Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun | Hacker News Reader

Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

europeanbusinessmagazine.com

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Whatever they come up with, I hope it doesn't tie you to a Google or Apple smartphone.

Can't we have cards for this? In Spain, for example, to use Bizum, you need either an Android/iOS smartphone (and for the Android case, as you use it from your bank's app, it would typically require some Google security assurances - so no Huawei phones allowed, for example) or logging into your bank's website and use Bizum from there, only if your bank allows you to use Bizum via web. And it's not very practical or convenient to do that when you're in a store and want to pay, in contrast to swiping your credit card.

So while I see very convenient gaining some sovereignty from American companies for these payments, I think we're losing it when we will need devices controlled by other American companies in order to use the new system.

On Portugal we have the Multibanco network, which already provided Internet like services for buying stuff on the terminals and eventually graduated to have online payments as well, however only in Portugal.

Likewise, in Germany we can have SEPA for most stuff.

And in Greece there is Viva.

Problem is getting something that actually works across all European countries.

Show me a german webshop that supports modern payment methods. It usually old school bank transfers still.

I just bought Kampot peppers from https://www.unclespepper.com/ which is in Germany, the name notwithstanding. And yes, I paid with my Danish Visa card. No problems except that I had to adjust my ad blocker once.

Which payment method is missing from Zalando? https://en.zalando.de/ It’s a German company

Yes, why did I mentioned SEPA?

It works for the purpose to pay something online.

If you want an example, Eurowings.

I have never paid anything via bank transfer, where are you buying?

I order all over Europe (including Germany) and I cannot remember the last time I did a manual bank transfer.

On the other hand, I have already seen Germans complaining about the lack of possibility to buy train tickets by bank transfer.

You must frequent a very interesting subset of German web shops then. Yes, some do offer bank transfer (many don't because latency is just so terrible), but I've never seen credit card not on the list. Perhaps with the exception of credit card available only through some intermediary like PayPal (which I tend to prefer over direct credit card, I don't really like spreading my CC details to servers of questionable maintenance state than strictly necessary)

It is quite recent though, but the webshops do all accept credit cards, most of them even use stripe for payments.

Now, of course our corner shop appliance store still only accepts cash. It was fun to pick up cash from multiple ATMs and pay 1500€ with a pile of 20€ bills a few months ago.

The problem isn't just getting something that works across all European countries. It's getting something that works globally.

While we may make most of our payments within EU, basically everyone still occasionally pays for something outside of EU, either online or when they travel. This means if the new thing only works in EU, every European will still need and have a MasterCard/Visa even if they use it less often than before.

This is still a massive amount of leverage - MC/Visa still have the ability to block payments made from EU citizens/companies to outside.

Also European merchants who need to accept payments from non-Europeans need to accept Visa and Mastercard.

Of course but they can support an EU standard as well. It's not mutually exclusive.

The big benefit is that all internal EU card transactions are no longer routed via US companies which is quite ridiculous.

Internal transactions all over the world are routed through US companies. I have paid using Visa or Mastercard at some point in Australia, Indonesia, India, Frnce, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Dubai.....

its not exclusive, but there is a problem with network effects. From the point of view of a business why should they add support for a new payment system no one users, from the point of view of consumers why should they sign up to a new system that no one accepts?

As I said in another comment the most likely alternative is a more decentralised system that all countries/currency blocks that want sovereign payments can get behind.

It's a problem for two reasons. First of all it means American companies get access to a lot of privileged information. Secondly, them pushing foreign morals eg sexual content or services being blocked.

If there were an EU card system id certainly sign up for it and demand from vendors that they support it. I don't want my data ending up in America especially these days.

The network effect will work out fine because we have reasons to want it.

Its a problem but a global one, not merely a European one.

Network effects are very powerful.

You might care enough about privacy but most people have given up.

You can buy things from your local Amazon or national equivalent that come from outside using this systems, so, you are not so restricted to EU sellers.

I suppose the most problematic would be traveling. I recently when outside the EU and was surprise how smooth the process was using my Visa card, to the point I didn't use any local currency.

On the other hand, I recently buy books from the UK and it get stuck for two weeks in customs, and it had nothing to do with the payment platform. I had not realized how difficult is to import something from outside the EU, even for personal use.

Many (most? all?) of the payment systems I’ve used over the years can interop with Visa or Maestro. Case in point: my Bancontact cards can pay in any Belgian business even if they can’t afford the better machines that do VISA, but my card also has the VISA logo. Same in Portugal and Germany.

If you can give merchants something that costs them only 0.1% in interchange fees, you can be pretty certain they’d jump on it.

If you build it on IBAN it already works everywhere.

The problem isn't just getting something that works across all European countries. It's getting something that works globally.

The Dutch iDEAL, on which Wero is based, already works for a lot of global payments. E.g. Stripe and Shopify support iDEAL:

https://stripe.com/en-nl/payment-method/ideal?__=

https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/shopify-payments...

I regularly get offered iDEAL as a payment option when ordering outside of Europe.

I've been in Portugal sometimes, and to me MB was synonymous with "we accept credit cards", and in fact it is in the sense that you can pay using Visa or Mastercard in those shops. But, is it a standalone system that doesn't require anything outside Portugal in order to work? With their own non-Visa credit cards? And can you use them when abroad in the EU, for example?

It's a standalone network. Most Portuguese cards are also VISA/Mastercard, but payment terminals may only have a contract with Multibanco, meaning only Portuguese cards are accepted. It's quite common for foreign cards not to be accepted.

Nope, it has nothing to do with credit cards, although it also accepts them.

It is majorly used for debit cards, and similar in use to the famous Minitel in France.

You can use it to load pre-pay phones, or other kinds of rechargeable services, buy tickets for public transport and various kinds of shows, pay water, electricity, taxes, among other services.

There is now an app used to pay on shops via QR codes.

You can also pay online with one time cards, that are generated for a single transaction.

Outside Portugal it is a regular debit card.

When you access Multibanco with foreign cards, you can only withdraw money usually.

I'm French and living in Portugal and I do not get the Minitel comparison. Minitel was basically a Telnet device to various services' servers.

That said, I love MB and MB Way. What an upgrade it's been over paying for stuff in the US (where I lived before moving to Portugal).

From what I know from Minitel, the same Internet before the Internet applies.

I was buying tickets on MB, before it became common place in the Internet.

Could you search for tickets and such on MB?

All the stuff I'm familiar with is only payments (with entity and reference).

Now that I think about it, you could search for things on Minitel but I don't remember if payments were made as phone charges or if they could also be done with transfers.

Minitel was so prohibitively expensive to use (just about every service cost multiple francs per minute), I didn't do much with it.

Yes, for concerts, matches, CP (including the seat on IC/Alfa).

https://immolusitania.ch/the-real-deal-with-atm-machines-in-...

SEPA would be a decent solution with instant QR code generation and app payments, but the transfer fees are ludicrous for daily use (~1-2€ per wire). Or maybe it's just my bank being greedy fucks as usual.

It is your bank, I don't pay for transfers.

Yes. In some eastern EU countries instant SEPA payments with QR are already super popular because you don't pay fees and you don't need special terminal/gateway.

Huh, I thought the EU had mandated for instant SEPA transfers to be free. Maybe it’s just national. What country are you in?

Of course there is no mandate to offer anything for free. They just need to be offered for the same price as other methods.

But most people have a bank account for a fixed price and some even for free. So individual transfers are considered free, even if the correct term would be "already paid".

Fair enough, been so long since we had paid transfers here, I forgot it used to be a thing.

I never paid for SEPA transfers. Some countries are weird. I am not sure if it is still the case, but Germans had to pay a transfer fee when they used an ATM from another bank. In The Netherlands, you can use ATMs from any Dutch bank without extra cost. In fact, you can also use ATMs of German banks without additional cost. So, a having a Dutch debit card in Germany was/is(?) cheaper than a German debit card in Germany.

Instant SEPA is free - see Instant Payments Regulation (IPR) — Regulation (EU) 2024/886.

Hmm does instant SEPA differ in some way from the regular kind? I just checked and my bank still lists 0.4-1.1€ per external transfer. It's the national bank so I presume they're not likely to be in breach of EU regulations.

Mine did too a year ago or so still (N26). Now they are free due to it being mandatory in EU.

Only mandatory in Eurozone countries, sadly. It won't be until 2027 (July at the latest?) where it will be mandatory for all EU countries.

SEPA gets blocked immediately when you try to buy something expensive, like a top-end graphics card (8k+).

I consider some flights already expensive enough, and have had no issues, unless I got lucky.

I use my credit and debit cards the same way today as I did before smartphones existed. I never invited the extra surveillance middleman of Google/Apple into my transactions. And the convenience of tapping or swiping a plastic card is simpler than using my phone anyway. Is this not possible in Spain?

I put my debit card in my smartphone case. Best of both worlds.

Yes, but in Spain all of our cards are Visa or Mastercard, afaik, so you can't really avoid using American tech in your daily payments (unless you use cash, which remains a very convenient method, by the way).

The fact you have the visa or mastercard logo doesn't mean you can't avoit to use their tech for your daily payments.

Example, in France most debit and credit cards are called "carte bleue" (literally blue card) but all of them either have a visa/mastercard logo. However when you pay with them you can decide with the merchant to use the CB system or the visa/mastercard. Sadly very few people know that and do the selection.

Interesting. I don't think there's anything similar here in Spain, though. On the other hand, in this same thread, somebody said Visa acquired that "Carte Bleue" system, and Wikipedia states it was discontinued in 2010. So maybe it's not possible to use anything other than visa/mc in France anymore

You mention an interesting thing I didn't realize before. Carte Bleues, the brand, seems to have been sold to Visa but CB, the payment system would still be a separate thing and now mean Carte Bancaire. It is not helped by the fact that french people literally adopted carte bleue as a generic name for payment cards.

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

Thanks for the info. By the way, is there any difference, apart from not having to rely on foreign parties, for the buyer between selecting CB or Visa/MC for his payment? And I suppose it's the shop owner who decides the default when the buyer doesn't choose.

I'm with you. Low-tech works just fine. I hate the idea of having to depend on a working phone just to pay for things.

But isn't the promise of Apple Pay that you never expose your real credit card # to the merchant? So they can't track you? I know Walmart in Canada really resisted Apple Pay for a few years because it would mean no more ability to track people by their payment methods.

> But isn't the promise of Apple Pay that you never expose your real credit card # to the merchant? So they can't track you? I know Walmart in Canada really resisted Apple Pay for a few years because it would mean no more ability to track people by their payment methods.

Yes, this is exactly what Walmart does in the US since they still don't accept Apple Pay/Google Pay. When I go in and make a purchase using my credit or debit card, they'll associate it with my Walmart account and it'll show up as a "recent order" in the Walmart app because I have the same card saved there for ordering groceries online. They use those in-store purchases to recommend things to add to my grocery orders all the time.

> since they still don't accept Apple Pay/Google Pay. When I go in and make a purchase using my credit or debit card, they'll associate it with my Walmart account

Why wouldn't they be able to do that with at least Google Pay?

I pay with my phone using Google Pay at a Swedish grocery store chain and it's connected to my loyalty account there.

(Since I don't use Apple Pay I don't know if the same works there.)

I guess I'm not familiar with how Google Pay actually works, I assumed it was the same as Apple Pay. With Apple Pay the merchant gets a randomized card number on every transaction.

Too late to edit my comment, but it looks like I didn't quite understand how Apple Pay works either. After a little more research on both of them, here's the gist of it: Apple Pay and Google Pay both create a "Device Account Number" for your card, and this number never changes. When you tap your phone to pay, it generates a one-time cryptogram for the transaction which will always be unique. I was under the impression that merchants only get the cryptogram, but that's not the case – merchants get both the cryptogram and the DAN during the purchase.

The problem is, since the DAN is a stable number that never changes per card, they can save it and use it to recognize you across visits. That's how stores can tie Apple Pay/Google Pay transactions to loyalty programs without scanning a separate card. The DAN doesn't differentiate between online/in-app purchases and physical purchases either, though the number is different between devices (i.e. use phone to pay in-store, use computer or tablet to shop for groceries). But realistically, Apple Pay/Google Pay would only marginally improve the privacy in the Walmart scenario, which is a bummer.

> I never invited the extra surveillance middleman

What's an extra layer of surveillance? Why accept the "credit and debit" surveillance middlemen but not the google/apple middlenmen?

What the world needs are "cash cards". Something equivalent to cash not tied to your identity that you can use in the real and virtual world.

I simply do not understand why governments or the private sector do not provide such options.

Credit cards provide convenience and cash back benefits. Some might prefer to pay cash for everything for ultimate privacy, and that's fine. But credit cards are the compromise I make. I can still pay cash when I think it's appropriate for a given transaction.

Using Google or Apple Pay so I can tap my phone instead of my card gives me no extra benefit that I care about and complicates my ecosystem with another party.

> cash back benefits

Only in the U.S. In many other countries the processing fees are regulated by the government so the banks can't afford to give you your "cash back".

How dare Europe force card companies to distribute the cost of being poor on all customers. Cashback is effectively a special fee levied exclusively on those who don't qualify.

I was told the other day that the people most likely to choose to avoid the extra 2.5% fees are the wealthier.

In New Zealand, most low margin business (like cafes) ask you to accept an ~2.5% transaction fee (if you use a credit card or paywave). You can avoid the fee by using a debit card with a chip.

I'm unsure what choice the poorer make. If you're actually low income, maybe you don't go to cafes.

I did notice that a thrift store didn't charge the extra 2.5%: so perhaps poorer people have more pressure to use cards with fees?

Amex is noted for its high fees - so perhaps it is a bathtub where only the middleclass care.

When you have to care for money, visibility doing so feels like exposing weakness. But when you care for the little amounts while it's clear that this is unrelated to need, it turns into showing off a quality.

Yep. In Germany credit cards are a nuisance for banks. If you want one with cash backs and easy chargeback functionality, you are free to pay 60€ a month for an American Express Platinum card that works exactly nowhere in EU.

Governments frown upon KYC-less digital purse cards. Gotta force everyone to share their national ID number to just open a bank account to keep out drug dealers, terrorists, or NSFW game peddlers.

Banks generally don't like disposable digital purse cards. They make money off fees and interest. If a product doesn't rope you into a customer "relationship" where you link your pay deposits or later might get a mortgage or car loan they can only make money off fees. Enjoy paying $5 to activate a $100 prepaid debit card!

We used to have a "cash card" in Sweden in the 90's[0]. It flopped because nobody wants to keep manually re-filling it with value all the time. It's much more convenient to have a card that pulls from your bank account (either instantly via debit or monthly via credit). In the mass market, convenience always trumps privacy.

The places where a "cash card" have gained popularity have all been using the "backdoor" of public transit payments that are so ubiquitous they also get accepted by retail (e.g. Suica in Japan, Octopus in HK, EasyCard in Taiwan, etc)

[0] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_(betalsystem) based on the Belgian Proton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(debit_card)

Ah, yes, we had those in The Netherlands as well (Chipknip), everybody hated those cards (though if I remember correctly most debit cards also doubled as a Chipknip card), but many parking meters used them for some time.

Thanks! ANOTHER SANE voice of reason! Nothing tops the simplicity of using plastic, either via chip or NFC. Leave the friggen' phone at home!

> I use my credit and debit cards the same way today as I did before smartphones existed.

How exactly are you doing that? with 3D Secure online credit card transactions now require confirmation in the mobile app (or via OTP sent by SMS, but this is being phased out, as it is insecure)

> Whatever they come up with, I hope it doesn't tie you to a Google or Apple smartphone.

Even if it does, Google won't be taking a cut from it.

Also, it's then much easier to provide a mobile web version, or something else.

My country's internal system also sells a bracelet for contactless payments, and there are obviously payment cards.

Once there's a mandatory standard, it's much more likely competition will show up. EU wide SWIFT, direct debits, instant transfers, all show this.

What would Google prevent from taking a similar cut as Apple is taking?

Lack of negotiation power. Less control over Android than Apple has over iOS.

Google keeps self-sabotaging Android Pay. They lacked market power so cellular carriers blocked it hoping to advance their own payment ecosystem (ISIS). Google changes the payment brand every few years, and fragments it into two separate apps or combines them. It's rather like their messaging strategy.

What's being discussed isn't Google or Apple Pay.

It's an app that uses NFC or, if needed, reads a QR code and does a web request (i.e. needs internet).

Neither Google nor Apple will block that, or take a cut; and it's already available in multiple markets.

This is about taking stuff that already works in one or two countries, design a similar system that works across countries, and mandate that all banks under ECB supervision implement it.

Digital Markets Act, also Apple nearly lost their payment monopoly in Germany as powerful banks lobbied for a law forcing them to open up. It was passed, but then they didn't want to use it. If I would guess, Apple offered them preferential conditions to not have a precedent.

https://financefwd.com/de/sparkassen-apple-nfc/

Wero is expanding around Belgium, France and Germany while Bizum has "joined" the European Payments Alliance with Bancomat and SIBS from Italy and Portugal respectively, not sure how these work exactly as I'm also located in Spain.

My point being, if these payment systems start becoming more interconnected and join within a standard, I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually saw Bizum cards around here, Wero cards in other places, and many more.

At least that's my take on it. Of course there's still a long way to go, such as developing the system, banks adopting it, businesses adopting it, then customers (which would probably take years, many people wouldn't bother switching at least until their current card expires)

The transition will be probably smooth and transparent for business and consumers. Banks are already deploying payment terminal able to handle both Bizum and VISA/Mastercard [1]. Since banks own these terminals, they can decide how fast they want Bizum adoption to spread. Business don't even need to opt-in into it. At some point they can simply start charging for credit/debit cards and people will naturally switch to Bizum.

[1] https://www.bbva.com/es/es/empresas/bbva-primer-banco-en-esp...

> Whatever they come up with, I hope it doesn't tie you to a Google or Apple smartphone.

I would also hope so, that is the entire point. The reason they are scrambling right now is because Starlink just shut off all of Russia. Because Starlink was so cheap and easy (and stable for the last 4 years of the war), a lot of people in Russia stopped using any other form of internet access. And while all of Europe is happy to see Russia go away, they are concerned that the same can be done to them at a whim by any number of American companies. So they are trying to quickly create alternatives to anything American including software providers like Microsoft 360.

As for credit cards, it is not as if there is something intrinsically American in credit card processing. They can just as easily create a new system that uses the same protocols as Visa and Mastercard.

Having your entire economy dependent on a company you don't control in a country you don't control was considered acceptable for as long as a concept of "allies" existed. That is not the world we are living in right now.

> they are trying to quickly create alternatives to anything American

They're the same bright minds that ensured no alternatives could naturally come out of the European market trough relentless bureaucratic central planning. I have zero hopes of a good outcome

Actually European integration the last 30 years has been pretty remarkable. In the past, not even electric plugs were compatible. But the EU is not a country. A lot of the inefficiencies are actually features sought by key members to protect their own local incumbents.

Your best example of European integration is electric plugs?

How about tap water has to be drinkable in every EU country

Many non-eu countries have drinkable tap water, not sure how representative of "integration" this rule is.

And many non eu don't have. I am neutral on the eu topic but you are confused. If this eu thing can mandate certain water standards or expel a country and or withhold common funds, that's a very different thing from seeing "some" non eu countries having water.

USB-C!

Money transfers between bank accounts for no extra fees (well, that's limited to the Euro, so a couple of countries chose to stay outside). Mobile phone usage for no extra fees all over EU (some limitations, but typically not relevant for the average trip).

B2B the integration has even bigger impact.

I don't think eletric plugs are even regulated. British plugs never changed and they were not an argument in Brexit.

All of those things don't require having a supranational body who you relinquish large parts of your sovereignty to.

Which is why bank to bank transfers are so easy in the US.

I wouldn't say that transfers are easy in the EU.

My bank requires me to fill in a paper form, scan it, send it by mail, wait a week, then get an answer (often, "no, give us more details") if I want to send money in another country. Neobanks tried to solve this for lower amounts, but will freeze easily your account for "AML" if you send low six figures.

Free cellphone roaming is a big plus.

It isn't bureaucracy that has prevented any alternatives emerging; it's network effects. Mastercard and Visa have a solid duopoly.

> Because Starlink was so cheap and easy (and stable for the last 4 years of the war), a lot of people in Russia stopped using any other form of internet access.

What are you smoking ..err.. any source to your claim ? (Which is between bizarre and just plain wrong).

Never mind russians putting starlinks on flying bombs to blow up Ukrainians. But those poor Russian Internet users you invented. While it’s jailable offense in russia to own starlink.

I think you misunderstood, I do not pity them at all. I am just pointing out it is bad strategy to be dependent on foreign potentially-hostile technology.

In particular, I heard this through Mallen Baker at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ACzkuSFzT4

> Starlink just shut off all of Russia

What are you talking about? Starlink never worked in russia. It worked in Ukraine, and it was shutdown in Ukraine by using a white list for which any Ukrainian can easily apply.

The goal was to shutdown Starlink usage by russian drones in Ukraine and by anyone on the occupied Ukrainian territories.

Starlink was never available in Russia due to the sanctions regime. It's only use by Russians was via grey import terminals on the frontline in Ukraine (made possible due to complications of geofencing).

