on 'instant' SEPA wire transfers. It is starting to gain ground now, particularly in Germany and the Benelux. I'm not aware of any smartcard-based implementations yet, though - currently it functions more like WeChat typically does, where you need to authorize the transaction on a smartphone.

[1]: https://wero-wallet.eu/

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> This point - that EMV cards have the effect of siphoning money out of many countries to the USA in payment processing fees...

Money isn't sent to the USA. It is sent to the banks that own your particular credit card. Many of these are certainly in the USA, but your statement makes it sound somehow patriotic/anti-USA to avoid using credit cards.

There is a component that is directly paid to the card schemes such as MasterCard and VISA. See this page from Barclays[1], for example:

> Interchange: the fee we pay to the card issuer, i.e. your customers’ banks > Scheme fee: the fees we pay to the schemes, i.e. Visa or Mastercard

> Visa Consumer Debit > Interchange fees 0.1% to 0.2% or 0.02€ > Scheme fees 0.0082€ + 0.11% to 0.312%

Obviously all the large payment card schemes have investors and subsidiary legal entities all around the world, and not all of the card schemes are from the USA. However I think it's fairly clear that at least 1/1000th of total card transactions everywhere in the world ends up flowing into the USA eventually, and that's without accounting for licensing and accreditation fees for the technology underpinning the system, also mainly from the USA.

I'm not surprised that European politicians would like to get hold of that money for domestic purposes by promoting Wero, and no doubt if political/propaganda gains can be made by presenting this as patriotic, at least some will try.

[1]: https://www.barclaycard.co.uk/content/dam/barclaycard/docume...

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