I guess I was misunderstanding. I thought that Starlink was deliberately ignoring the sanctions because they were able to shut it off real quick once Musk got that tweet https://x.com/sikorskiradek/status/2016221397396168995

You might be thinking of Ubiquiti, who were exposed as blind eyeing the sanctions

It wasn't easy to geofence due to fluid nature of the frontline and lack of single official supply channel to Ukraine. A huge part of Ukrainian terminals were also procured abroad by volunteers.

However a recent development was Russian use of terminals on attack drones. Out of that Starlink was able to block terminals with certain velocity (and possibly bearing) in the region. In addition Ukraine got around to making internal registry of all frontline terminal allowing Starlink to white-list. So no it was a bit more than a tweet involved.

You did misunderstand:

https://x.com/FedorovMykhailo/status/2017932529882296706

SpaceX worked with Ukraine together to register authorized Starlinks.

You obviously can’t simply geo-fence because the usage is not in Russia, but Russian troops using it in Ukraine.

And you can’t simply blacklist Russian use, because lots of devices with legitimate Ukrainian use cases were imported in privatly or by third party.

That is why legitimate Ukrainian devices must now be cumbersomely whitelisted.

> a lot of people in Russia stopped using any other form of internet access

What you're saying is just plain false. No one has ever used Starlink in Russia. It doesn't even work here. It never did. Russian troops were using Starlink on Ukrainian territory, that's what was shut off.

What are you talking about, 92% of Russian population has access to internet via landlines, the government subsidised building all the infustructre. The internet access is one of the cheapest in the world($5-10 per month for 100-500mbit/s), starlink with its $50-120 price tag is not affordable at all, ignoring the fact it doesn't even work here

Misinformation on HN? Well, I never!

Where did you get "4 years"? And what makes you think people in Russia were using the service?

> for the Android case, as you use it from your bank's app, it would typically require some Google security assurances - so no Huawei phones allowed, for example

I don't know about Huawei, but actually most (all?) of the banking apps in Spain should work on a non-Google-certified Android builds. There's an community list tracking GrapheneOS compatibility at https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa... and all of them currently appear supported just fine.

GrapheneOS in Spain?

https://www.androidauthority.com/why-i-use-grapheneos-on-pix...

> Police in Spain have reportedly started profiling people based on their phones; specifically, and surprisingly, those carrying Google Pixel devices. Law enforcement officials in Catalonia say they associate Pixels with crime because drug traffickers are increasingly turning to these phones. But it’s not Google’s secure Titan M2 chip that has criminals favoring the Pixel — instead, it’s GrapheneOS, a privacy-focused alternative to the default Pixel OS.

EDIT: Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44473694

Really makes you think when petty criminals use privacy tech while billionaire pedophiles run their dealings through gmail.

I guess they consider themselves untouchable.

Same here, I'm using Dutch banking and credit card apps (and iDEAL/Wero) without issues on a GrapheneOS phone (/e/OS works as well).

This is really a human right issue. No one should be required to carry an attacker-controlled tracking device, especially not for interacting with the government. It's funny that the EU uses all this mobile attestation BS more than the US does. So much for sovereignty and consumer protection. No monopoly Google can build is as good as the government forcing you to accept their terms.

> It's funny that the EU uses all this mobile attestation BS more than the US does

Attestation in on itself isn't unwarranted which (to me) is an important security measure. Attestation as commonly implemented on Android via Play Integrity (the way banking apps are known to do) is restrictive, sure: https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu... / https://archive.is/snGEu

An important security measure for who, though? The servers at the bank should "never trust the client" in case the attestation is bypassed or compromised, which is always a risk at scale.

If it's an important safety measure _for me_, shouldn't I get to decide whether I need it based on context?

I think it's fair for banks to apply different risk scores based on the signals they have available (including attestation state), but I also don't want the financial system, government & big tech platforms to have a hard veto on what devices I compute with.

It's an anti-brute-force mechanism. It's not for you, it's for all the other accounts that an unattested phone (or a bot posing as an unattested phone that just stole somebody's credentials via some 0-day data exfiltration exploit) may be trying to access.

Sure, banks could probably build a mechanism that lets some users opt out of this, just as they could add a Klingon localization to their apps. There just isn't enough demand.

If you work on mobile apps you will notice that full attestation is too slow to put in the login path. [This might be better than it used to be, now in 2026].

I don't think a good security engineer would rely on atty as "front line" anti brute force control since bypasses are not that rare. But yeah you might incorporate it into the flow. Just like captchas, rate limiting, fingerprints etc and all the other controls you need for web, anyway.

I know I'm quibbling. My concern is that future where banks can "trust the client" is a future of total big tech capture of computing platforms, and I know banks and government don't really care, but I do.

> total big tech capture of computing platforms

Correct. And the end of ownership, privacy, and truth too. If something can betray you on someone else's orders, it's not yours in the first place. You'll own nothing and if you aren't happy, good luck living in the woods.

> you work on mobile apps you will notice that full attestation is too slow to put in the login path

Hm, Play Integrity isn't that slow on Android, from my experience.

> don't think a good security engineer would rely on atty as "front line" anti brute force control since bypasses are not that rare

I'm not privy to device-wide bypasses of Play Integrity that ship with Trusted Execution Environment (which is pretty much all ARM based Androids), Secure Element, and/or Hardware Root of Trust, but I'd appreciate if you have some significant exploit writeups (on Pixels, preferably) for me to look at?

> My concern is that future where banks can "trust the client" is a future of total big tech capture of computing platforms

A valid concern. In the case of smart & personal devices like Androids though, the security is warranted due to the nature of the workloads it tends to support (think Pacemaker / Insulin monitoring apps; government-issued IDs; financial instruments like credit cards; etc) and the ubiquity & proliferation of the OS (more than half of all humanity) itself.

> Insulin monitoring apps

A monitoring app doesn't even interact with systems you don't own. Just put a liability disclaimer for running modified versions.

> warranted

Decided by whom? And why is Google trusted, not me? At minimum, I shouldn't face undue hardship with the government due to refusing to deal with a third party, unless we first remove most of Google's rights to set the terms.

> A monitoring app doesn't even interact with systems you don't own. Just put a liability disclaimer for running modified versions.

This is unserious when Insulin overdose can be fatal.

> And why is Google trusted, not me?

(Hardware-assisted) Attestation on Android doesn't require apps to "trust Google".

> I'm not privy to device-wide bypasses of Play Integrity that ship with Trusted Execution Environment (which is pretty much all ARM based Androids), Secure Element, and/or Hardware Root of Trust, but I'd appreciate if you have some significant exploit writeups (on Pixels, preferably) for me to look at?

Hi, you don't have the break the control on the strongest device. You only have to break it on the weakest device that's not blacklisted.

The situation is getting better as you note, but in the past the problem was that a lot of customers have potatos and you get a lot of support calls when you lock them out.

> think Pacemaker / Insulin monitoring apps; government-issued IDs; financial instruments like credit cards; etc

I agree with you on the need for trustworthy computing. I mainly disagree on who should ultimately control the trust roots.

We can only hope they continue to be found so there would at least be a small cost for this kind of indignity.

> Insulin monitoring apps

Funny that you say that, but the so far best artificial pancreas that is completely free and open source will soon be much harder to install to any Android phone without every user getting a valid key from Google.

In Germany, doctors even recommend these tools if they work. Because they make patients who know what they are doing healthier and more safe.

Naturally me and hundreds of other diabetics have already contacted our EU representative due to the changes Google is planning to make in their platform.

https://androidaps.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

This tool has literally saved my life.

It isn't that these tools are not useful, just that successful exploits on those may be fatal for the enduser.

> important security measure

It's a security measure against the owner of the device, in other words, an attack. Would you be okay with me using a remote control to forcibly slow down your car so I can merge? Using attestation this way is fundamentally incompatible with ownership. If the bank wants some assurance about a device, they need to sell or issue one to me, like credit cards or point of sale machines, which are explicitly not your property.

The fact that the assurance is provided by a third party you have little recourse against just adds insult to injury.

> If the bank wants some assurance about a device, they need to sell or issue one to me, like credit cards or point of sale machines, which are explicitly not your property.

In this example, a banking app is not making the entire Android device non functional when it refuses to work when remote attestation like Play Integrity fails.

It is colluding with a third party to increase their power. What devices pass Play Integrity? Yeah, the same ones with all the telemetry and spying that you can't remove. I thought the government is supposed to protect consumer rights, not to tilt the playing field even further.

Like I said, I'd be fine if they offer a viable alternative, like a card or a physical authentication dongle (which doesn't require spyware to use).

I don't want to depend on google and android for EU mobile attestation or the like. I didn't think anyone wants government enforced duopolies.

>against the owner of the device

Would you consider MFA to be a measure against you, the owner of the device, because it makes it harder for you to login?

>If the bank wants some assurance about a device, they need to sell or issue one to me

They are offering you free software and are operating under a security model tied to these specific devices. You're still free to walk into their branches, or use their physical cards, if you prefer not use their limited selection of devices.

>Would you be okay with me using a remote control to forcibly slow down your car

Car manufacturers do this as well though. Some of this is for the benefit of their customers (preventing theft from easily cloned keys). Some of this is not for customer benefit, like locking down infotainment systems.

Banks however are only interested in preventing fraud.

> MFA to be a measure against you

Not really, unless the MFA involves the same type of attestation involved in the process. TOTP is fine, and you can put it in your password manager to avoid phones, and can be done without consenting to any spying. And I don't really own the account anyway.

> use their physical cards

The premise of this discussion is these will get replaced by the hostile phone app, since the Europeans are too lazy to make a proper replacement.

> locking down infotainment systems

I don't agree with that either, but you can presumably buy a car without one, and you'd still be allowed to drive. What if the government says, you can't drive anymore UNLESS you use the locked down infotainment system and consent to all the ads/spying that comes with it?

> Would you consider MFA to be a measure against you, the owner of the device, because it makes it harder for you to login?

In theory - of course, it shouldn't make it any harder for _me_ to login, it's just that in practice the friction is inevitable since it can't distinguish between me and someone else without it.

> You're still free to walk into their branches, or use their physical cards, if you prefer not use their limited selection of devices.

The point is that this freedom is going away. I'd absolutely want to use their physical cards (there are smartcards with e-ink displays which would be a great thing for confirming payments), but no, they're slowly taking this away, starting by limiting transfers done without their mobile app.

And _their_ mobile app needs to invade __my__ property by locking down the system. I understand this might be neccessary to ensure the UI can be trusted, but this shouldn't happen on my device as it restricts my ability to do completely unrelated things.

>No one should be required to carry an attacker-controlled tracking device

What about being required to carry a your-own-government-controlled tracking device?

Because the US or Chine government can't harm me in Europe via the data they collect from me, But the EU authorities can if they want to, so naturally I fear them more if they were the ones hoovering my data.

What are the odds they're using this on-shore tech grab to implement their own domestic version of China's social credit score system, to easily get data on their own citizens who commit "wrong-think", without having to through the effort to twist the arm of US entities every time they want to do that?

Food for thought, but I do think we're living the last years of online anonymity, it's inevitable.

Tracking device might be the wrong thing to focus on. The US has other ways of messing with foreigners who depend on services provided by US companies, like suddenly cutting off those services in the case of ICC judges.

IIRC, ICC judges lost access to their O365 work email accounts. Worst the US can do to me is turn off my Steam, and Gmail but I can easily live without those.

Now imagine being debanked by your own government because they don't like what you're saying and becoming unemployed, homeless and dead. I don't think they're remotely comparable.

For example, a few years ago, a power tripping gov bureaucrat turned off my unemployment payments over a technicality. Luckily, I had enough money to pay a lawyer to sue them and won, but it was tight. What if I hadn't had the money to hire a lawyer? Since I was in a foreign country, with no family or close friends to fall back on. I was exclusively relying on the welfare state I paid into for years, that then turn its back on me for shits and giggles.

So I don't think you understand just how bad it can be for you if your government decides to turn on you and fuck with you, if you're comparing this to losing access to your work email account.

See the famous case of UK postal workers that got fucked by their government trying to hide their mistakes.

It's all the same. How is suing Google any different, if you instead get debanked by Google for violating their "terms"? The only solution is untraceable, permissionless money, like Monero. Why do you think governments try so hard to ban it?

> if you instead get debanked by Google for violating their "terms"

Since when is google a bank?

>The only solution is untraceable, permissionless money, like Monero. Why do you think governments try so hard to ban it?

Because untraceable currency is mostly used by criminals for crime.

Your bank (like most European ones) requires you to pass attestation to use their services. If you don't accept Google/Apple's terms, you can't access it without extreme difficulty.

I can always access my bank via a web browser or even in person at the teller at a branch somewhere, or as a last resort via snail mail from attorney, but most importantly even if I get locked out somehow by google, the account still runs and I won't be homeless as my salary and rent auto-payments keep going regardless if you can access it or not.

How is this comparable to your government debanking you meaning that no bank, landlord, layer or job will touch you?

It's less severe for sure, but I'd rather live without undue interference based on someone else's whims, unless I broke a law.

I... don't think you understand debanked. There is no movement OUT of your account. Deposits will be processed all day long. The intent is to tie up access to as many of your assets as possible. If you think anything of yours will just keep on going if you end up debanked, you're sadly mistaken. In addition, based on the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act as amended by the PATRIOT act, covered entities are forbidden from disclosing to you anything about why your account is frozen.

It's as close as you get to a complete shunning from modern society. You're reset to the cash you hold on you and keep custody of. And yes. In the U.S., the list that manages who can and cannot transact is centralized under OFAC. So it is at the whims of Executive whether or not any financial activity can be done with you.

The premise here is that you lose access to a European bank's mobile app because the US government compels Apple or Google to disable your app store accounts. Not that your relationship with the bank is frozen.

the account still runs and I won't be homeless as my salary and rent auto-payments

Luckily in most European countries renters are protected and they cannot just kick you out of your home for missing one rent payment (IANAL, but in NL it requires 3 months of no pay and a judge has to approve). Most likely they wouldn't approve if you missed a payment because you were locked out of your banking account.

My bank's app uses Google Pay to pay at POS terminals, so Google can at least block that.

Being de-Googled is a hardship, though there are replacements for virtually all its services. I acknowledge you are well informed on this topic.

It is not unreasonable for governments to pursue avenues for laundering money. I recognize that you likely don't believe governments should prosecute money laundering, but that view is not aligned with the majority of citizens in your country.

After a fair trial and appeals process, right?

Ah money laundering, the government's 2nd favorite excuse to bypass due process, remove freedom, and impose arbitrary punishments, after "emergency" and before "think of the children".

The government can prosecute money laundering and all the other crimes, but it's not an excuse to impose extrajudicial punishment. Until they stop, having some cash and crypto is your only means of defense.

I understand your threat model is centered around the risk of a government persecuting you. This will naturally conflict with incentives of people whose threat model centers around a lower severity but higher frequency event of systematic violence performed by criminal enterprises, with a necessary condition being ease of moving money. Both representative and totalitarian governments seek to aid investigation of criminal activity by following the movement of money.

I'm unsure about your reference to extrajudicial punishment, is it referring to de-banking associated with AML and KYC regimes in the US? If so, I agree that unjust things are unjust. I believe we should seek to fix those injustices directly through lobbying lawmakers, rather than rejecting an entire system that has significant security benefits.

I am sympathetic to people who have a fatalistic attitude when it comes to political reforms. Having other financial instruments as a backup is a good practice.

I'm not necessarily opposed to KYC or even government being able to audit transactions in general. But there is too few legal protections both from the bank and the from the government itself for this to be acceptable in a free society.

It's not entirely hopeless I guess. For what it's worth, the US government recently issued an EO that purportedly stops banks from debanking you for political reasons. Hopefully a future administration would take care of the other part.

Because financial sanctions are one of our main tools to pressure enemy countries into calming the fuck down in hopes of avoiding an actual kinetic conflict.

In 2025, North Korea managed to steal from the world over 10% of its GDP worth in cryptocurrency.

According to AP News (https://apnews.com/article/international-court-sanctions-tru...) at least one judge had his bank accounts closed. So it's not just your own government who can debank you in Europe.

Of course in this judge's case there might still be some banks who are willing to work with him even at the risk of getting sanctioned as there weren't language in the news that he was completely debanked which I assume they would highlight if it was the case.

The main problem IMHO that a bank access not seen as a right. Even Russia which is neither powerful (unlike the US) nor an EU ally can de-bank Russian critics living in the EU (and other places) by reporting them to FATF. AML is ripe for abuse.

> IIRC, ICC judges lost access to their O365 work email accounts. Worst the US can do to me is turn off my Steam, and Gmail but I can easily live without those.

They lost access to everything american, including Visa and Mastercard. It's in french and maybe not the best source but it's not paywalled :

https://www.tf1info.fr/international/nous-sommes-attaques-le...

> "Payments are mostly cancelled," he continued, "as almost all cards issued by banking institutions in Europe are either Visa or Mastercard, which are American companies."

They are not completely debanked since they can go to the bank and withdraw cash, but it's a crippling situation to be in.

You most likely use a Windows PC and an Android phone. If Uncle Sam viewed you as a threat actor, he could ask both companies to send you a signed and verified update to either your OS or apps they control, running whatever he wants.

> Now imagine being debanked by your own government because they don't like what you're saying and becoming unemployed, homeless and dead. I don't think they're remotely comparable.

You don't have to imagine it.

Alina Lipp, Thomas Röper, Xavier Moreau, Col Jacques Baud, Nathalie Yamb. The last two are Swiss nationals. The Baud case is interesting because he's a Belgian resident who now can not even buy food or pay his bills while living in his own home.

The odds are very low. It all depents on the people. So far, the European citizens are very privacy senstive. The European institutions are characterized by a huge devision of power. There is no chance that European instutitions can impose their will against a considerable majority of people. If people turn away from liberal democracy, that's another matter. But then everything is lost anyway.

> There is no chance that European instutitions can impose their will against a considerable majority of people

The EU commission just passed chat control to have government mandated software in every phone

If you want to over simplify at least do it right.

It's substantially neutered from the original proposal, with most of the scary parts taken out. I'd count that as a win as far as how antidemocratic the EU commission is.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/after-years-controvers...

Given how many world leaders form the west had absolutely the most vile chats with Epstein about doing despicable things to people, I'd totally want chat control but only for our leaders. They certainly proved that's who needs it the most to keep us safe.

Do you have a citation for this? I can't find anything showing that 2022/0155(COD) has passed the EU Council or Parliament (nor can I find any scheduled votes). [1]

The most recent related information I could find was some movement to extend the temporary derogation of the ePrivacy Directive, which expires on 2026/04/03, to 2028/04/03 but even that did not seem to have passed yet. [2]

The very fact they're trying to extend the temporary derogation hints to me that they think it'll take some time yet to pass Chat Control (if at all).

[1] https://oeil.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/en/procedure-file?refer...

[2] https://oeil.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/en/procedure-file?refer...

> So far, the European citizens are very privacy senstive.

In some areas, sure - like GDPR.

In other areas, absolutely not - like chat control.

As another commenter pointed out, it seems as if government mandated privacy intrusion is OK, while violations by corporations are quickly shutdown. It’s like the opposite of how it works here in the US.

>it seems as if government mandated privacy intrusion is OK

Once you give people an outside boogieman(Putin, Trump, Covids, etc) or a self inflicted false flag crisis(surge in violent crime rates for example) to shake them up to their core and put the fear in them, you can then easily sell your intrusion of privacy in their lives and extension of the police state, as the necessary solution that protects them.

When you start lose control of your people because their standard of living has been going downhill for 2 decades and they realize the future prospects aren't any better so they hate you even more, you can regain control of them by rallying them up on your side in a us-versus-them type of game against external or internal aggressors that you paint as "the enemy". The media is your friend here. /s

This isn't an EU or US exclusive issue, it's everywhere with a government issue. The difference as to why the EU people seem to be more OK with government intrusion compared to the US, is that EU always has external aggressors the government can point to as justification for invasiveness and control, while the US has been and still is the unchallenged global superpower so it has no real external threats ATM, meaning division must be manufactured internally (left vs right, red vs blue, woke vs maga, skin color vs skin color, gender vs gender, etc) so that the ruling class can assert control in peace.

Either way, we all seem to be heading towards the same destination.

Amen to that.

I agree 100%. Europe is just ahead of us for the time being, but our turn is soon approaching...

You may say that, but last I checked, we don’t get stopped and shot in the streets by masked goons on government payrolls.

Sure, but I am talking about government-mandated surveillance through legislation.

Also, your police aren’t afraid to go the extra mile to quash dissent. Look at what’s happening in the UK for example with Palestine Action. The only difference is that they are less armed and better trained.

Remember how UK is not a part of the EU anymore for about a decade by now?

Pedantry at its finest. The UK is European and you know it - regardless of the technicalities.

Since you’re a pedant, look at what Germany is doing in this same area.

Oh boy, did I hurt your feelings or something? If you call this pedantry, I'll gladly be a pedant in your perception. I'll call you ignorant in return though. And since you are an ignorant (notice how I can also take an adjective and ascribe it to your whole personhood?) you probably won't know what the difference between Europe and the European Union is anyway, so there's little hope for a fruitful discussion.

> chat control

The Danish proposal for indiscriminate chat control did not receive enough support and was retracted last autumn. Similar proposals have been put forward regularly over the past 30 years and have so far come to nothing just as regularly.

The problem is they will keep trying just like before, and they only need to get lucky once to succeed, while we need to be lucky very single time.

This is a truism, but not that helpful. I have to be lucky every time I leave the house not to be murdered, but it doesn't substantially change my behaviour. Rather than freaking out or catastrophising we just need to focus on asserting and celebrating and educating citizens in our shared values (murdering is bad, privacy is important).

Nah, I think in this metaphor we need to lock up Mr.Stabby McStabFace instead of just allowing him to go without punishment for his repeated efforts to legalize face-stabbing.

> chat control

For the conservative (and sometimes not so conservative) non-experts things like this sound like an easy win. So every new generation of politicians has to be educated about it again.

> like chat control.

That has never been passed in any form.

> the opposite of how it works here in the US.

It appears that you have conveniently forgotten about FISA, EARN IT, CLOUD act, PATRIOT act, LAED, etc, etc.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/after-years-controvers...

It hasn’t been passed in that “voluntary” form either.

35 years ago, a good chunk of the current EU was under a Soviet-imposed totalitarian rule. Spain was a dictatorship until 1975. And it's been just 80 years since WWII.

It always boggles my mind that most Europeans are absolutely convinced that nothing like that could ever happen again. Meanwhile, many people in the US are convinced that the government will be coming for them any minute now.

> It always boggles my mind that most Europeans are absolutely convinced that nothing like that could ever happen again.

It’s not that it cannot happen again. It’s that the EU is explicitly built against that and if it happens it will come from the national governments (see Hungary), not the EU.

> it will come from the national governments (see Hungary), not the EU.

what's the difference? The EU relies on national gov't to enforce rules. Until the EU becomes a sovereign entity with standalone enforcement mechanisms, it's no more able to ensure things can't happen than the UN.

>it's no more able to ensure things can't happen than the UN

It's not the same. EU will cut your funding if you don't follow their rules. UN is not finding any EU countries, but the opposite, we all pay to fund the UN.

National governments are often at odds with the commission. France was regularly threatened and fined for its energy policy, for example, which was not pro-business enough. All EU regulations are the result of horse trading in the council of ministers and the commission, the member states are not helpless victims or perfect enforcement forces blindly applying what the president of the commission of the day wants.

Maybe in theory, but the idea that nations that trade doesn’t go to war is a naive one, it has happened plenty and will happen again. As for the structure of voting etc, it’s just a matter of pushing until people give up.

Indeed, which is why entanglement goes deeper than simply trade. The emergence of pan-European companies like Airbus makes the cost for one country to go alone much steeper. Same for the establishment of EU-wide supply chains. There are also incentives to play nice in the form of the customs union and the single market. The moment you leave, you’re on the wrong side of a trade barrier.

How is the EU built against that and how does it matter?

The EU is built on rules that uphold liberal democratic principles, agreed to by national governments in a flush of post-WW2 clarity, and which tie successors to the same principles. There are exit mechanisms, but they impose large costs (i.e. Brexit).

You're saying nothing concrete in particular. What rules? How do they inhibit change? The only thing I can think of which is actually difficult to change is the echr and i see more than a dozen mostly liberal governments queueing up to change it (to little effect so far) over migration issues.

The ECHR isn't actually an EU thing. (It's a Council of Europe thing, which is separate from and predates the ECSC/EEC/EU.)

I know and it's a requirement for being in the EU still.

There are rules about election conduct and free operation of courts, to give two examples. Both of which Hungary skirts on occasion but the EU does apply some pressure.

> It’s that the EU is explicitly built against that and if it happens it will come from the national governments (see Hungary)

So to prevent individual EU nations ever becoming authoritarian, like Hungary, we have to cede sovereignty and authority to the EU & EC unelected bureaucrats like Ursula VDL who take over as the main executive leaders, ensuring we'll no longer have the danger of national-level authoritarianism.

Hell of a solution.

Surely the better solution to issues like Hungary is ensuring we get more democracy to Hungarian people, not giving authority over Hungary to someone else the Hungarian people can't elect.

US Supreme Court Judges are not elected. Although I hesitate to use this as an example currently, given how well the US separation of powers is (not) working, the point stands that all democratic systems need some kind of "damping" influence to survive. If successive national governments were hostile to EU bureaucrats there are options open to them to restore sovereignty — e.g. exit the EU, or force change in appointments by coordinating with other EU governments. The fact that senior positions in the EU are unelected does not in itself make the system un or anti democratic.

> So to prevent individual EU nations ever becoming authoritarian, like Hungary, we have to cede sovereignty and authority to the EU & EC unelected bureaucrats like Ursula VDL who take over as the main executive leaders, ensuring we'll no longer have the danger of national-level authoritarianism.

Not really, and the example of Hungary shows that it would not be that effective for that purpose.

The EU is a union of nations, not really of people. It was built so that nations play nice with each other. Each member state still does more or less what it wants within its borders, as long as it does not jeopardise the union.

In that way it’s not perfectly democratic, because there are layers of indirection between the citizens and the institutions.

Commissioners are nominated by member states and approved by parliament. So they are generally aligned with the politics dominant at the national level and palatable to MEPs. Von der Leyen is there because she had support from the German government and was from the dominant block in parliament. It’s not direct democracy, but it is not a faceless blob either.

> Meanwhile, many people in the US are convinced that the government will be coming for them any minute now.

It's a bit ironic that most of those people voted for Trump, who is now doing exactly that. But I guess they think it's ok as long as the government is coming for others, not for them (at least not yet)...

While I love the premise that he is choosing arbitrary groups to go after and we just haven't been chosen yet, no, he campaigned on this and was elected for exactly this. This is what the people want.

Sort of correct but also playing with words. Most, many.

There's a divide between generations and geographies to start with. Younger vs. older generations see things differently. Westerners vs. Easterners (especially those who remember the communist times) see things differently.

It's very hard to say what many and most people are doing on either side of the Atlantic. Until a few short years ago you wouldn't have imagined enough Americans would vote for the leader they did, knowing exactly what they're getting, and yet they did. So people aren't always forthcoming about their views and beliefs.

In Europe for anyone who can't remember the "hard times" it's easy to fall into the trap of believing things will stay good forever. The US hasn't had equivalent "hard times" relative to the rest of the world for as long as any person in the US has been alive and a few generations more. So they too can easily believe things can't turn sour, which is why this recent and swift downturn caused so much shock and consternation. But the US also always had a lot of preppers and people "ready to fight the Government" (that's why so many have guns, they say). It's a big place so you expect to have "many" people like this.

In Italy were already trying to break that division of power, we’ve a referendum that does just that

Very privacy sensitive? In Germany, maybe. Elsewhere in Europe, not so much. See the regular attempts to push through something like chat control.

> citizens are very privacy senstive

Their reaction and opposition to ChatControl (or near complete lack of both) would indicate otherwise? They could hardly care less about privacy.

National governments which have openly declared that believe they have the right to unlimited access to any private communication hardly lost any popularity or faced real consequences.

Every government is an attacker.

> What are the odds they're using this on-shore tech grab to implement their own domestic version of China's social credit score system, to easily get data on their own citizens who commit "wrong-think", without having to through the effort to twist the arm of US entities every time they want to do that?

What are the odds that once shut down "chat control" will come up under a new name?

> without having to through the effort to twist the arm of US entities every time they want to do that?

Right now, it's more like US corpos are try to twist the arm of EU governments [1][2], pushing heavy propaganda to manipulate our elections [3], allying with the US government to do so. And the US government has been threatening EU govts with invasion [4], leveraging US corpos to harm lawful individuals doing their jobs in the EU [5], and sanctioning elected officials for performing their duties [6], or threatened to [7].

Sure, there's an hypothetical risk of the EU turning sour. On the other hand, when it comes to US corpos, the risk has materialized.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly930y90lro [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0589g0dqq7o [3]: https://www.politico.eu/article/twitter-faces-renewed-scruti... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_crisis [5]: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n... [6]: https://www.brusselstimes.com/1931733/eu-parliament-blasts-u... [7]: https://www.politico.eu/article/us-accused-threats-eu-diplom...

Read your third link, please. The Ministry of Truth not being happy that their policy on "disinformation" isn't being applied as strongly as they wish isn't what I'd call "pushing heavy propaganda".

Yep. Color me shocked that the propaganda state media is unhappy with information being spread that doesn't conform to the views of the state, and so calls it propaganda or mis-/dis-information.

It's totally not the "ministry of truth".

GP means "Ministry of Truth" in the Orwellian-sense. The "Ministry of Truth" was the propaganda arm of the government just as the "Ministry of Love" is the interrogation/torture and brainwashing center.

> Because the US or Chine government can't harm me in Europe via the data they collect from me

That's an amusingly naïve perspective. The US government absolutely can harm you, via a multitude of ways.

Also, Chinese-owned firms are known to be transferring EU citizens' data to China in violation of GDPR: https://noyb.eu/en/tiktok-aliexpress-shein-co-surrender-euro...

China's government has strategic goals to destabilise and weaken the EU, and data-farming will be part of their strategy.

Not to speak of russia who have been sending assassins to kill people in the EU for a long time, and the EU has not been very good at stopping those.

> What about being required to carry a your-own-government-controlled tracking device?

What part of the cellphone manufacturer being based overseas makes you think the government can't track you via it?

Even leaving asides 5-eyes style data-sharing agreements, your US/Chinese smartphone still connects through a domestic cellphone carrier, using a domestic number. That's enough to have at a minimum fine-grained location tracking, call logs, and data usage.

In fact 5g and all previous standards have a provision for lawful intercept. So your domestic intelligence service and police can always turn it into a listening device.

Yeah it seems that some politicians have noticed that they can enact a lot of self serving authoritarian legislation that wouldn't fly otherwise if they push it as populist independence-from-US thing. Can't let a good crisis go to waste, of course.

One only needs a few looks at what the EU Commission has been doing lately to see that if left unchecked their plan is a UK-like total surveillance state.

I don't disagree but that wasn't the point here. The point is they are handing even more control to a different US entity. Putting my tinfoil hat on, I assume the authoritarians are intending to simply buy the data from the American companies to circumvent legal restrictions, as in the Five Eyes arrangement.

Carrying this device is the key here. Eventually we all need to carry it around, track us everywhere.

Most people have mobile phones that need to roughly know your position as a technical necessity, why are you speaking like its 1990's?

Not just the phone needing to know your location, your rough location has to be reported to a central server, because that's how incoming calls/texts are routed to the phone.

I can leave my phone at home and route SMS and voice via http to my real phone.

You are shifting the goal posts here - if we work by this argument, we will never achieve anything.

There's a certain amount of conspiracy theory going on in this thread, but it it right to ask: who will be banned from this payment system, and under what rules? Can we make it a legal requirement to at least provide a justification which can be challenged?

The usual first victims are sex workers, not political minorities.

The real human-rights issue, in my view, is optionality. If interacting with government or the financial system requires a specific proprietary device tied to a specific ecosystem, that's a problem

This "Play Integrity" garbage is the first thing europe should break with. Instead we have Italian government app refusing to run on devices not serving Google's interest.. shame.

Also often a requirement on govt digital identity apps...

With my bank (bankinter) you can bizum from a browser (just checked).

Sorry: This is Spain (to clarify).

I think absolutely Europe needs it's own mobile OS. And thankfully they can "just" fork Android - or better still, adopt one of the existing forks.

I suspect simply stating that it must be a supported standard will do most of the work, much like standardising phone chargers.

> Whatever they come up with, I hope it doesn't tie you to a Google or Apple smartphone.

The article starts with Wero right off the bat, which a pan-European rebrand and continuation of the Dutch Ideal. The Dutch have been using Ideal everywhere, and you usually use that to pay online. It redirects you to your bank to acknowledge the transaction, and most bank have auth methods where a smartphone is optional. Most often used for sure, but optional, and you can complete the transaction with a hardware reader and your debit card as well.

The only exception are the neobanks like Bunq, which actually are smartphone-only. That one in particular is great if you appreciate the CEO and staff keeping a personal eye on your transactions (no kidding).

FWIW, I'm using Bizum on a daily basis in Spain, on a de-googled android phone running e/os/, via my bank app (revolut)

It's true that it's a problem, but it can be easily fixed in the future. For example they could just change the app to work on any old android fork. You still get the benefit of no longer having transaction data run through the US.

But right now many of us are concerned with not being able to run e.g. GrapheneOS without locking ourselves out of all basic digital infrastructure. We shouldn't wait until it gets untenable for the EU to lock us into Google and Apple, we want independence from the start.

Not to mention that we are essentially forced to give up accsss to all of our private data stored on our phones to either google or apple because you have their rootkit (Google Play Services in the Android case) installed

This. A sane voice of reason in an insane, software-tech dork driven world.

Physical cards ftw!

Btw i love simply using cash in South America when getting a taxi, no stupid "apps", no tech nonsense. Just wait at a proper spot and hail.

An Indian friend of mine, constantly raves about their UPI system:

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

It sounds a lot like what they're discussing.

Oh it is good. It has its drawbacks (like everything else) but it's quite the de facto now and UPI Lite ( a wallet not on individual apps but on UPI/NCPI f/w itself) had made it even better.

There's so much trust / dependency on NPCI at this point but I recently learned that it's not a public entity and thus excluded from the transparency acts such as RTI. I hope the EU does better!

I am not sure which country you are from but is the term “accountability” even relevant in India anymore? It’s been non existent since more than a decade.

I was just commenting on how good, widespread it is and no it is not the doing of the current Govt. It just gained traction during a massive f up of the current Govt.

My friend says even the poorest Indians use it.

You can buy vegetables at a farmer's market, and just scan a QR code.

It’s everywhere. On the hills, on the boats (yeah I paid for roasted peanuts on one but it was close to the shore), rural, urban, semi rural etc.

Canada has the interac system and it works pretty wonderfully, it's integrated into other systems for overseas compatibility but it can operate entirely independent of VISA/Mastercard if the POS supports it.

I don’t see why they can’t just piggyback on existing, proven solutions such as Bancontact, Carte Bleu, etc., which are all based on a card running on its own network. If it’s app-based, we’re excluding quite some citizens from it.

Visa bought Carte Bleue in 2011. Yep.

Nice... /s

I thought Carte Bleue no longer existed?

The selling of sovereign infrastructure to foreign actors is a failure of regulation. I’m baffled as to why that was approved.

Some of these are 40+ years old.

It makes sense to build upon modern SEPA payment rails and focus on mobile wallets. Europe has always been on the forefront (Swish, Vipps, ...) and we have entire generations of consumers who barely if ever use plastic cards.

Logical next steps: 1. European app store that has to run on Android/iPhone 2. European phone (platform) -- maybe as a joint venture of different European players / not a single company.

What about a implant that can be placed into your palm? It can carry everything about you and be tied to your pulse so that if you have a panic attack or something as you are being robbed it wipes everything but your name and basic information.

> implant that can be placed into your palm

Might as well make it to the brain while we are at it. Safe when one is brain dead or unconscious. What say?

I hope they go with Taler, personally. Privacy of cash but the required traceability for merchants.

They should just do on the lines of what India has been doing with UPI and Brazil with Pix. Both massively successful at this point. Of course take their good parts.

By the way, since you wondered, it seems to be

> built around the digital wallet Wero

and wikipedia says its a mobile payments method. I hope not. I hope it's rather an interface/spec.

(On a side note, I also hope individual countries of EU ensure that those spec leaves an ability for them to continue internally or even externally if rest of the EU decide to cut someone off or so.)

> Brazil with Pix

Are you aware of any banks that don’t require you to use their Android/iOS app to use PIX? I’ve had accesss to maybe a dozen banks and none had that ability. Sometimes you get via web, but needs their app’s 2FA to log in.

EPI is the interface and it's built upon SEPA and TARGET standards.

Wero is the implementation. I think it makes sense to provide a turnkey solution to all participating banks, so that we don't have 100+ versions of the same app.

Countries that don't want to trust EPI (or simply outside the Eurozone) are able to take the same path as Bizum in Spain, and make their domestic solution interoperate with EPI instead of replacing it.

> Of course take their good parts.

I completely agree. Sadly UPI is now almost completely dependant on platform integrity ( google and apple).

You need to research better before forming and sharing wrong opinions about world's most popular payments system: UPI.

UPI will work even without a smartphone, it will work on even with a basic feature phone, using USSD codes! That's called UPI 123PAY.

https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/news/upi-without-smartphone-...

This feature allows rural populations, poor people, small merchants, etc., to send and receive UPI payments, even without a smartphone.

So UPI has no dependency on Google or Apple, it can work on any basic phone that supports USSD codes feature!

A key patent on this is held by a friend of mine. He tried to monetise this tech way before operators were ready.

I forget what the company was called, m-pay or something like that.

UPI in India if I remember correctly can actually work even offline by either sms/calling functionality even on dumb phones

Pasting this ddg-ai thing but I think its called UPI 123PAY

UPI 123PAY allows users to make digital payments using feature phones without needing a smartphone or internet connection. Users can set up a UPI ID by dialing *99# and can make payments through methods like IVR calls, missed calls, or sound-based technology.

https://razorpay.com/blog/what-is-upi-123-pay/

So... there once was a company called First data. Founded by some JPMC execs who got chased out of the bank after being caught performing espionage for Palantir.

They sold their transaction platform as a service to Apple Pay. And funneled all your transaction data to palantir.

Financial networks are side channels for intelligence gathering. And that makes the folks doing them outside of your nation an adversary.

With the US choosing to become an enemy of western democracy in Europe, the need for more investment in building trusted core infrastructure is inevitable.

Certainly none of this is ever simple. But this is just a microcosm of a much larger shift across many industries in Europe and we as tech nerds should be mindful of the tectonic shifts that are happening currently. The capital investments occurring have serious long term implications for us all.

Really the folks doing them inside your nation are also adversaries. The worst ones in fact because they usually have the power or know somebody who has the power to jail you.

How has the US become an enemy of western democracy in Europe?

Maybe you missed it, but the US is threatening to attack an EU country for close to an year now.

Cards are really slow and expensive to distribute and (tech forward) people would also prefer to just use their phone or watch. This is the kind or project that will take years to work and almost everybody now has a smartphone on one of those two operating systems in their pocket every time they leave the house.

Cards will have a slow demise over the next 10 years but it's coming whether we like it or not.

Support both?

Like to log into e-banking services over here we either have phone apps, or a code calculator device that can be used instead of those: https://www.seb.lv/en/private/daily-banking/tools-and-online...

Seems like common sense to me, the same how I have a wallet on my phone but still carry cards for payments just in case.

Well, at least in Spain cards typically take between 3 or 5 days to get to you via post mail when you first open your account in a bank, and when it's about to expire, from time to time, you get the new one weeks in advance.

So I don't think distribution is a problem. Of course companies would prefer to save the cost, and they also prefer that you use their applications, but I just don't think it's more convenient for the end user. Taking a card with you is not a big deal while having to use a mobile application or approved device limits your freedom to choose which smartphone you want to use or how to use it.

If the interfaces are simple, straight to the point, able to do a good enough job, all that in a modular fashion. It should be rather ok.

But 99.99% of the time won't be the implementation of such interfaces, but monitoring and security.

Real independence requires thinking about the full stack

Definitely. I have spent the last few days trying to get a replacement "Digipass" device for a bank account I run for a small sports club. The bank was very reluctant to issue a new one as they want to move everyone onto their app to generate codes for logging in to their website. Trying to argue that even if their app worked now on a de-Googled Android device there was no guarantee that they wouldn't require Google's safetynet etc. at some point in the future was a failure. They did not understand this and decreed that the app not working, or possibly not working, on one's phone was "not a valid reason" to be excused from using the app. Luckily because the account is a business account I was able to claim that using banking apps on phones was against company policy (I set the policy myself), which is an excuse they were willing to accept. For now.

Any solution they come up with will benefit some company that implements the solution. Most likely there already exists a company (it could be Visa or Mastercard) that has the solution ready and they're lobbying for this to happen.

The Portuguese alternative "MB Way" has small NFC tags that can be tied to your account and used instead of the phone. You still need to register it in the phone. But it's a small step in the right direction.

I always find it entertaining to hear people try to argue that what these companies do is soooooo difficult and that's why they're valuable. It's just multiple computers keeping a balance. It's not complicated.

No, these companies keep themselves in power not because they've solved such a difficult problem that nobody else can, but because they have a moat which they protect.

Time to do away with these foreign entities.

Each individual detail isn't difficult, the moat is dealing with a huge, huge, pile of them. But most of the details are driven by laws and regulations: of the entity in charge of those things decides it doesn't want you to have a moat any more, you've got a problem. If there's one thing the EU really does have, it's the capacity to revise regulations.

Rather than a moat of details, it's first-mover advantage. Anyone can run a credit card network, but merchants and banks need to support them. Many others exist, but the issue is that they don't have widespread adoption. Solutions that work exist, which means the lesser supported alternative is not widely used, which again reduces reason for wider adoption...

Regulation changes "why bother" to "oh crap".

jup. once this is built, if adoption is lacking, it's not hard to imagine how the EU could make it the standard payment option.

> If there's one thing the EU really does have, it's the capacity to revise regulations.

This is the central power lever of the EU and one that is frequently underestimated.

European power projection doesn't work through tanks and aircraft carriers. It works with regulations, trade deals and economic incentives. Remember how a few years ago everyone was scrambling to get GDPR-compliant? That wasn't some random event. That was the EU projecting power.

Why do iPhones have USB-C now? European soft power.

Why are things like Champagne and Prosciutto di Parma protected brands that can only be sold if they're from the actual region? And I mean not just in Europe itself, but everywhere it has deals? Canada, Japan, India, China, Mercosur, etc etc? European soft power.

The EU is playing a different game from the other major players. Not one of brute force, but one of shifting the foundational rules of commerce in their favor. And they're very good at it.

Yep. And whereas the EU can't magic itself into having enough fossil fuels or bootstrap a commercially viable reusable rocket launch industry overnight, it absolutely can align payments legislation and mandate that point of sale devices accepting Payment Provider I in Europe should also accept Payment Provider II...

> No, these companies keep themselves in power not because they've solved such a difficult problem that nobody else can, but because they have a moat which they protect.

I don't know that the problem is sophisticated, but it's certainly complex [1]. It's a bit of both in terms of complexity and defending a moat, which all businesses do, including, and especially European ones.

And companies like Visa, Mastercard, American Express, &c. arose initially from solving a real need. Before these companies came into existence when you traveled you'd have to take cash, or traveler's checks or some other nonsense. Today you can, at least as an American, just walk in to the subway in just about any country and tap to pay. Need a coffee at Mt. Fuji? Easy. Buying a bottle of Calvados in some remote area? Yea just tap to pay with your Mastercard.

> Time to do away with these foreign entities.

You'll never do that. Why? Because at a minimum you want American tourist dollars and Europe isn't going to start issuing European credit cards to Americans or other citizens around the world.

[1] Why is it complex? Well you have to deal with American and European financial regulations, KYC, &c. - you have to vet merchants, you have to run the infrastructure to process transactions, refunds, direct payments from bank accounts to pay for cards, and all of those things. Those are real, genuine business activities that are non-negotiable and while they may seem simple, in practice they are not at all simple.

About your point in [1] yes it is complex but maybe 50% is done by the issuing bank/institution

And people do underestimate the complexity of it

This last summer, I couldn’t use my US-issued Visa or Mastercard credit card in most places in the Netherlands.

Had to use debit.

Literally just got back from a trip there and didn't find a single business or transaction that I couldn't pay for with various US-issued (Chase + BoA) Visa credit cards via tap.

Even more surprisingly to me - a pretty decent chunk of businesses even would accept AmEx. By no means all, but I recall it being basically nonexistent not that long ago.

And to be clear - much of my time was not in areas that get a ton of foreign tourist visitors.

Not saying your experience didn't happen, but given our very different experiences it might be something with your particular bank/issuer/card?

On a recent trip I skipped most the fees and got a good exchange rate with a Wise Card/account.

I was slow to try it and it’s great.

Most Americans with the means to travel also have access to credit cards with no foreign transaction fees and by selecting "pay in local currency" you get the best exchange rate.

There's still an ongoing trick that some European businesses do where they'll try and get you to pay in dollars because they can arbitrarily set the exchange rate. It's obviously within "reason" but on the higher end for no purpose other than to make extra money. I find such behavior to be dishonest and deplorable.

There's also ATMs from Euronet that are conveniently placed in tourist areas that refuses to pay out Euro if you have a Euro card, you can only get money if you do an exchange and they do a 15% or so on top of a fixed rate. Also do things like charge for checking balance on account and don't tell you about before its done.

Its an American company.

> Its an American company.

Thankfully though a lot of times these ATMs and such are avoided by American tourists because....we just use a credit card.

By the way, those fees are split with other folks. For example you might find that American Euronext ATM in a shopping plaza or outside of a storefront. Those European businesses are getting a cut of that exchange rate.

Like we dont have credit/debit cards in Europe? I haven't had to use cash for 15-20 years or so, but also don't have a credit card.

Doesn't really help if they only take cash, which is still common in Germany for example, but gotten a lot better in the last decade.

Ok so the scam is shared, great.

> Like we dont have credit/debit cards in Europe?

I didn't suggest otherwise?

> Ok so the scam is shared, great.

Yea, just making sure we're all aware that Europeans are positively complicit in this scam.

>because....we just use a credit card.

Implying we could or would not.

> There's also ATMs from Euronet that are conveniently placed in tourist areas

I wasn't implying that Europeans can't use credit cards. We were talking about tourists using credit cards versus cash.

> credit cards with no foreign transaction fees and by selecting "pay in local currency" you get the best exchange rate.

I’d be interested to compare their rates to Wise. The credit cards here in New Zealand don’t come close. However we regularly get screwed down here, and sadly it’s not just foreign companies that do it.

> I’d be interested to compare their rates to Wise.

Well for US-based "no foreign transaction fees" credit cards the rate is 0. There's no additional fee. For cards with foreign transaction fees you'll see something like 1% that goes to Visa/Mastercard/whoever and then the bank will charge a fee too, typically a percent or two.

But that's one thing, and then you have the actual currency conversion rates. I found an excerpt from an article that I think explains it well enough [1].

  "Typically, a purchase at a foreign merchant is made entirely in the local currency. The cardholder authorizes the purchase amount in the local currency, and the purchase price is not converted until the payment is processed.

  When you make a purchase at an international store, you may be asked if you want to convert your purchase to your home currency. This service is provided at the point of sale as a value added service and allows you to know the converted price at that moment—but don’t be fooled; it comes at a cost.

  While this may initially sound like a wise way to avoid fees, these charges are in addition to any foreign transaction fees your card may apply. These fees assessed by the merchant at the point of sale are called dynamic currency conversion or DCC. You can think of DCC as an added service and just like most services that make life easier, there’s a convenience charge. Plus, even when using DCC, you’ll usually be charged a foreign transaction fee by your card issuing bank unless your card has no foreign transaction fees."

tl;dr version is, at least for an American, get a "no foreign transaction fees" credit card and save 1%-3% on all transactions you may otherwise be charged a fee for, and if prompted by a local shop to exchange currency, don't, just pay in the local currency so they can't dishonestly set arbitrarily high exchange rates. Visa and Mastercard (among others) as mentioned in the article have better negotiated exchange rates so it's better to let them do any exchange that's needed to keep costs to a minimum.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/credit-cards/foreign-transact...

My experience matches yours. I found AmEx accepted maybe 50% of the time, if not less. But Visa or MasterCard were accepted 99% of the time, both big and small businesses.

I suspect you're right: it depends on the specific card/bank, not whether it's credit or debit.

Why would you expect to be able to use a creditcard in a physical shop in the Netherlands? Surely you knew? It works if the payment terminal has support for it, but since no Dutch person uses a creditcard outside of the internet, your kinda going against the grain.

Why would you expect people not living in the Netherlands to just know this?

In South Africa where I live, anywhere that accepts cards accepts Visa and Mastercard. Outside of the "informal business" sector (e.g. tiny "businesses" like a roadside stall), card acceptance is so ubiquitous I don't carry cash anymore and it's very rarely an issue.

> Why would you expect people not living in the Netherlands to just know this?

Because this is a thing in most of Europe. Most people don't own a creditcard, and those that do use it mostly for online purchases outside of the EU. I don't travel to another continent without looking up how to pay for things when I get there.

> Because this is a thing in most of Europe.

I think you wastly exegarate your observations.

According to this, he's mostly right: https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/people_with_credit...

It's not about owning credit card, but about being able to use it in physical shop. In one of the parent comments author of comment to which I replied said:

> Why would you expect to be able to use a creditcard in a physical shop in the Netherlands?

And then

> Because this is a thing in most of Europe.

This is definitely not a thing in most of Europe.

Netherlands' anti-credit card stance is quite unique, perhaps only matched by Germany and their obsession with cash.

I was just in Germany and lived on my credit card - not a single Euro used. I strongly disagree with this generalization based on extensive personal experience.

> Why would you expect people not living in the Netherlands to just know this?

It’s generally a good idea to learn something about your travel destination and not to assume everything there is the same as where you live. The world is big and diverse.

That's not really true. Especially in the more touristy places, credit cards are generally accepted and it'd be unusual for it not to be. If you're out in a village in, I dunno, Brabant, then sure. But the places that visitors are likely to be I'd expect cards to work.

I think even AH accepts credit cards these days, though I haven't tried it myself.

> Today you can, at least as an American, just walk in to the subway in just about any country and tap to pay.

Is that really true? I remember wanting to buy a train ticket at Charles De Gaulle airport, and the machine only took French credit cards. That was around 2010, so I don't know if something changed.

Ha, well I was just in France last April and didn't have an issue at the machine to buy the train ticket. Though, unfortunately the train just so happened to cease to function on our last night there so we had to take an Uber in to Paris [1].

The wonderful French train company wouldn't refund the ticket either and instead insisted that we might use it one day on another trip to France. Thankfully by the time I got to the front of the line to chat in broken French to the ticket administrator, I had already accepted my fate after hearing a number of tourists (not Americans mind you) yell and stomp their feet uselessly in hopes of obtaining a refund.

[1] That was a fun adventure too. At CDG, well I found out later that taxis are "allowed" and are the same price as the Uber ride and so we could have avoided this by just taking a taxi through Uber, but a group of folks from Great Britain were ahead of me in line and I came across them later when looking for where to get a taxi/Uber. There were rideshare signs or something but they didn't lead anywhere that made sense. They seemed rather aspirational. Well, one of the members of the British group spoke good French (or good enough) and found out the secret spot to go after chatting with an airport employee I think it's at Terminal E (someone else may know for sure) or something and so my wife and I befriended the same British group and went along with them for the long walk over.

We were able to get a ride, though not cheap. Of course the bus was an option and we're no stranger, but we were on vacation and the $50 ride was just chalked up to the cost of doing business. We were already 2 hours behind schedule because of the train fiasco.

All that to say, I think using an American credit card these days is the least of your concerns. I was surprised to see American Express taken rather much more widely than anticipated. Be careful getting gas though as they place holds on your card for $250 or something like that, and once you get enough holds you can't get any more until the prior ones "roll off".

Well the reverse has been true IME - my Visa credit/debit cards issued by an European Bank have worked just fine abroad, including in the US. There are certainly edge cases where transactions get denied or US people think every card must have a Zip code but overall yes you can just pay.

> Well you have to deal with American and European financial regulations, KYC, &c. - you have to vet merchants, you have to run the infrastructure to process transactions, refunds, direct payments from bank accounts to pay for cards, and all of those things. Those are real, genuine business activities that are non-negotiable and while they may seem simple, in practice they are not at all simple.

Those are partially or completely taken over not by the card network but by the bank that is issuing you the card, so a change in the underlying technology will be transparent.

> Because at a minimum you want American tourist dollars and Europe isn't going to start issuing European credit cards to Americans or other citizens around the world.

It could be handled similarly to how tourists in Brazil can now use Brazil's Pix payment system.

One way Brazil handles it is with 3rd party digital wallets that tourists can install on their phones such as Wallbit [1]. Another way is with 3rd party services that let you pay from your own digital wallet or bank app and the service makes the Pix payment [2].

[1] https://www.wallbit.io/en/blog/brazilian-pix-and-a-payment-a...

[2] https://www.pagbrasil.com/lp/pix-for-international-travelers...

Well, you could do that, but that sucks. Not just in philosophy (I don't want to download your crappy app - this applies to any country) but also in practice.

Thankfully Americans at least have enough purchasing power that the demand for convenience - just take my money with this card will keep us away from bad solutions in Europe.

>Well, you could do that, but that sucks

Only sucks for the Americans though, I think most people non American countries will be fine with that

No it sucks for everyone haha. It's an objectively worse experience compared to just using a card (debit or credit).

The vendors you'd pay with Pix in brazil are typically the vendors who may not even accept cards at all, it's pix or cash.

(Although you CAN pay with pix at many supermarkets, I'd rate it as rare. Also useable for online payments, but you take the risk in case of fraud, unlike with creditcards)

Thanks for the information, reminds me of CashApp or something like that in the US. But just to be clear the context was, at least as I understood, moving to using an app instead of using existing credit card rails via Visa and Mastercard and that's just not going to happen because it's a worse experience (in Europe).

If you don't have the ability to accept a card at all, that's a different use case.

I mean it’s an obvious decision to not accept cards if you can avoid it. You’re letting a company like Amex siphon up to 3% of your income away in perpetuity.

Business owners are forced to accept this situation because customers have your expectation. But it’s really not a good situation we’ve ended up in, letting for-profit, uncompetitive companies skim off the top of consumer spending. It’s frankly a rip-off.

Tap to pay could literally just come from your bank’s app.

> I mean it’s an obvious decision to not accept cards if you can avoid it. You’re letting a company like Amex siphon up to 3% of your income away in perpetuity.

In Brazil you can easily be paying 5-6% when accepting card payments, if not more. You'll generally get a 10% discount when opting to pay with cash in clothing/electronics/etc stores.

Handling cash comes with its own expenses too for business owners. It's not "this costs nothing" and "this costs 3%".

Selling something expensive? Well if a customer doesn't have the cash, by the time they go find an ATM (and pay a fee yay!) they probably changed their mind on the purchase.

There's a myriad of reasons to use cards (credit or debit). There's merits to using cash.

But, back to the actual discussion thread, there's no good reason to try and get tourists to use some convoluted app instead of just paying with a credit card.

How do they get the cash? I'm assuming from an ATM with a Visa or Mastercard.

All the locals can use cash. Friction free. Objectively better

Cash can get misplaced or stolen, you have to keep going to an ATM to get more of it which for most costs money (my bank pays for ATM withdrawals globally for any fee), it's not nearly as convenient as a credit/debit card though it's cheaper. Though maybe it's not since merchants never lower prices and even if everyone switched to cash prices wouldn't go down. Also there are costs for the merchant to carry cash.

I think your everyday credit/debit card is still objectively better overall, even moreso for tourists which was the main topic.

>you have to keep going to an ATM to get more of it

Not if you are paid in cash by your employer

Are we not talking about tourists anymore?

>No it sucks for everyone haha

We were until this guy joined in!

"Everyone" in this context was tourists. If you want to change the subject that's fine, but be honest about it.

Sorry it would suck for everyone, including an Australian like me. How does it not suck?

Why can't I just use my one debit card anywhere, why do I need to setup a separate card with a random app in another country, then another in another country etc.

My visa debit card allows me to travel virtually anywhere and use my own money without issue.

Anything else is just extremely inconvenient and technologically not really necessary

Sorry but this is silly, as an Australian I can also travel anywhere with my visa debit card without issue. No need to setup a random app for the particular country and transfer money into that, if I need to transfer money into a random app why I can't I just pay the vendor directly?

My visa debit card allows me to travel virtually anywhere and use my own money without issue.

Anything else is just extremely inconvenient and technologically not really necessary

> Buying a bottle of Calvados in some remote area? Yea just tap to pay with your Mastercard.

Hard disagree. Until Covid, many small shops didn't take cards in Europe. Taxis, restaurants, market stalls, even trains were often cash only not that long ago. I in the UK ran accounts in companies that had people travel extensively in Europe. We used to issue travellers with EUR200 for the things that cards couldn't buy. Most shops didn't take Amex due to fees. Americans will either have to bring a compliant card or change some cash at the airport.

I also think you have misjudged the mood. I guarantee there are a large number of people in rural Europe that would be very happy never to meet another American tourist, even if it costs them. Americans can look forward to worse service everywhere. I wouldn't be suprised if some people in rural France refused to let you have the Calvados at all.

What is Europe in this sense? In the Europe I know, every small business has accepted cards for decades. The exception if there are some children selling strawberries to tourists.

As for your second paragraph, you seem to be dreaming. Americans are some of the best tourists to deal with, and anybody who works in the tourism sector is happy to receive them.

I haven't been to every country in Europe, it is true.

A few years ago I shut down a website in Poland for someone because people didn't want to pay with cards, they wanted COD. My colleague took a train regularly in the Netherlands a few years back that was cash only. Dutch websites also have to offer whatever the Dutch payment provider is (I forget). Another colleague in rural Spain found that the price they were charged was lower if they paid cash by the exact amount of VAT. In Germany I ran a website that had to allow bank transfer as a payment method because 'companies generally don't have credit cards' according to the locals. Up until Covid travellers from our office to France and Germany always needed to use a few Euros. Up until Covid it was an absolute taboo to buy drinks with a card in the UK and Ireland, unless it was with a meal. My local chip shop is cash only today, but none of them had a machine before Covid. My local Chinese restaurant tells everyone the card machine is dodgy to see if they will pay cash. They only installed it during Covid.

I think we will manage without Visa just fine.

> and anybody who works in the tourism sector is happy to receive them.

Of course they are! That is literally their job. It is everyone else that has a problem with them.

Who is everyone else that has a problem here? Since tourists almost exclusively deal with people who work with tourism. Villagers annoyed that American tourists are swimming in their lake? Street scum irritated that American tourists are taking up space on the sidewalk? When I was young I used to hear anti-tourism sentiment sometimes, usually from the most base people. Everybody else was busy working or living their life, so they didn't have time to loiter in touristic places at touristic times. Unless they worked there.

As for your run-ins with card hostile businesses and people, you have the option to make your purchases with businesses who accept cards. Most customers choose that options, because cards offer the best protection and convenience for the customer. To the tune of the endless teeth grinding of some small business owners who think that their low profits are to blame on a tiny merchant fee.

> My colleague took a train regularly in the Netherlands a few years back that was cash only.

I don't know what a few years back was, but I can't believe there was a train in NL that was cash at all for quite some time. In the past over 10 years it's always been an OV-chipkaart, and you can get an anonymous one that you pre-load with money. I'm not even sure if you can pay with cash, short of buying a ticket/loading the card from a person at a desk.

> Dutch websites also have to offer whatever the Dutch payment provider is (I forget).

iDeal, which Wero is based on.

About the only thing I use cash for in NL is paying for my barber as he doesn't take any card, and I'm pretty sure that's black money.

Germany has always had a bit of a relationship with cash, I'd always keep €1-200 in my pocket when I went there, though this is changing now.

> I think we will manage without Visa just fine.

There is also Cirrus and Maestro which are run by Visa and Mastercard, which appears on a lot of debit cards around the world, though I don't know exactly how it works (i.e. do the cards tend to use the local network within the country and only go to the cirrus etc. networks when international, or do they do it always?)

Germany is a massive exception to your claim. Cash only is very common there.

Its not just American tourists. Its everyone from everywhere.

If you do not accept Visa and Mastercard you are not going to accept payments from all sorts of travellers (tourists, business people, people from your own country living abroad) either.

> I guarantee there are a large number of people in rural Europe that would be very happy never to meet another American tourist, even if it costs them.

Xenophobic or anti-tourism?

> Xenophobic or anti-tourism?

Opposed to what America has become.

I wouldn't say enforcement of law is inherently either one of those.

If I went to another country and broke the law, got arrested - should I call that country xenophobic/anti-tourism/racist?

> If you do not accept Visa and Mastercard you are not going to accept payments from all sorts of travellers (tourists, business people

Who all stop in chain hotels, who will accept whatever you bring.

> Xenophobic or anti-tourism?

Anti-American tourism. I would say it is a mainstream opinion in Europe that American tourists are very annoying. Each country has its stereotypes about each other, usually stemming from WW2, but the feelings against American tourists have the wonderful effect of uniting Europe. Then America elected a president that threatened us first with economic sanctions, then war. Perhaps it is a fault in our characters, but we tend to take against people that threaten us with military action.

> Who all stop in chain hotels, who will accept whatever you bring.

No, that's pretty much all European hotels actually. Hotels require credit cards for three reasons:

1. Security - if you leave the room a mess or destroyed there's an avenue for recourse.

2. To make more money - having a card on file for "incidentals" increases purchases from hotel guests.

3. Obtain payment - most people don't have the cash laying around to pony up to pay full nightly rates, nor do they have any desire carry thousands of Euros around on their person just to go pay in a large purchase at this conjured up local cash-only inn. It also makes your hotel property an easy target for robbery.

It's strange to me that you're taking such a hard stance over something that is obviously incorrect in order to... make fun of people from around the world who can only afford to stay in chain hotels on vacation?

I usually stay boutique properties which are sometimes, but not always managed by boutique property groups. They take credit cards. Every. Single. Time.

Can you provide the name of a single hotel in Europe that doesn't take credit cards?

>Hotels require credit cards for three reasons

>Can you provide the name of a single hotel in Europe that doesn't take credit cards?

Holy goalpost.

How is this a goalpost shift? The person I was responding to seems to think it's only tourist and chain hotels that accept credit cards.

Show me a hotel in Europe that doesn't. Stop trying to associate credit card usage with foreign tourism in a negative light.

>require

>take

Ok fair enough. I used the terms interchangeably but shouldn't have - I can't edit my post.

So to be more clear: find me a hotel in Europe that doesn't require a credit card to book or have on file related to the reasons I stated above.

I live in Europe and have stayed at quite a few hotels, I don't have a credit card, I do have two debit cards.

Sure, can you provide an example?

And separately, does that hotel accept credit cards?

By the way, American debit cards also run on Visa and Mastercard. So going back to the OP this idea of Europe "breaking up" with Visa and Mastercard is just not going to happen even if somehow whatever number of European businesses just stopped accepting credit cards.

Hotels in 10+ European countries? They accept any visa/mastercard and don't care if its debit or credit, its irrelevant. They will keep accepting them in addition to this new EU system.

Glad you finally agree with me.

Are you confusing debit and credit cards?

I think you don't know what you're talking about in this conversation, but I'll kindly summarize it for you.

I said the following in context of using credit cards:

  > Buying a bottle of Calvados in some remote area? Yea just tap to pay with your Mastercard.

Jimnotgym said:

  > Hard disagree.

Implying that it is in fact not easy, or common, or something like that.

graemep then wrote:

  > It's not just American tourists. It's everyone from everywhere. If you do not accept Visa and Mastercard you are not going to accept payments from all sorts of travellers (tourists, business people, people from your own country living abroad) either.

So at this point jimnotgym is saying, effectively, "tourists use credit cards". graemep is accurately pointing out that everyone uses credit cards, not just tourists.

Let's continue...

jimnotgym says:

  > Who all stop in chain hotels, who will accept whatever you bring.

So here what's happening is jimnotgym is basically saying tourists use credit cards, they only stay in chain hotels.

Here is where I highlighted why credit cards are used (and sure, debit cards too) and then claiming that every hotel in Europe takes credit cards.

And then afterward you've said a few things which, of course one of them I acknowledged using the wrong words for. Since then you've just been arguing points that aren't relevant to the conversation at hand. You at one point claimed you used a debit card at a hotel.

Great.

Find me a single hotel in Europe that doesn't take credit cards Why? Because jimnotgym is asserting credit cards "are a tourist thing" and are used only at chain hotels or hotels for tourist. I'm giving him a softball question and setting an extreme anchor point here. The vast majority of hotels in Europe take credit cards regardless of whether they are catering to "tourists" or not. That's a demonstrable fact. But do all hotels? I bet they do. Which goes to prove that credit card usage at hotels isn't limited to "tourists".

If you have any specific questions you'd like to ask, I'd be happy to answer them. I don't know what point you're trying to make here and it really seems like you've lost track of what the initial conversation was and now you're just arguing things that aren't being argued.

But these tourists can be rerouted to visa or mastercard transparently

It works at the moment, here in France, with Swile (for instance)

There is a strong push towards cashless now though.

> And companies like Visa, Mastercard, American Express, &c. arose initially from solving a real need. Before these companies came into existence when you traveled you'd have to take cash, or traveler's checks or some other nonsense. Today you can, at least as an American, just walk in to the subway in just about any country and tap to pay. Need a coffee at Mt. Fuji? Easy. Buying a bottle of Calvados in some remote area? Yea just tap to pay with your Mastercard.

The reality is more complicated.

I have had Visa or Mastercard being refused in other countries by some retail outlets / institutions.

In fact I never travel with only one card from a single bank because I always want to have a backup. And it is not really Visa vs Mastercard because I have had occurences of having 2 Visas, one of which would work and another would not on a specific shop for no obvious nor documented reason.

In some cases different Visa or Mastercards have different fees associated with them, and if the merchant has configured or negotiated with their service providers to only accept cards under a certain fee percentage then just being a Visa or Mastercard is not enough. One example I can think of is the Chase Sapphire Reserve card as that is (or was I guess things can change) a Visa Infinite card and I believe transaction fees are closer to ~4%> or something versus maybe a standard ~3%. I don't know the exact fee percentages but that's the mechanism.

I agree the reality is a bit more complicated and even wrote about it in France when dealing with gas stations but what I wrote is broadly true. You can just take a credit card to Europe and the vast majority of the time you just won't need cash. I also agree it's a good idea to have a couple of cards though and maybe your debit card too. Frankly I do this in the US as well, and not just when traveling abroad.

I think it's probably a little bit harder than you think with all the rules and regulations out there. I would highly encourage anybody who's remotely interested, listen to the Acquired podcast episode regarding Visa. It's actually quite fascinating how it was started. You may balk at the length, but the whole thing had me interested.

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/visa

India built RuPay, China built UnionPay. There's no reason why Europe can't do the same.

France still has CB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CB_Bank_Card_Group

There are equivalents in several European countries. The problem is that these networks are national and not European, let alone global.

National banking players did not want to give up their turf. The European Union had to twist their arms to get them to agree to SEPA transfers, instant transfers, etc.

If banking players cannot agree, then regulation (or the threat of regulation) must be used.

Well, yes, but it happens that European directives do happen and are actually followed or enforced.

Without laws there would be no bank in the first place, neither at national or paneuropean level.

CB actually have higher security standards than visa.

I once worked at a company doing payment card personalization (its the company who turn blank smart cards into finalized cards on behalf of banks. They print the customers names, emboss the account number, and program the chip and the magstrip)

Every year they had comprehensive security audits from Visa, Mastercard and Groupe Carte Bleue.

One guy there told me that they did the Groupe Carte Bleue audit first, because its the toughest. If they passed it they were sure to pass the others.

The most obvious difference being that unlike China or India, Europe (or the EU) is not a single country. This doesn't make things impossible but certainly complicates them.

Exactly, now that the internet is ubiquitous, none of the problems with replacing credit card companies like VISA are really technical. They are regulatory, they are political, they are social.

And before Trump it wasn't worth the aggravation. It wasn't worth the pushback from the US government.

Trump sure has moved the needle on that! We used to pay protection money to the US via this. Now we don't get the protection, so we don't need to pay.

> one of the problems with replacing credit card companies like VISA are really technical

VISA and Mastercard never resolved major technical problems. It's nothing a bank wouldn't already be able to achieve internally from a technological complexity point of view. They didn't invent any of the technologies, they just navigated the political and regulatory hurdles, then leveraged their position for more.

Your comment makes it look like the problems are "just" political or regulatory. These are more often then not the bigger ones.

Surely the EU could pull off something similar to what India did with their instant payments program? That system seems to have garnered near-universal praise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface

The sensible thing would be to do it by currency area - e.g. the Eurozone.

Technology and some systems could be shared.

Then we could have an international standard to let the national networks work together, like for the phone network.

Yes, common standards would solve the technical problem.

There are also business and regulatory problems with regard to international transactions.

Same with phone networks. Since India got serious about blocking spam, it has some strict requirements to call into the country.

European countries each have their system. But they do not interoperate. You can't pay with blik in Germany, you can't pay with German debit card in Poland.

As jacekm mentioned already (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46963497), Blik has just made a significant step toward interoperability just week ago, see https://www.blik.com/przelewy-na-telefon-w-euro-z-hiszpanii-...

In the Netherlands, before VISA, there already was a national debit card standard called PIN [1]. Sure, times have changed and it's probably not super easy, but it's also not going to be super hard.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIN_(debit_card)

Fun fact: until about a year ago it was not possible to pay using normal debit cards in most Dutch shops, you had to have a local card. I distinctly remember that AH, Vomar and Jumbo would typically reject foreign cards while Lidl and Dirk would typically accept them. Of course there were exceptions, but that was the rule of thumb.

Most Dutch people were unaware of the issue (because Dutch cards worked abroad), and those who were, were fully convinced that it's because Dutch system is objectively better (it wasn't, it was just a separate network). Then in like 2024/2025 Visa and Mastercard finally retired their special V-Pay and Maestro brands, and now most terminals in the Netherlands accept most normal cards.

Was V-Pay different from Visa Electron?

I think most people miss that the biggest hurdle is political. Once a political will exists, this system will come to exist.

A card I can tap on a vending machine anywhere in the world. Crypto was probably the hope to compete but that didn't pan out.

My takeaway from the episode was that its actually really easy to setup up visa, you just need to get the banks, vendors, and card issuers onboard, which should be easy if you're the government

You still need to make it, but actually making it is a small fraction of the problem, less than half

> with all the rules and regulations out there.

And who wrote those? Aren't they just another part of the moat?

> It's actually quite fascinating how it was started.

Visa was founded in 1958 by Bank of America (BofA) as the BankAmericard credit card program.[1] In response to competitor Master Charge (now Mastercard), BofA began to license the BankAmericard program to other financial institutions in 1966.[8] By 1970, BofA gave up direct control of the BankAmericard program, forming a cooperative with the other various BankAmericard issuer banks to take over its management. It was then renamed Visa in 1976.

The answer is: "Banks."

Sure, it’s hard, but a duopoly is skimming LITERALLY 1-3% off the entire consumer economy for a service that is not that expensive to operate. Additionally, interchange rates are higher for premium credit cards, to pay for the benefits (not to pay for the cost of operating the network.) This cost is shared among all consumers, not just the well-off who can get premium credit cards.

It’s a captive market, which means Visa & MC really don’t have a ton of incentive to compete. How do you get new payment networks to integrate? Banks typically only offer a single network on their cards, and businesses use whatever their PoS systems accept. For a new network to compete, it’d need to be available everywhere.

It’s the textbook definition of core infrastructure for society and frankly should be operated like a utility. It’s not like Visa & MC are innovating - just look at the lethargic rollout of contactless in the US until COVID forced everyone’s hands.

The sole purpose of visa & MC is to grow profit each year. That’s it. I’m not a fan of that being in the middle of practically all consumer spending

Canada has had the INTERAC payment system for over 20 years now. It is privately run by Canadian banks, universally accepted and runs on a cost recovery basis.

So there are 3 kinds of "debit cards" in Canada:

1. Debit Mastercard/VISA. These are Debit Cards that use the Mastercard/VISA communication system to process transactions. While they are not "Credit" cards because you are using cash in an account that is your money, they rely upon the VISA/Mastercard system and merchants will be charged the Mastercard/VISA fee like a Credit Card.

2. Interac Debit Card. Interac was the first company to offer a debit card type system in Canada, and they are the traditional bank card. These cards use the Interac system (so does eTransfer) and Merchants are charged by Interac for using the system. Its typically less than Mastercard/VISA, which is why you see these "Debit Card only" signs.

3. Mastercard/VISA and Interac hybrid cards. These are newer and combine both Mastercard/VISA and Interac cards in one. The merchant can choose how they want to proceed.

Most of these "Debit" only signs are really saying "Interac only", but because for 30 years Interac was the only provider of Debit cards in Canada, it became the common vernacular to say "Debit" when you mean "Interac".

Required Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

What about it?

I can't disagree that they have a moat, but it's a hard problem and if it were as easy as you say somebody would be disrupting them already to get a share of that $24T.

Just dealing with fraud is a major problem in itself.

Fraud is mostly resolved by the two banks involved. The network is just that, a network.

The problem arises when the banks are in two different countries. If money leaves your account and mistakenly ends up in an account in another country, even within Europe, it can be very difficult to recover.

That is why national payment systems tend to work relatively well. Cross border systems are a completely different challenge.

The problem here is interoperability.

Now most merchants have to work with two companies, visa and mastercard. Want to accept russian MIR cards? Well, in some countries you're not allowed to, and in some, you must, since visa and mastercard don't work there. Now if you add a european company to the mix... whill their cards get accepted in south africa? What about in eg turkey? China? Will whatever indian alternative is get accepted in france?

Currently, with a visa and mastercard, except for maybe russia and iran, you're pretty sure it'll get accepted at least somewhere in any urban area you visit, so you won't be hungry and have somewhere to sleep. If my bank replaces my mastercard with the EU alternative, I won't be that confident about that for quite a few years.

On the other hand, cash is still the king of everything everywhere... somehow some politicians are trying to get rid of that for some reason.

Most merchants don't work with Visa and Mastercard, they work with payment processors like Fiserv, or other middle men even further removed from the card networks, that already abstract all the different cards (including existing local debit cards) away into a unified flow.

Sure, there's a gajillion of those processors all over the world, and they somehow all work with mastercard and visa.

Diners club? Well.. "it depends". Many don't work with it.

Indian, russian, chinese, cards? Maybe in india, russia and china, but you shouldn't expect it to work "everywhere" like visa and mastercard. Same will be true for EU cards for quite a few years, especially if the system gets fragmented into many different companies using many different systems, and you'll always wonder if your german card will get accepted in Algeria like your friends' french card is.

> Want to accept russian MIR cards?

Thankfully, this use case has been solved by Russians themselves.

Creating Acceptance is super difficult.

Hence why crypto hasn't taken off with merchants. Because who's going to pay for merchants to change their point-of-sale systems to accept a new payment method.

If the entirety of Europe comes up with a single system I think that'll be more than enough incentive for merchants to update their pos software to accept the new network. I hope that they are eventually so successful that merchants here in the US support them too. I'd love to stop using visa and mastercard.

You mean like Pix in Brazil, or UPI in India.

Crypto is also a shit payment method though. Expensive and difficult to run and with high transaction fees. And if you use a chain with low transaction fees, there's no consensus on which chain that is (otherwise transaction fees would be high) so you have to support all of them. Then you might as well outsource the whole thing.

I have done some work at crypto exchanges so I am a bit biased.

I would agree that BTC and many assets are a terrible payment method due to poor UX (block time, clunky wallets), speculation, and wild price swings. But crypto in general works well for payments I would say.

Transaction fees have improved significantly where it can be on the order of a few cents per transaction. So yes this is a little high for a $1 candy bar but this is fantastic for a $1,000 watch.

The number of chains and interoperability is a bit of a pain at the moment, but this problem can be resolved by delegating to a payment processor, or simply targetting ETH, the top stablecoins, and BTC which account for the vast majority of the market.

> Expensive and difficult to run

Again I am biased because of my experience, but I could set up a payment gateway for ETH in a few hours using free public nodes at virtually no cost. No business overhead. No agreements with payment processors or card companies. The biggest cost and overhead ends up being accounting, because crypto still has ill defined laws and regulation.

If we could create a single solution on Europan level, based on cellphones first and order banks to provide service of access to it for all of their customers, free of charge, for the privilege of remaining in the market, it could be done.

If you gave any argument for why and how this is true, I might have believed it.

I'm a little shocked that of all the comments so far, no one has mentioned the financial risk borne by this whole value chain. OP is operating as if it's just a debit system moving money from one account to another but:

- For many consumers there isn't sufficient money in the account to settle all the one-time and ongoing transactions they are liable for -- credit cards are giving you a revolving loan, there's risk it will not be repaid, and that risk ends up reflected in processing fees

- For many _businesses_ managing cash flow is existential -- as merchants they want to be paid as quickly as possible, but as B2B customers they want to have 30-60 days to sell the input goods they've purchased so they can pay for them upstream. There is a premium for that flexibility that gets reflected in processing fees.

- For both consumers and merchants, fraud risk is real and while it's the most solvable part of all this it's a real (and costly!) factor today. That risk for fraud gets moved upstream to the networks/acquirers/processors/issuers and that premium shows up in (you guessed it) processing fees.

If you want to switch the world to a debit-based system where economic transactions are limited by cash on hand, I'd argue that's a poorer and less dynamic world than the one we're operating in today.

There are many countries where debit cards are the norm and credit cards are extremely rare. In France, people are so afraid of consumer credit that cards are renamed ‘deferred debit cards’ rather than credit cards, otherwise people do not want them.

There is also a major difference as I understand it. They need to be resolved at the end of a certain period. There is a legal difference from Credit cards as in there is no continual liability and thus no continued line of credit. Getting a true credit card is also a lot harder here (not France) than a deferred payment card (usually 1 month) and has stricter credit checks.

Visa and MC have basicly all of these configurations, depending on country & legislation: - Direct Debit - Deffered Debit - Rolling Credit - Installment Credit

And if you are a $MegaBigCorp customer of them, you can customize even more.

indeed. my credit card requires me to preload money from my bank account. it's like there is a second account that keeps a balance that i can spend using the credit card. whenever i use it, the balance is updated. how the credit is paid off i don't know. it could be either right away, or the amount is just hidden by my bank until it is time to pay off at the end of the month. either way, the credit limit is zero. so i can never spend more than i put in first. (though this may be based on how much i spend or be a configurable value.)

So, your credit card is in practice a debit card?

yes. it is possible that i can get a real credit limit too, but i didn't check.

these debit like credit cards put a different light on the statistics. as some people here have said, europeans don't use creditcards, and then someone contradicted that with a statistic of how much is paid with credit cards. how much of those credit card payments are made with debit like cards like mine?

europe doesn't want their people to get into credit debt. possibly protection for people is stronger and makes it harder for banks to recover if people fail to pay? but most likely countries just want people to be able to protect themselves from overspending.

like i can get an overdraw limit on my bank account. it is set to a default value based on my income. but i deliberately reset that to zero. i don't want an overdraw limit. if i really need to overdraw i'll change the limit at that time and i think i can even set that it is valid only for a short time and then it resets automatically.

that is not a credit card :)

There is a point though - Mastercard and Visa treats them as "prepaid" credit cards, which are different from both true prepaid cards (as issued in the US), charge cards, and true debit cards (former Maestro and Visa Electron). Again, different regions have different lines for this, especially in Europe.

IIRC, bunq in the Netherlands issues Mastercard "credit cards" (with no "debit" annotation as on true Mastercard debit cards). They're treated as credit cards for Mastercard purposes but are backed by deposits.

it is what i get when i ask my bank for a credit card. it says credit card on it, and it is what i use when a credit card is called for.

as i said, it is possible that i can actually get a real credit limit on the card, or possibly the bank has other credit card products.

It's more taboo to talk about revolving credit card than crack addiction for a french. I don't know a bank that offer them, even the shady online bank.

Too bad that doesn't extend to their government, which seems to have no problem spending their credit down to the wire...

Historically, these have been issued by "consumer credit" specialized banks like Sofinco; and retail chains ("carte Aurore"); traditional banks would seldom advertise them, if offered at all.

Things have been changing a bit in recent years. Since the "debit" and "credit" nature of the card is now written on them, French folks have started to request "credit" ones for travelling (to rent a car for instance).

My understanding is that for car rental purposes, anything using Visa/MC (and not a national debit network like Visa Debit in the US) will work, it doesn't actually need to be backed by a revolving credit. At a US gas pump, a Frenchie needs to select "credit" even though the card has "debit" written on it. Still, should the clerk refuse the card because it reads "debit" without running it... better have this "credit"-labeled one.

> My understanding is that for car rental purposes, anything using Visa/MC (and not a national debit network like Visa Debit in the US) will work, it doesn't actually need to be backed by a revolving credit.

Many companies will refuse all debit cards, or all cards with "electronic use only" restriction, at least for the deposit, irrespective of the payment network involved.

Why would they do that? Are there differences in chargeback risks?

These are historically called “charge cards” in the US and are common for corporations who give employees “credit cards” for travel and the like.

American Express is big in this market - what looks like a normal Amex Business Platinum card can very well be a charge card that needs to be paid in full at the due date every month.

There are minor differences but the big one is no carried balance between months is allowed. Payment in full due each month.

Debit cards come with the same fraud protection as credit cards do, which is the most important benefit of Visa/MasterCard.

In UK, consumer protection for Credit Cards is guaranteed by law (Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act), but not for Debit Cards (that's contractual).

The UK is often completely out of step with consumer protections in the EU.

If a pan European system takes off, it’ll be interesting to see what happens with the UK.

Their self-harming has been impressive.

Is it? Can’t say I’ve really noticed it.

In fact just today I read this article in my EU country that sounds almost identical to what this comment describes:

https://yle.fi/a/74-20209419

“ If, for example, the payment was made by credit card and the product has not been delivered, the consumer can contact their credit card company directly and request a refund.

Credit card firms can usually refund the money quickly, Beurling-Pomoell noted, whereas consumers who paid by debit card must try to claim their money back from the bankruptcy estate.

"Unfortunately, [reclaiming money from a bankruptcy estate] is usually a very long and difficult process. Consumers are generally in a relatively weak position when a company goes bankrupt," he said.

Beurling-Pomoell added that consumers should always consider using a credit card when purchasing a product that they do not immediately receive.”

I think some examples are in order - where has the UK, having recently left the EU, changed its laws so that it was completely out of step with consumer protection? Or is this one thing that made it necessary for them to leave the union, perhaps?

The "consumer protections" of the EU basically amount to communism (i.e., state interference in private matters). So no, that's not a thing the U.K. should emulate.

Well the average bloke inside the EU is much better off than those in the UK. So much success for your policies

https://www.ft.com/content/837a7b40-f534-11e3-91a8-00144feab...

I somehow doubt that parent is British or has any clue about life in UK.

with a debit card your cash is gone from your bank account in that moment, even if you get it back later (hopefully). With a credit card they are not able to drain your bank account, the risks are entirely on the cc company and they will be significantly more motivated to get that back than a bank would. it's entirely their problem, not yours

No, Card Misuse is their problem either way in the EU

misuse is not what I mean, I am talking about if your card is stolen and someone runs up a bunch of purchases before it gets caught, that money is gone from your account and any fees from overdrafts are the account holders problem to deal with and stress they can entirely avoid if they did not have/use a card tied directly to their bank account. I pay close attention to my bank account (as it is important for rent/important bills direct drafted), I only check the credit card when the bill comes in.

users can even avoid interest if they pay that card off every month

I pay everything with my credit card (bills, stores, online, etc) and pay it off at the end of the month. Even my tap-to-pay is tied to the credit card. I never use my debit card anywhere but an ATM. I have never had my bank account violated but I have had the credit card stolen from a store I visited (card company caught it as there was a bunch of fraud from the same store, they let me know and they proactively replaced my credit card)

I have never had my ATM card compromised as it is for one purpose, the ATM

best part of all is my credit score loves the large payments I always make on my credit card

> I am talking about if your card is stolen and someone runs up a bunch of purchases before it gets caught, that money is gone from your account and any fees from overdrafts are the account holders problem to deal with and stress they can entirely avoid if they did not have/use a card tied directly to their bank account

Yes that's what I'm talking about too, and it's called misuse. Liability is capped at 50€ as I said. We also don't have any fixed overdraft fees, only a compared to credit cards low interest rate, but this would also be the banks problem in this case. Also you still need a pin to pay or 2FA when paying online for European Cards. So that scenario seems very unlikely anyway.

> I have never had my ATM card compromised as it is for one purpose, the ATM but I have had the credit card stolen from a store I visited (card company caught it as there was a bunch of fraud from the same store, they let me know and they proactively replaced my credit card.

I have never had my card compromised, as it only uses the EMV Chip for payments in the civilized world, which you can't clone, and even then you would still need the PIN to pay, or the second Factor. I also never had my Debit card (what you mean with ATM card) compromised, because it's the same thing.

US does not always have those proper card safety features (you can use debit cards without pin and online use does not require pin) and banks will fight tooth and nail not to give back overdraft fees (as the overdraft would be from other transactions from the account after the fraud drains an account)

Would you be able to overdraft with a debit card, though? When I was the victim of card cloning, I discovered it in the supermarket when my card purchase didn't go through due to lack of funds.

When a card is stolen or cloned, it is usually discovered really fast. Either by the victim or by the bank. It's probably in most cases a matter of hours or even minutes.

yes, it is possible depending on timing (if a card is authorized but captured later in the day or the authorization was less than the capture, this is why gas pumps do auth for $100 and hold that for days till it clears), but the risk is more about expected/scheduled transactions hitting the account before you realize it got drained

I guess my bank accounts have never had an overdraft function. If there aren't sufficient funds in the account, the debit card transaction/withdrawal gets denied, no matter who is using or misusing the card.

Yes

Just by their nature, that is inherently untrue.

If your CC is stolen, you are not out all the cash in your account until the dispute is resolved.

If your debit card is stolen, you lose that cash, making it more difficult to pay whatever other obligations you have that period.

If your debit card is stolen, your bank has to return all money that was used or withdrawn to you. Since it is unauthorized use of your funds. Same for credit cards of course. Such money is returned swiftly.

But the more concerning fraud is when you purchase something and don't receive what you should have received from the merchant. Whether it is due to outright fraud or not. In these cases you will also have your money reimbursed by your credit or debit card.

> If your debit card is stolen, your bank has to return all money that was used or withdrawn to you. Since it is unauthorized use of your funds. Same for credit cards of course. Such money is returned swiftly.

This may be what the letter of the law says but this isn't reality. Using debit puts you at greater financial risk.

“Using debit puts you at a greater financial risk.”

What how? Surely the US populations credit card debt dorf even the global populations debit card fraud numbers. So while my whole family in a combined 200 years of adulthood have indeed lost some 1000 euro total in fraud, it's not thing compared to the average Americans credit card bills.

I'd rather risk the street criminals with my debit than the suit wearing ones with their credit.

My debit card is a direct line to my primary bank account. If something goes wrong there and an attacker gains access, my cash is simply gone. Yes, the bank will perform an investigation and yes they may issue some provisional credits as a bridge, but there's a window of time between the theft and that investigation concluding where my actual cash is not in my account.

With a credit card, if the card is compromised, its not my money being stolen - its the card issuer's money from my line of credit, and they were planning on settling up with me when my monthly statement closes. I still have to launch a fraud case with the issuer, but critically, _all of my money is still in my bank account_ and I can continue to pay my other bills and obligations as normal.

I think its reasonable to consider giving up that buffer to be additional risk for the debit card approach, setting aside any other advantages or disadvantages between the two.

EU has much stronger consumer protection and it's on the banks to provide secure systems. Like if my card gets skimmed by an ATM or merchant the bank pays for the fraudulent charges. And overall the EU has much less card fraud.

My debit card is a direct line to my primary bank account. If something goes wrong there and an attacker gains access, my cash is simply gone.

Your bank lacks proper security protections then. Here most banks have limits on debit card transactions. If you want to do a very large transaction, you have to increase the limit for a short time period in your banking app, and there is a delay of a few hours (they'll warn you when the spending limit is increased).

IANAL, but also consumer protection is much stronger in Europe. E.g. in NL if you stick to 5 basic rules, which are sensible things like not intentionally giving away your banking card or PIN code, the bank has to refund stolen money:

https://www.consumentenbond.nl/betaalrekening/bankvoorwaarde...

That's what I said... but, that takes time, time for which you don't have access to that cash.

Just a quick Google... Wells Fargo's policy is 10 days to either case resolution OR provisional credit. I assume that's typical for American banks. For somebody living paycheck to paycheck, 10 days is a long time to go without access to what little cash they might have.

You guys use the debit card linked to your primary bank account??? There's been virtual cards for online shopping for 10+ years now. They're meant to be linked to an empty or low amount bank account. Now with Revolut you can schedule auto top-up to keep this low amount up to date.

Not to mention the per-purchase (online/in-person) limits, mandatory PIN entry, and daily maximums...

We have virtual cards as well, maybe used it once. But we also have a lot less fraud and typically require 2fa for online purchases and chip+pin every x purchases.

We don't use any cards for online shopping, what do you mean? In most European countries online shopping uses a payment API that takes you to your bank's payment portal where you can review the transaction amount before confirming. It's no longer the 20th century, we're not handing out any card details to online merchants.

Banking in the US feels like it's stuck in the 90s. Heck, half the time, it's not even chip+PIN, it's chip+signature (which is a relativelyrecent change from carbon copy or swipe and signature).

I've never had a web shop use an API to deduct from my bank account - the closest thing is PayPal, which as far as I can tell is basically ACH under the covers, just though an intermediary. Pretty sure more Americans use their CC or debit card for online shopping.

Of course all online merchants in Europe take card payment. Some of them also offer payment by bank payment portals, such as you've described. These have zero benefits for the customer.

Ah yes let me forego the chargeback protections (and convenience of one tap Apple Pay) to reduce merchants fee by 0.2% of transaction value, sounds great

The protections aren't quite the same with merchant issues. Notably, most situations that you attempt in good faith to resolve, purchased within 100 miles of your home are protected for credit cards.

But even if it were - most people operate one checking account, and most folks don't keep an especially large balance. If your debit card gets compromised or there is an erroneous charge, it will process up to your balance. It is incumbent on you to notice the fraud and take action. If the bad dip is today, and tomorrow morning my mortgage and other payments bounce or hit overdraft, I have a mess to clean up.

With a credit card, you're typically hitting a larger credit line that isn't fully utilize -- you may not notice the bad charge for a month, but there's no impact to you... the thief stole the bank's money.

In Europe your liability for Card Misuse is capped at 50€ for things that happened before you blocked it.

Also how would someone misuse it? You need a PIN Code for every transaction anyway, and the EMV Chip can't be cloned like Magstripes.

Online Payments need a mandatory 2 Factor Authentication

I have always heard that the 2fa verification really depended on the vendor actually doing that auth so I always scrape the 3 verification number (what is it for anyways ?) at the back of my card. It's just 3 numbers after all.

It's mandatory by law, and it's additionally to the 3 numbers at the back of the card. Usually it works by confirming or denying the transaction on the App of your Issuing bank

None of the eu amazons have 2fa on their card transactions.

They recently enabled 3DS for business accounts, on customer ones it’s indeed still disabled

Why do they say otherwise on their own website?

https://www.amazon.de/b?ie=UTF8&node=17666138031

Well I have bo idea. All I know is when I purchase on either .de, .co.uk or .ie the transaction goes through immediately. I have 3D secure enabled.

The text on that link of yours is sneaky though:

"...you MAY be asked to..." (Emphasis mine)

Because you can add them to a "That Store is safe" list, and you won't get asked again. You probably did this at some point

Not true. At least not in Sweden. There are different laws from credit cards and debit cards.

This is the law which regulates such things, and the law makes no difference between any payment service (ie credit or debit), when it comes to unauthorized use, see chapter 5:

https://svenskforfattningssamling.se/sites/default/files/sfs...

Edit: Page 28 to be precise.

The law explicitly states that funds have to be reimbursed to the victim immediately or at latest on the same bank day.

And do you think this law applies to Debit cards too? No, it doesn’t. Of course you can find some laws that apply to both. But the relevant law is.

https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/sven...

You're linking to a completely different and irrelevant law regarding consumer credits.

The law 2018:175, which I previously linked to, is crystal clear and protects consumers against unauthorized use of their digital payment means, including but not limited to all types of card transactions. Otherwise, please let me know which chapter excludes debit cards.

Even bank transactions are protected by this law. And it has been all the way to the supreme court, which ruled in favour of the fraud victim against the bank. The victim had voluntarily handed over their digital banking credentials to scammers, and the bank refused to reimburse the stolen money. However, the supreme court ruled that the bank was indeed bound by law to reimburse the money:

https://www.domstol.se/hogsta-domstolen/avgoranden2/2022/115...

But even so, if the law is not enough and if the supreme court ruling is not enough for you, then at least empirical evidence should be enough? Just ask around with family and friends and you'll find at least a few people who have been the victims of having their debit card stolen or cloned. They will let you know that the bank returned their money swiftly.

Others have said it but I will pile on as this is dangerous misinformation.

It’s sort of true in a legal sense, but not a practical one. If you find yourself in a dispute (even outright fraud sometimes) you might end up stuck for weeks or months with your disputed funds frozen.

If you are a highly paid software engineer with considerable assets and transaction volume at your bank it’s likely you will never experience hardship with disputing a transaction. If you are someone scraping by and that $200 depends on you paying rent on time that month you will find your experience to perhaps be different.

I’ve helped friends and family with such disputes in the past. Credit cards even when it “goes wrong” are much better to deal with. Your credit limit being reduced a bit is immaterial to your life most of the time. Having your own money tied up during an investigation that demands more and more paperwork like police reports etc. can be incredibly damaging and if nothing else quite stressful. The experience some of my friends had in these matters is nothing like I had when I had my wallet stolen and I no longer recommend anyone use debit if they can avoid it.

Heck, I had a friend who doesn’t even have a passport dispute an ATM transaction in a country he never visited. The bank initially denied it and it took weeks to eventually get it resolved in his favor.

In the end having the banks money tied up vs your own money at risk is always better if you can handle the responsibility of a credit card.

> Others have said it but I will pile on as this is dangerous misinformation.

Was that an introduction to the rest of your comment?

Explain to me please how a dispute with a vendor on a purchase makes a difference for your ability to pay rent? If the purchase was not fraud, then you have used that money anyway with your purchase. Unless you're planning to pay rent by bartering your Amazon order.

If you're instead talking about a stolen or cloned debit card, then that money is refunded usually as soon as you've made a police report and sent it to the bank, which is a matter of two days at most. The paperwork is not difficult, because cards get stolen and cloned all the time.

But the fraud protection is the same, even if procedures and timelines might differ.

> But the fraud protection is the same, even if procedures and timelines might differ.

I wrote about outright fraud taking weeks (in one case, months) to resolve. From my own personal direct experience.

> I had a friend who doesn’t even have a passport dispute an ATM transaction in a country he never visited.

Does this sound like a dispute with a vendor or outright fraud?

A dispute with a vendor can also mean an overcharge or something like a renewal fee for a yearly membership that is under dispute. It's not just marginal items you bought and the vendor refuses a return or it never shows up or whatever.

Like I said - if you are a highly paid professional you likely will never have a problem with this. It's an invisible part of the economy to you. If you are working class you are much more likely to have a wildly different experience. Banks have what is effectively an internal credit score system for each customer. For those with serious assets with the bank you get a lot more leeway and benefit of the doubt until you start abusing it.

Please spare me the "working class" appeals. You don't know anything about me, and I don't know anything about you.

I've had my own bank account emptied by card cloners. And the bank reimbursed the money swiftly after having made a police report. The same for everybody else I know who have fallen victim to the same. None of us with any kind of impressive assets when it happened.

As for disputes with vendors, sure, I give you that there is a difference in time frame when paying by credit instead of debit.

A cloned or stolen card should never take weeks or months to resolve. In that case, you've been the victim of a criminal bank. It's not the experience for most victims, whether rich or poor.

Growing up in the EU, living in North America now, it's mind blowing to me how much credit these companies are making available to me. Not that I ever would outside of an actual emergency but I can see how it's tempting to someone who didn't grow up in a financial risk averse society.

> grow up in a financial risk averse society.

It is not risk taking, it is a system that not just normalized the debt, but punishes people for not taking it. When you are recommended to use credit card, so you can function on debt, so that you can get better mortgage later on, then the thing in play is not just "risk aversion".

Yeah, that always blew my mind as a non American.

It's amazing. Meanwhile your fellow Europeans wouldn't trust to lend you their power drill for a weekend, even if you've known each other for 30 years.

My European business banks have never offered any kind of line of credit. Of course they probably would if I needed, and went there to grovel and prostrate myself. In contrast, my American business bank just sends unprompted e-mails sometimes asking if I would like to borrow a bunch of money.

American trust is based on rationality and intuition, while European trust is based on rules and authority. That's why business can flourish much more in the USA.

Nah, more like the money is lent out because it's so profitable to exploit americans addicted to debt.

> That's why business can flourish much more in the USA.

And look where that's gotten you.

Indeed!

> In contrast, my American business bank just sends unprompted e-mails sometimes asking if I would like to borrow a bunch of money.

> American trust is based on rationality and intuition

Just remind us where the 2008 subprime crisis started again?

The availability of credit is a positive imo. Sure, it's possible to trap yourself in debt, but being able to pull that lever in an emergency is valuable. Imo US is better on this front than Europe.

Here it's more normal to save up for something and then buy it. Rather than buying on credit and then paying it off.

It makes much more sense too.

The financial system is built to stimulate that. For example if you'd buy a house you need to pay about 30% in cash and you can't loan that money somewhere else. This way you get people that know how to deal with money. And also the bank doesn't run a big risk if there's a market slump.

This is not the only difference in the banking system; 25-year fixed-rate mortgages are also a feature that is rarely found elsewhere.

The minimum 10% deposit is mainly there to cover taxes, which cannot really be recovered by the bank in the event of default.

It's not a 10% deposit though, it's 30% (so 10% taxes and 20% investment in the house)

And the fixed-rate mortgages are a good thing (though only when the rate is low hehe)

I shouldn't have to pay for your usury economy if I'm using cash. If that were really the issue, these companies would have no problems with businesses charging different prices or offering discounts for cash.

The networks allow cash discounts if it's posted clearly and the customer has an option to use a different payment method -- you see this on every gas station sign alongside every highway in America. (What's _not_ permitted is adding a secret surcharge or item mark-up for credit card payments)

The latter is allowed now - after the backs of the credit card processors were broken.

They fought tooth and nail against cash discounts OR credit surcharges and they finally lost. In some areas it's rampant that you get a pretty substantial discount - often 4 or 5%, better than cash-back - and many places post "cash prices".

You can get even more if you're willing to ride the hassle of the gift card train.

The credit card companies know people spend more if they use credit cards, and they turn around and sell that to the merchants.

The UK actually forbids cash discounts and cred surcharges by law - and has done so since at least 2012.

Credit card companies are allowed to run cashback for using them.

All in the name of "consumer rights": https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/payment-surcharge...

Some European countries forbid a price difference but they also limit card fees very low, so the merchant doesn't lose money and you don't get cash back. Forbidding a price difference but allowing high fees is nothing but pure corruption.

Mainly because cash processing fees are higher than electronic, and the primary use of cash is to avoid paying tax

Surcharges are permitted in some states.

Colorado law recently changed permitting merchants to pass on the actual cost of processing, except for cash, check and debit payments.

https://colorado.public.law/statutes/crs_5-2-212

This law overrides any prior contractual agreements with banks/processing companies that prohibit surcharges. This is previously how MasterCard and VISA coerced merchants into absorbing the processing fee, by contractually requiring credit same as cash pricing.

Not true. A chain of restaurants near me does not accept cash, and charges 3.5% markup from their list price to cover CC fees. Texas.

If you'd like to get that fixed: https://usa.visa.com/Forms/visa-rules.html

Companies did do that - but I belive now it’s not allowed to charge less for cash.

Yes this is exactly what GP is talking about (he just phrased it the other way round).

Sure, as long as I don't have to pay for how much your cash costs the business in cash handling, security, theft, counterfeiting losses, and more. Studies show businesses pay more for a transaction in cash than on credit. If they really were losing out on taking cards, they wouldn't accept them.

Your comment seems to miss the point. It is totally possible to enable the first two of your bullet points without Visa or Mastercard, for example banks could just give lines of credit directly to consumers. Indeed, the myriad of loan products is run without Visa and Mastercard.

Yet if the airline goes under, or I never receive the product I bought online, using Visa/Mastercard I'm not left holding the bag.

If I take a random loan with the bank and use those funds to do the same purchases using debit, then I'm the one taking the loss.

> For many consumers there isn't sufficient money in the account to settle all the one-time and ongoing transactions they are liable for

This is a uniquely American viewpoint. In most of Europe you don't buy anything on credit ever.

Most places outside the USA actually. A liability is someone else's asset, and everyone wants USA assets, so the USA needs to generate a lot of liabilities.

There are numerous credit providers in Europe that would beg to differ.

By December 2025, consumer credit in the Euro area alone stood at an estimated €812 billion.

Are you talking about the same thing?

Sure, in Europe people will subscribe to a credit to buy a car or materials to improve their home.

But buying your groceries or lunch with a credit card is quite a rare exception.

There is a significant amount both in credit card debt, buy-now-pay-later type offerings (e.g. Klarna), and payday loans - it's by no means all larger loans.

It also varies greatly by country, but all major European countries still have significant credit card (not consumer, so excluding e.g. car loans) debt, with the most "credit willing" countries like the UK reaching around 1/3 the US average credit card balance (but you'd also want to adjust for average salaries before comparing these). There is no single attitude to this across Europe.

I would have said "true", or at least - I would have said "I do, but never incurring a charge on next month's bill", but with services like Flex from Monzo, you can actually get credit over 3 months with 0% interest rates, which not only makes buying stuff more likely, but spreads out the costs. It doesn't solve over spending though.

How much is it?

You could draw all of it and put in a a 2x leveraged SP500 ETF :-D for 3 month and then return the money :-D

"Credit limit: £1200"

It depends. The more you use it the better the limit gets. Mine is nearly 3k now.

Just don't let the credit card companies find out. The reason they give the money to you and not the stock market is to diversify their portfolio.

Imagine if all the shares in Bank X were paid for by loans issued by Bank X.

How much is Flex? It is free. You have 2 options -

1) physical card, which works like a credit card. 2) You can flex payments you made on your regular card.

The rules are the same. If it was a card purchase it will more than likely flex (it will if you used the Flex card, account it will depend on the type of transaction.) But it needs to be used for purchases. I guess you could set up a CC processing unit and pay yourself, but it somehow doesn't seem worth it. You can't flex a bank transfer for example.

When you Flex, it gives you the option to "pay on next payment cycle", "pay in 3 installments with 0 interest", "pay in 6/12 installments with the usual big interest". But you can at any point pay it off and so you could do it over 4 months and only pay minimal interest and you could pay over the amount due and make it pay off quicker.

I would never buy a plane ticket on debit.

Airbnb reservations I also tend to do on credit.

Anything related to company expenses I also do on credit and receive reimbursement prior to having to pay it myself.

In Europe you typically have travel insurance on debit cards as well.

What? Where? I don't believe this to be common, and have some doubts about this existing anywhere at all.

Certainly not the case in Sweden. Although travel insurance is usually included in your home/renters insurance.

https://www.icabanken.se/kort-och-betala/reseforsakring-mast...

It's usually not tied to the debit card, but plenty of banks offer ad-hoc travel insurance as part of an options package with their checking accounts.

It's just now how it works in most of Europe. I've lived in four countries, had accounts with lots of banks, paid for countless plane tickets and booking reservations, and only had a credit card once when I was issued one at work. I don't expect I'd ever get a personal one, and can't think of anyone that regularly uses one.

The only time I even considered it was to build a credit score in the UK to eventually apply for a mortgage, but even then it's not really necessary.

In EU to build credit score the best thing is to have no credit at all. I'd be surprised if the UK works differently.

Even after a few years of living in the UK, I could not get a credit score from any of the three or so providers because they said they didn't have enough information about me. I guess being on the electoral roll and paying bills on time just wasn't enough.

Not having a credit score isn't necessarily a big problem, as banks use it for context rather than making decisions purely based on it, but I did see some advice online about getting a "credit builder card" [1] (essentially a high interest and low credit limit card) as a way to build up credit history.

I decided that getting in debt just so I can prove I can get out of it is a stupid system, and didn't do it. Last time I checked (with Experian), I had a perfect credit score, so I don't know what happened in the meantime.

1: https://www.experian.co.uk/consumer/credit-cards/types/credi...

Ah yes I see, being new to the country does not help instill their confidence either. True.

From your nickname it sounds like you are from Romania so if that's so there might be a dose of xenofobia included there as well. That is kinda big in the UK right now, the whole Brexit was fuelled by it, sadly, especially concerning eastern Europe. I was on the receiving end of some of it myself too, being called 'a non-national' and eyed with distrust. I'm sorry.

Close, I'm from Moldova! Not sure that it played much into it, this is all automated, nobody's manually looked at my score. I reckon they just needed n data points about me to show me a number, and I had n-1 (not that they'd tell you).

My only data point from Europe is Norway, where credit cards are widely adopted.

There are also official debt registries, where you (and prospective lenders) can look up how much debt you have.

A bit different than the credit score concept.

Seems you're right, Norway has one of the highest credit card ownership rates in the world. https://genderdata.worldbank.org/en/indicator/fin10

In Moldova where I'm from, only 8% of adults have one.

Those 'protections' have nothing to do with the purchase being credit or debit. They're just artificial incentives from the banks for you to pile on the debt. We frown on that behaviour here in the EU so it doesn't really happen. The same with the cashbacks american banks offer on credit cards, they're just paid by the extortionate card processing fees that vendors pay. So essentially, you are paying for your own cashbacks because the vendors just include it in the price in the end (and usually for everyone, not just those paying by credit card)

Besides, if you want insurance just get a 30€ per year rolling package.

> Besides, if you want insurance just get a 30€ per year rolling package.

My credit card has a yearly fee of €36 (and it’s not like having a debit card instead would have been free). The total annual insurance premiums of all insurances that it includes (travel, third party liability, purchase) would exceed €200 from the same provider.

It is not. https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/private-debt-to-gd...

The widespread use with "buy now pay later" also counters your wildly baseless claim. Klarna, PayPal 30 days etc.

Just because you have to use Klarna doesn't mean you pay later as you can just select your debit card or even bank account directly.

... I know. But what do you think I meant when I said "Klarna" in the context of this discussion?

Your link counts all types of debt including mortgages which is the reason why Luxembourg comes up first.

The argument was, at least how I read it, that europe doesn't rely on credit that much. My argument is: we do. We just don't have 20 credit cards at a 45k debt level. But we have enough other stuff.

Sure, but mortgages are backed by an asset whereas credit card debt isn't.

I agree the risk transfer is very important, but Visa and Mastercard don't do that (they just facilitate it)

man who has only used the american financial system: the world not singularly using the american financial system is less dynamic. surely there are no counterexamples to this.

Hmm, maybe for countries with strong consumer protection, yes.

I lost 3 credit cards INSIDE an airplane (hello AirAsia!). I only realized it when I turned on my phone while queuing at immigration and was bombarded with dozens of "Successful transaction" messages. That's ~30min from stepping off the airplane. When I checked my statements, I saw dozens of physical transactions (swipes/taps) with different merchants in different cities from the airport.

All 3 cards have different PINs. All require a PIN for transactions above ~USD200. Yet the banks rejected my disputes because "it's a physical transaction, so you must be the one doing it." Apparently, they all think I could fly to different cities, buy different items, and fly back to wait in immigration, all in 30 minutes.

Lawsuit time! Against your bank.

I had missed the warning that this tech is now widespread. Must have not logged into Hacker News that day

https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/nfc-gate-relay-attacks-2026/5...

But but my CC literally said "it's more secure" (I asked and complained about the contactless feature because it interfered with my transit card)

If my bank did this to me I would immediately drop them.

> credit cards are giving you a revolving loan, there's risk it will not be repaid, and that risk ends up reflected in processing fees

Neither Visa nor MasterCard are loaning customers their money. It's the European banks that hold the bulk of the risk for European credit card transactions.

Also worth noting that who owns the risk is a regulatory question, not a technical or product one - and, like all regulatory questions, is different for different countries/regions.

Chip and pin and NFC transitions took off much quicker outside the US because merchants generally owned more of the chargeback risk than in the US, and therefore were willing to update their POS equipment accordingly.

Risk (like debt) is another place where a US-centric view will likely lead you to misunderstand the purpose of Visa/MC.

> Chip and pin and NFC transitions took off much quicker outside the US because merchants generally owned more of the chargeback risk than in the US, and therefore were willing to update their POS equipment accordingly.

Not really. The risk of all fraud is initial borne by banks issuing the cards, after all they’re only parties that have an actual financial relationship with the person providing the cash/debt. If something which results in that person cash/debt being stolen, it’s between that person and their bank to figure out who’s liable for the lost money. Chargebacks are just a mechanism for banks to recover some of that lost money, once the liability between the card holder and the bank has been settled.

One of the big reasons why Chip and PIN etc took off outside of the US, is that the US is very accepting of fraud, and charging crazy high interchange rates (up to 10x what they are in Europe) so the cost of fraud is spread over many individuals. Other parts of the world have regulations capping interchange rates, and providing better consumer protection, demanding that banks and payment networks tackle fraud, rather than increase the cost of everything by 1-2% to cover fraud losses.

Just to put another perspective there. In Brazil, chip and pin took off immediately (from non-existent to ubiquitous in about 6 months) after the government decided that the bank and card issuer were responsible for all the fraud risk.

I have no idea what policy made the US hold into signatures for that long. But the seller and the buyer are the least powerful people on that entire chain, so I don't think it reasonable to look at them.

> Neither Visa nor MasterCard are loaning customers their money. It's the European banks that hold the bulk of the risk for European credit card transactions.

And the bulk of the fees from credit card transactions goes to the bank(s) since they hold the risk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee#:~:text=The%20...

> For many consumers there isn't sufficient money in the account to settle all the one-time and ongoing transactions they are liable for -- credit cards are giving you a revolving loan, there's risk it will not be repaid, and that risk ends up reflected in processing fees

This is really much less of a thing in Europe, or at the very least in Germany and Spain. Mostly it's the overdraft from banks that you can use as what you call a revolving loan. Most of the visa and mastercards I've had in my life simply debit from my main account.

> credit cards are giving you a revolving loan

I'm confused - is it not the issuing bank that gives you the loan, and the credit card company just provides the infrastructure?

Btw. having an overdraft limit of a few hundred Euros is quite typical for those liquidity issues. You don't need a credit card for that.

I used "value chain" euphemistically because you can get really complex on this and I wanted to spare the casual reader. I meant your credit card as an end-user product in your pocket and not meaning the card networks in isolation, but the value chain is roughly:

1. Merchant (bears little fraud risk but a lot of chargeback risk)

2. Payment Gateway (little direct risk but some liability risk)

3. Merchant Acquirer (more direct risk but mostly if merchants become insolvent)

4. Card Network (Visa/MC/AmEx - less risk but significant underlying costs managing a global technology that spans the financial system and needs to be distributed to almost every merchant of any scale in America)

5. Issuers (Banks + AmEx - most risk but get a big share of interchange fees)

I've surely missed something here that the very smart (and increasingly grumpy these days!) HN community will doubtlessly pile-on to correct, so I apologize in advance for errors or omissions... and I bow down if @patio11 swoops in to tell me about the complexity I've missed in either payments or Japanese economic/cultural conventions

Will also add that the benefit of credit is not overdraft but smoothing cash flow... if I'm living paycheck to paycheck and get paid every two weeks, I will incur essential expenses at the beginning of the fortnight that I can afford but lack cash in my account to pay now. I can't overdraft because I won't have the funds to deposit into that account for another two weeks. I'm getting a service that smooths my cashflow and there's a small premium added to reflect that. (Could you save up enough to avoid needing this? Is that a uniquely American way of living? I don't know! I'm making a descriptive claim not a normative one!)

Sadly I’ve noticed that comments on this topic usually devolve into tribal comments about how ‘things are done in the EU’ which always seem to not be actually that representative of the 27 different countries of the EU, but of course must be better than the US.

> ‘things are done in the EU’ which always seem to not be actually that representative of the 27 different countries of the EU

This is so true, the EU countries are super diverse, and yet EU citizens tend to believe that whatever happens in their country is common across the Union.

Cash flow and fraud, yes. Credit, not much in most of Europe. AFAIK nobody has had something close to real credit cards until recently. They were called credit cards but it was a debit card with payment and deferred to the end of the month and backed only by the cash in the bank account linked to the card. I guess that no financial institution did like to risk any money on the behavior of European customers.

Switch? We mostly use debit cards today.

That's all the bank's problem, not the network's.

They are taking a percentage point or two on the entire consumer payment system.

I think there's plenty of money to back all the activity.

Especially if there are central banks willing to back them

> They are taking a percentage point or two on the entire consumer payment system.

Visa/MC make about 0.1-0.13% of each transaction, not a 1-2%. The rest of the interchange (the vast majority) goes to the issuing bank.

Doesn't it depend on the country? Payments with Visa and MasterCard work very differently in various countires. In Poland you can pay 0.01€ with credit card and the seller will happily oblige. In Germany even few Euros they prefer to be paid in cash.

That's their cut in the US, the market with the highest total interchange fees. In other markets with lower total fees, it's hard to imagine Visa/MC's cut being higher. They do a pretty useful service for a pretty reasonable fee.

Patio11 doesn't name names or give precise figures, but: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/how-credit-cards-make...

> For many _businesses_ managing cash flow is existential

Err, no - for _all_ businesses managing cash flow is the _only_ NR 1 crucial thing, because if they dont, they will disappear by tomorrow :)

This risk is all covered by the banks, not the interchange networks?

> - For many consumers there isn't sufficient money in the account to settle all the one-time and ongoing transactions they are liable for -- credit cards are giving you a revolving loan, there's risk it will not be repaid, and that risk ends up reflected in processing fees.

Their risk is covered multiple ways (as reflected in their profits). You pay an annual fee to have a card. You pay per transaction, you pay for paywave, you pay 21% in interest.

They cover their risk by hitting every possible angle.

Isn’t that financial risk of credit cards borne by the banks doing the lending? It’s not really any different to a debit card transaction on a bank account with an overdraft facility.

Visa/MC have built walled gardens which provide many services.

Some of the services include: - Consumer Credit - Fraud protection - Payment network - Discount service (rewards, etc) - Concierge services - Rental/Ticketing services - etc

No one is denying the utility of what they have created. The problem is they’ve built monopolistic walled gardens where these are all bundled together which raises overall costs while also prevents competition.

These services can easily be unbundled (for example in India the payment network is open and cost free, so anyone can provide those other services on top of the payment network).

What has made this far more urgent, however, is that these companies are located in the U.S. which has recently leveraged the power these networks have to attack EU citizens for frivolous reasons.

So even if the MC/Visa business model was perfect, it would be foolish for even American allies to rely on them given the actions of the current administration.

> If you want to switch the world to a debit-based system where economic transactions are limited by cash on hand, I'd argue that's a poorer and less dynamic world than the one we're operating in today.

Disagree. Credit has its uses, but debit is superior for the vast majority consumer transactions: lower fees, lower risk, instant settlement, easy P2P transfers, and broader accessibility. That we've become used to credit card payment system in the West is largely a historical aberration that needs correcting.

Also, I'm a bit biased since I live in China, but WeChat Pay and Alipay are so far superior to the credit card system that I can hardly find a single redeeming quality in the latter. China was lucky in that it leapfrogged the traditional credit card system since it didn't have that historical baggage.

Instant settlement is an anti-feature.

I don't want some asshole to be able to instantly drain my bank account. If I did, I'd be carrying a suitcase of cash around with me.

You can have instant settlement while still maintaining fraud safeguards (e.g. daily payment limits) and remediation mechanisms (e.g. reversing fraudulent transactions). With modern 2FA and device-based security, this risk is extremely low. Not a risk that justifies a 2.5% tax on every transaction plus all the other disadvantages of the credit-based system.

> lower risk, instant settlement

That's ridiculous. Why should I, as a consumer, care about the merchant's "risk?"

You don't have to, that's mostly a benefit for merchants. Although it does translate to lower prices and greater competition.

You're mixing debit and credit cards.

In the EU, debit cards are pretty common, and largely its a network effect. You need to get terminals that are supported by your payment provider.

A lot of merchant terminals are provided by banks, and frankly they are itching to get a sweet sweet cut of each transaction. Not only the information, but the cut of each transaction. Something like 0.2-1.5% of each transaction. (I'm sure mastercard and visa give them a cut)

For Credit cards, the banks/operator already handle most of the risk, and then pay visa a percentage for the privilege of charging usury like rates

I'm not mixing -- if I have $0 in my bank account today and I don't get paid until Friday, I cannot buy food today with a debit card. Being able to buy things today on the promise of future cash flows is a risk-based financial product and risk comes with premiums. (Again: could you solve this problem by having more money in your account? Sure! But there are a lot of downstream consequences of every consumer and business in society operating that way and there are real trade-offs that should be discussed with more nuance than "monopoly hoard ledger boo")

Replacing EM dash with "--" doesn't take away LLM smell.

You know here in Europe you can just overdraw your bank account anytime without bullshit fees, just with interest that is still way lower than average US Credit Card Interest (around 11%)?

Also bank transfers are easy, instant and free.

> For many _businesses_ managing cash flow is existential -- as merchants they want to be paid as quickly as possible, but as B2B customers they want to have 30-60 days to sell the input goods they've purchased so they can pay for them upstream. There is a premium for that flexibility that gets reflected in processing fees.

Yes those businesses use a bank loan for this, no need for a credit card again.

Thinking that the world doesn't have credit just because they use debit cards is one of the most idiotic things I've read today

None of what you’ve mentioned has anything to do with Visa and Mastercard. Visa and Mastercard are just payment networks, their whole business is literally just transporting transaction information from payment terminals to banks and payment processors, plus keeping track of all the numbers (which is pretty important).

Payment networks don’t provide credit or any kind of liquidity whatsoever, that entirely provided by the various financial entities that communicate via the payment network. The reason Visa and Mastercard haven’t been easily replaced is simple network effects, nobody wants to integrate with a payment network where there’s nobody to transact with.

I replied downthread but I used "value chain" deliberately -- there are lots of intermediaries of which the card networks are just one link in the chain -- and the statement above is about risk being borne (and value being created for consumers) by the entire value chain that is different and difficult/impossible in a FedNow-style immediate settlement model: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46964968

Mastercard and Visa also use immediate settlement models and basically always have done. The settlement buffer between end parties is created entirely by entities that are all basically banks.

There’s nothing special about Mastercard and Visa rails that prevents you recreating all the functionality that the broader ecosystem provides, without Visa and Mastercard. Hell all of that functionality could be provided by exactly the same companies and banks that provide it for Visa and Mastercard networks.

Because mastercard/visa don't personally bear any risk they are very happy to process refunds and chargebacks in the customer's favor. It's not a perfect system, but it's much better than direct bank debit where the customer has very little recourse. There is also a significant privacy issue. Today my bank can only see the sum total of my credit card purchases but not what I buy and from which vendor. Amex can see what I purchase but knows very little about me otherwise. I like this separation, and I like that it's hard for the government to get a complete picture of my financial affairs. I know credit cards get a lot of hate (here and elsewhere) but as a consumer I think they're exceptionally convenient.

> Because mastercard/visa don't personally bear any risk they are very happy to process refunds and chargebacks in the customer's favor.

That’s not how chargebacks and refunds work. Mastercard and Visa are not involved in the vast majority of disputes at all, it’s entirely handled by the card issuer and card acquirer. Mastercard/Visa only get involved in cases where network party has broken one of the technical rules of the network. For cases of missing or faulty goods etc, Mastercard/Visa do nothing except transport the messages used by bank/merchant to litigate the dispute.

When Mastercard/Visa are forced to step in and make an arbitration decision, they charge a hefty fee (hundreds of dollars) to the losing side to do so. So they have no issue with people raising disputes, it makes them a lot of money.

> Amex can see what I purchase but knows very little about me otherwise. I like this separation, and I like that it's hard for the government to get a complete picture of my financial affairs.

This is naive, all banks and credit card issuers are required by law to perform KYC (Know Your Customer) to ensure they know exactly who they’re transacting with. It’s trivial for the state to buildup a complete image of your financial situation by sending a small number of court orders to banks and financial entities to turn over all their records on you. That’s ignoring the automated tax reporting that banks also have to do.

Yep. Worked for a bank, they definitely know who you are

I had no idea visa/mc didn't bear the cost of fraud. I remember Paypal almost getting killed by fraud in the early days, and I always thought of Paypal as basically replicating visa/mc for online purchases. I didn't realize they were doing so much more than visa/mc by assuming fraud risk.

MC/Visa do drop merchants who do bad stuff (remember CSAM on PH) so I guess they bear some of it.

their monopolies were formed in a different time, when it might have been thought prudent to drop bad merchants even if they themselves did not bear the risk in order to not get governmental regulation imposed that would be more detrimental than just dropping the merchants.

Not saying that's the case, just given circumstances not sure if risk is needed to explain the result in this case.

PayPal was a counterparty so if one side didn't pay or there was a dispute then PayPal was stuck in the middle. Visa and MC are just payment networks and have minimal risk. The only risk I think would be criminal liability (handling drug money) or maybe if the bank goes bankrupt before the payment is due to the merchant (but even that might be borne by they merchant - not sure).

At least if the failed bank is Japanese, all of it will fall under their deposit insurance program (https://www.dic.go.jp/content/000010138.pdf#page=13), although this is actually a rare guarantee (FDIC and SVB comes to mind).

> Full coverage for deposits for payment and settlement purposes, bearing no interest, being redeemable on demand, and providing normally required payment and settlement services

Visa/MC do carry some risk, but the chain generally goes merchant -> acquiring bank -> ? platform (like Stripe or something) -> Visa/MC. So they care a lot about the people just above them in the chain, and not at all about the rest of them as they won't end up holding the bag.

A debtless society probably wouldn't suffer as many catastrophic economic recessions/depressions though (usually a result of cascading liquidations/unpayable debts)

In Europe, credit cards for individual use are extremely rare. I've only had one to manage a company expenses account.

In some parts of Europe. Credit cards are extremely common in the UK and Ireland, at least.

Gotta echo other commenters here. Many people do not want revolving credit, or want to just use it to smooth out balance spikes and for emergencies. The American tropes of carrying a large debt balance or maxing out cards (eg to launch a business) as financial strategies are viewed as somewhere between gambling and fraud by a lot of people.

In this response, I detect the typical European tendency of elevating risk over opportunity.

This is not meant as a personal attack, or meant to be defamatory. I am detecting a familiar pattern, that is entrenched culturally.

Further, I identify this cultural trait as one of the obstacles or reason for many European problems.

It’s an opinion I have.

This shows a fundamental understanding about the market you're commenting on. The European market is nothing like the US market. The vast majority of transfers are already debit based. Most people have a credit card, but for most part it's not a daily driver. Many European countries don't have credit scores at all, and in the ones that do, it isn't nearly as important as in the US. Since there isn't much of a practical need to take on debt, most people don't do it (leaving aside mortgages and leases, but you don't take those on a credit card anyway).

Yeah very disconnected comment I agree, Europe is different (and dare I say better or more stable long term in this regard).

I have credit cards for decades with various institutions, but NEVER EVER went to minus, see no reason to change it. Just a bit of discipline. We don't have public credit score or similar dictatorial stuff here. The only loan I will ever have on my name is called mortgage on real estate, and beyond that is a line I'll never cross. Same goes for everybody I know - family, friends, coworkers.

This comes from somebody working for a bank so not some clueless fool.

I meant to write misunderstanding, sorry about the typo.

Unlike americans, the rest of the world isn't as addicted to credit cards, and operate on a mostly debit based system already.

Then the vendors pay 2-4% of credit transactions to the payment processor or shift the cost to consumers.

It’s about the cost of another employee in salary per year for restaurants.

While many other countries employ pay by QR code which is free.

> While many other countries employ pay by QR code which is free.

In which countries is this service free? Alipay and Wechat are probably the biggest actors in this space both take a cut.

It’s a little bit of both right? They’re entrenched yes, but it’s not technologically trivial either. The operations they do for each account might be simple but the shear volume of transactions they handle is enormous. The scale makes it complicated.

Sounds like you should build a competitor if that's literally all it is...

I suspect there's quite a few other things you have to consider when you're managing trillions of dollars of transactions a year. Fraud, settlement times, up times, security, customer service, debt collection, interest rate calculation, reach, KYC, record keeping, legal inquiries.

But I'm sure we're just a couple grok comments away from a competitor

Don't forget stand-ins, much of this hasn't discussed that credit card networks do a lot of "stand-ins" when the issuer is unreachable (bank goes down, latency too high, etc). It's a bit unclear how things like Wero would operate when a network issue hits as Wero and EU rails won't just assume the liability for the transaction and hope it clears later as it does on Visa/Mastercard.

Very good examples. I'd add that Trust and connections are also huge in payments. Even if your technology is perfect, you need to integrate with tons of different systems to get full coverage, and the people who run those systems don't sign contacts with just anyone.

It's not a technology problem. It's a problem of being compliant with vague government regulations (e.g. AML/KYC) and getting banked (which is very difficult... thanks to perceived AML risk).

> I always find it entertaining to hear people try to argue that what these companies do is soooooo difficult and that's why they're valuable. It's just multiple computers keeping a balance.

Roughly nobody argues that part is difficult.

> It's not complicated.

It's very complicated, for the reasons that all complex real world systems are. It's an absolute mess.

> Time to do away with these foreign entities.

I don't really mind the "foreign" part, but it's fairly wild that essential financial infrastructure is privatized, so let's!

The #1 thing you're paying for with Visa and the others is uptime.

Knowing the card will always work 24/7/365 with such a high degree of assurance is a non-zero factor in how well a consumer economy performs.

> It's just multiple computers keeping a balance. It's not complicated.

It wouldn't be hacker news without a comment like this. I haven't personally worked in finance, but I've had a lot of friends do it.

It _absolutely_ is complicated. It's not too complicated for a nation or the EU to do it in house, but no, there's a bit more there than "Claude make me a ledger"

My usual response to claims like this is “if it’s so easy, why haven’t you done it yet?”

Trolling is not insightful. A number of other companies already have "done it" and are in use across the world. The question is why aren't western nations ALL using alternates yet? The article is pointing out that a new attempt is gaining political momentum, which answers the question.

Those alternatives are not worldwide payment networks with near-universal acceptance. They’re scoped much smaller. Even then, those independent efforts have either been implemented by law as a political strategic measure or are subsidized. They wouldn’t exist but for those supporting elements. Having federated payment networks may be good politics, but it’s not particularly efficient and it impedes world trade.

At any rate, making someone who haughtily trivializes a problem solve that same problem is a useful exercise both in the complexity of the subject matter, and—perhaps more importantly—in humility.

> It's just multiple computers keeping a balance. It's not complicated.

I'd argue this was the trolling

it's just addition and subtraction, how hard can it really be???

I very distinctly remember a dev talk at early 2000s Microsoft where a distinguished engineer recently come to MSFT from VISA described the herculean effort that it took to run this network. There was an anecdote that he shared that stuck with me where they had a worldwide daily balance mismatch of something like 0.37 cents and it was all hands on deck to find the missing thing. Yeah, man, it is very difficult to run these networks, hence so much money in it.

The fact that Asean and India did it, just like that, shows that the technical difficulty is no longer the issue.

Visa and Mastercard exists because of US hegemony. The Europeans just put their heads in the sand for a long time and accepted the "superiority" of American payment solutions because it benefited their geopolitical play at the time.

Some sources (Old and New):

- https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/exclusive-visa-comp...

- https://jakartaglobe.id/business/indonesia-expands-qris-reac...

- https://www.china-briefing.com/news/wto-china-unionpay-rulin...

- https://valorinternational.globo.com/foreign-affairs/news/20...

>I always find it entertaining to hear people try to argue that what these companies do is soooooo difficult and that's why they're valuable. It's just multiple computers keeping a balance. It's not complicated.

Honestly its a few things.

No, the technical and financial implementation is quite complicated. Its not just a balance in a database.

Yes, they do maintain control through a vertically integrated business structure. But its very easy to justify due to risk management.

>No, these companies keep themselves in power not because they've solved such a difficult problem that nobody else can, but because they have a moat which they protect.

The moat is the difficulty. And they do protect it.

Theres a common type of customer in IT who thinks they can do everything themselves and the "finding out" phase of their shenanigans is often extremely costly, not just for themselves but for their customers.

The chief product of a good supplier is not just software or technical services, its the regimented and disciplined implementation of those services.

Some people will pay more for an IT provider who permits less because they lack the internal organizational discipline to do these things correctly for themselves.

As far as various governments are concerned, the payment card industry is largely self regulating. And that's because the apex card providers provide the balance of enforcement downstream to all the nitwits who would otherwise have to be stung by hundreds of security lapses before they would otherwise respond. The PCI SSC has created an environment where data security is more restrictive than most polity's would require, and its standards are applied worldwide. Often people get liability exemptions for meeting this standard, rather than the standard itself being enforced by legislation or regulation.

Governments honestly love this shit. Its like catnip.

And if you had 1 tiny look behind the curtains of a merchant credit card processor, you would see that they would abandon this level of compliance at the drop of a hat were they permitted. The glue that holds the whole thing together is the restricted access to global Visa and Mastercard payment processing.

If you think all this is trivial, demonstrate how trivial it is, and spin up your own cards, card payment platform, various interconnects and clearing houses. I think you would much more quickly assemble a working computer out of a kids sandpit. Shit I remember a bunch of crypto projects sought to replace Visa and Mastercard, the best we got was Crypto branded Visas and Mastercards.

Yes and a missile is just a big can of propellant. It’s not complicated

Hosted on Amazon and Digital Ocean from what I can tell

What they're doing is a combination of the network effect and fronting a financial risk. The value comes from their ability to intermediate billions of dollars in transaction volume a month. It's not that tough to understand why they are valuable.

It's obviously very difficult. Just not necessarily difficult in technological sense.

Convincing your neighbors to build a refugee shelter in your neighborhood is difficult, and it's not like we have a shortage of house-building knowledge.

I think what people are missing in this conversation is fraud prevention and protection.

Any cross border payment solution, even within Europe, that lacks strong fraud protection is dead on arrival.

But I suspect the fraud problem will be ignored until it cannot be ignored anymore. And then we will go back to square one and try everything again.

If Europe wants its own rails, that's a policy and economic decision not a technical impossibility

I'm surprised that Canada doesn't seem to be talking about doing this.

We've already got a strong payment processing brand with Interac, it's used daily for millions of debit transactions, and supports all the features you'd expect (in Canada) from a payment card (tap, chip&pin). There's also the MasterCard Debit and Visa Debit branding which seem to bridge debit transactions to the MasterCard and Visa networks. And there's already Interac-capable terminals basically everywhere that Visa and MC are accepted.

My thought is that Interac should launch a credit card brand called "Interac Credit". The actual credit would be via the banks, just like it is with Visa and MC. Interac already has the relationships with merchants and banks to make this happen, and it has the mindshare with consumers to make it successful.

This would still rely on Visa/MasterCard allowing dual-branded credit cards for overseas transactions, which isn't a very common arrangement. The only market that has this is in Asia where there are UnionPay + Visa/MasterCard dual branded cards and I suspect that the reason they allow this is because the market is huge, especially compared to Canada.

Also Interac does not do online transactions outside of some very specific merchants that take Apple/Google Pay transactions. This is how Interac reduces fraud risk, which is why interchange rates for Interac are so low.

You can do this in multiple steps. Start with a credit card usable only with Canadian merchants, which will cover a great majority of transactions of a great majority of Canadians. I'll have an MC for travel and the ordering from non-Canadian merchants, and this Canadian credit card for the other 95% of my expenses. If a significant percentage of Canadians have such a card, major non-Canadian services will add it as a payment option (e.g. ChatGPT or Claude). Then you branch out by either joining or co-branding with the EU credit card company if such a company succeeds.

A world with a patchwork of payments processing options will look different for travel and business, in some ways worse, but such is life in a "multipolar world" which the Americans elected their leadership to conjure up.

> This would still rely on Visa/MasterCard allowing dual-branded credit cards for overseas transactions, which isn't a very common arrangement

We can and should make this practice illegal, along with several other anticompetitive policies in this space. Oh no they might hit us with tariffs in response?

At least in Germany our local GiroCards are dual branded (Maestro and V-Pay, although V-Pay is being faded out iirc) so we can pay globally, too

> This would still rely on Visa/MasterCard allowing dual-branded credit cards for overseas transactions, which isn't a very common arrangement

False? Co-badged cards are used in Germany, were used in NL, are used in NZ/AUS, many more examples than just "Asia".

We have dual-branded debit cards in Canada, too. But these are all debit cards, not credit cards. Visa/MC makes way more money off credit cards than debit cards, which is why they're much more hesitant to allow dual-branding.

The Canadian government has been trying for about 4-5 years now to get Canadian banks to embrace Open Banking, which will allow these sorts of products to be built quickly.

The banks have consistently refused to do anything, because they don't want any change that threatens their oligopoly. Canadian bank services are more or less the same as they were a decade ago.

The current government will have to show that it can resist rich people lobbying in this regard, before any real change can happen.

Indeed, no one seems to ever talk about the banking monopoly in Canada so it's not a big political issue. It's not nearly as controversial as the telecom or airline monopolies.

There are some new banking startups popping up in Canada like Neo Financial (from the guys who made SkipTheDishes) but they are online-only and have limited integration with stuff like Plaid.

Just looked at their site, and the images all show Mastercard logos on the cards. Isn't this just middleware between me and Mastercard?

Canadian banks still live in 2006. They can't even make EMT transfers more convenient, so people could request a payment or pay with QR.

Sometimes I feel like they don't actually refuse to do things, maybe they are not capable to improve. Something in their chain of command is broken and doesn't let them change.

> surprised that Canada doesn't seem to be talking about doing this

Canada could get the best of all worlds. Let Visa and Mastercard compete with Alipay and whatever the EU comes up with in the 2030s.

The real leverage isn't elimination it's optionality

Interac strong? Are you serious? That thing can take up to 30 minutes to receive your money! (source: interac.ca)

<< Interac e-Transfer is a fast, secure and convenient way to send money to anyone in Canada using online banking. The participating bank or credit union transfers the funds using established and secure banking procedures. Transfers are almost instant, but can take up to 30 minutes depending on your bank or credit union. >>

Even putting aside issue of geopolitics, it's quite baffling to me that every country besides China and Russia are paying ~0.2% "sales tax" to corporate America.

Not 0.2%

Visa: 1.3% to 2.3% Mastercard: 1.5% to 2.6% Mastercard: 2.3% to 3.5%

Nothing precise as it depends on whether that's debit vs credit cards, and the type of card. Also volume related and what the bank may subsidize, or take on top.

The payment processing rates offered vary by country. It rarely goes above 1% in Germany unless you're really not shopping around or are really low volume.

A % of that also goes to the issuing bank*, not to MC/Visa, so I suspect the mentioned 0.2% is talking about what MC/Visa has as their cut.

*: That's also how banks can profitably offer things like cashback.

Depends if we are talking credit or debt cards

The low fees are for debt and high for credit cards and VISA/MC won't allow you to accebt only the debt cards

The fees for those are still often comparatively lower to the US rates posted above. Credit cards are also not popular here, so while I do own one, I suspect average % of a merchant still remains low. Amex also offers pretty good rates to low-volume merchants here to have more acceptance to my understanding.

The rates I posted are the full range. Because it varies yes.

You suspect average percentage is low but try to get a payment processor agreement and see within two years what you actually pay overall. It may get even above the rates I mentioned with fix costs the jeopardy to your business when a fraud does occur and the issuer blocks you from accepting any payment, or worse, accuses you of being the fraudster.

We are well educated by the financial system and VISA/Mastercard to believe this technology is for our own good. Many in the financial industry denounces their predatory practice, that of a cartel of 2 or 3 that imposed a dictate for decades. Things are finally changing, resistance will continue but you will see QR or some alternative will settle in.

Not in EU.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/fees-for-...

> Specifically, the regulation:

> caps interchange fees at 0.2% of the transaction value for consumer debit cards and at 0.3% for consumer credit cards;

Visa and MC were capped at 0.5% for the network before that change went in as well. But we have no idea what actual rates were beside the cap as they were negotiated with each card issuer based on their risk profile and customer base.

These regulations were the reason that American Express pulled out of various European markets (but not all) as it became less/not profitable for them to issue their cards in those markets.

Completely false. They don't apply to 3-party systems.

Not correct. I was there, inside a EEA region bank, as Amex was pulling out due to the fee structure coming online in 2018.

Co-branded Amex cards essentially became considered no different than 4-party cards and stopped being exempted from the cap interchange in 2018. Nothing changed for Amex proper. How would you even define interchange when it's indistinguishable from the scheme fee?

There's a reason every European PSP charges 2-4x higher fees with Amex cards.

Key term in that sentence is consumer. As in that's not the cap for businesses.

You need to look at both sides of the transaction to figure out the total.

That's the full cap for "consumer cards", so cards owned by "normal people".

There are exceptions for business cards, as said in the document:

> provides for a limited number of exemptions, such as business cards used only for business expenses being charged directly to the account of the company;

This is incorrect.

Visa's processes ~$14T in transactions. At 0.2% thats roughly ~$28B in revenue (VISA posted ~$40B in revenue in 2025) versus 2% is $280B in revenue.

EDIT: The 2~3% you're talking is the payment processor fees which get divvy'd out to acquiring processors, acquiring banks, gateways, merchant processing, etc. etc.

The amount going to Visa/MC is 0.1-0.13%. The vast majority of CC interchange fees go to the issuing banks, not Visa/MC.

This. And don't forget that most businesses have in their payment processing contract terms (set forth by Visa/MC ) that prevent the business from directly charging card users the card processing fees. Which means that everybody - even cash users - pay for those fees. What a racket.

I think this is one of the biggest issues here, that the EU is actually forbidding to charge credit card users the transaction fee. On the contrary, it should make it mandatory that card users have to pay the transaction fees themselves. This would automatically force card providers to reduce their fees, because nobody wants to use cards with high fees. It would also get rid of nonsensical cash-back systems.

The EU also regulated the fee to be very low, something like 0.1% of the transaction value, comparable to the implicit costs of handling cash. If it was America–style 5% then it would be a problem, but at 0.1% it's not.

The official Apple store (McShark) in Vienna used to pass this ~3% charge on to consumers (a few years ago, not sure if it's still true today - and also there is a real Apple Store now).

Wow I didn't see that. Usually it's forbidden in the terms of agreement between the merchant and the payment processor to add a surcharge for using the card so everyone else ends up subsidising it.

Vienna/Austria is such a strange place wrt payment right now. Some places are cashless, many are cash only, many are card only above a certain amount. I had one lady running a ramen restaurant accept instant SEPA.

And it's going to be interesting tax wise when they remove the requirement for receipts on transactions under 35 EUR.

This has broke down in the last 5 years in the Asean region. Now most shops (that still accept cards) charges you 3-5% if you pay with Visa/Mastercard.

There are lots of restaurants in the US these days that charge 3% for use of any credit card. One that I've been even has a sign posted at the entrance about it, that it's legal to do so. Must have gotten a lot of complaints that it was somehow illegal, or perhaps against card processing rules. Because it's one thing to post a sign that says you charge the fee, it's another for that sign to mention the legality of it.

No every, you just don't know it ;)

There was a recent case of one Serbian company being sanctioned by the USA, and Visa and Master refused to process payments. No big deal, since even a small country like Serbia has its payment system called Dina that kept the company afloat.

There's not a single technical reason for bigger and richer countries to develop their own card payment system. It's not rocket science. The only reason they didn't is their regulators wanted a dependency on the USA payment processors.

France has CB. Germany has girocard. The entire problem is that these are national and not interoperable across the EU.

I don't know for France, but in Germany, they did everything they could to reduce Girocard usage. Today, every bank offers Visa debit, but if you want Girocard, it's difficult to find a bank that offers it.

There's nothing wrong with having national cards, since >90% of transactions are national anyway. That's how German Girocard worked for decades until the coordinated push to switch to Visa Debit happened.

And the government did nothing to protect domestic payment systems. As if they value foreign dependency more than the independence.

I set up accounts in two different German banks. Both gave me girocard by default. I had to request Visa from one to attach to google wallet. I have no idea how to request Visa from the other bank.

One positive aspect to Trump is he makes it desirable to punish/break up with US companies .

I get the Visa card for free from my bank whereas I have to pay for the Girocard (German alternative). Presumably the bank gets a cut of the fee.

japan mostly uses paypay, just saying

the eu should try innovating and building a massive global business. seems to be very difficult for you guys

Electronic debit card was invented in…. Denmark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dankort

I said "massive global business"

Those two countries are also at war, hot and cold respectively, with the powers that be.

Indian banks had already switched to RuPay. Most Indian banks issue RuPay debit and credit cards.

"RuPay" is a hilarious name for an Indian payment service. Kudos to whoever thought of that name

Rupee payment?

Its a lot less than that overall. The use of credit cards is just much lower for people in Europe - or at least in the Netherlands.

I only took a credit card for a bit when I went traveling, then canceled it.

Not sure Wero will succeed, but European country-specific mobile payment systems like Swish (Sweden), Vipps (rest of Scandinavia), Bizum (Spain), iDeal (Netherlands), Bluecode (Germany and Austria), Twint (Switzerland), BLIK (Poland) etc. are also working on interconnectivity under the EMPSA association. Combined they already have 110+ million users.

Wero is like a monolith, while EMPSA is more like mobile phone roaming. If I would bet, I would bet on EMPSA.

https://empsa.org

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

Like sepa, this initiative can be forced by law and made open rather than tanken hostage by large cooperates, which may then exclude parts of the market.

Very European approach: the winner is chosen by law. Is Wero really a success? According to this article, in 2024 it processed over €7.5 billion.

Polish BLIK, which is not even mentioned in the article and which has joined the EuroPA Alliance, processed €83 billion in 2024, with a 30% y/y increase in H1 2025. I understand that BLIK is much older, but it invested significant effort and money in marketing and promotions while delivering a good user experience. BLIK is now trying to expand to Romania and Slovakia, yet Wero is getting all the hype on Hacker News. Maybe this is a case of East, South, and West Europe being treated differently. Is the only “European” solution one that comes from Western Europe?

Wero is very new, no wonder it’s not used a lot yet.

Wero is basically a rename (and territorial expansion) of the Dutch iDeal system, which processed €141 billion Euros in 2024.

not really

Wero acquired iDeal and integrated it (as well as Payconiq)

> Maybe this is a case of East, South, and West Europe being treated differently.

Just my pet peeve, but say Central Europe here, not East. Unless of course you mean Ukraine or Kazachstan.

Referring to old Iron Curtain is refueling the animosity of the ancient past.

If BLIK is better then it will prevail over Wero. There is no law mandating Wero.

Just looking at the banks that make up each - 16 for Wero and spread over Germany, Belgium, France and the Netherlands versus 6 Polish banks - it feels like the systemic risk is higher with the latter. But time will tell.

Last year BLIK also signed a letter of intent to join the EuroPA which has Italian, Spanish and Portuguese banks involved.

The EU consists of 27 different countries, with substantial practical barriers between their internal markets (even if it's one single market in theory). Often, only EU intervention can overcome those barriers. Otherwise, you end up with national fragmentation.

Solve the problem and people will come. I don't see which problem Wero is solving. Cross country p2p money transfers? Not something people do often.

What people in Europe do very frequently is buying from online shops of another country, either because they do not find the product in a local shop or because of better prices.

What is needed is a card for online shopping that is valid in all Europe.

But it's not the card. Wero isn't doing anything new. It's just yet one more payment method to implement. Adyen, Stripe, Shopify and many other already support different local payment methods.

> Very European approach: the winner is chosen by law

Isn't that like the entire purpose of government and law - to help citizens come to a consensus?

No, in most of the cases government should not be the parent, but external arbiter.

In Austria EPS is also very commonly used.

Wero is iDeal.

I wish it was still just iDeal. The rebranding was done very poorly and the things that they added like accounts are just bad ideas

I thought they were interconnecting all those ideal-like systems from different countries and then rebranding to Wero? So the tech may be different per area but they all interconnect and the UX is the same.

But maybe I misunderstood and other places are actually replacing tech.

We wouldn't even need these services if instant payments were the norm. I guess we have to thank the Visa and MasterCard lobbies for this to happen at least 10 years too late.

Yeah that's pretty much the only reason people use Wero: transferring money faster than a snail between people. This was filled by the likes of Lydia before, but their shenanigans trying to become a bank pushed people to Wero (which is indeed a rename of something else I don't remember, but I used for less than a year).

The real deal is the card payment networks that your plastic thing can use at a merchant's point of sale. All the rest is moot as we already have SEPA for e.g. online payments (it does have its issue for sure, but it's something).

One problem I see with some of the EMPSA systems, is that if you're a developer and - if you don't have a company behind you, you're pretty much shit out of luck trying to integrate any of these payment solutions.

That have at least been my experience, trying to integrate Vipps in Scandinavia.

What was your experience like trying to integrate with Vipps?

>Vipps (rest of Scandinavia)

This is wrong.

Vipps MobilePay is in Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Sweden.

That is almost all Nordic countries, and all of Scandinavia.

Caveat that Vipps support in Sweden is severely lacking compared to the other countries where it's the main system in use.

We need the Swedish banks to open up.

> Bluecode

Never heard about this before, and I'm a German.

When India moved to UPI in the last few years something very interesting happened. The same devices that accept UPI (usually some android based POS) also accepted a plethora of cards. Previously merchants would be hesitant to take anything other than cash or charge 2% for visa/mastercard. But with wide adoption of digital payments they now just accept any payment with the goal that they don't want bad reviews and/or lose customers.

Point being that with a cheap alternative, it's actually much more convenient now to use a Visa or Mastercard especially with tap to pay because with competition being so high, the diversity means people allow all payments.

You mean that the 2% something visa/Mastercard demand, is far more digestible by merchants when it doesn't represent the majority of their revenue?

If previously 3 merchants had visa / Mastercard out of 10 who only accepted cash or cheques, then with UPI all 10 now accept UPI but 7 or 8 accept a universal POS which allows more type of payments. If previously 10% payments were via cards that costed them 2%, then now if sales are 2-3x because of UPI and online payments, letting go of that 2% for even 20% share of cards is fine because they captured a larger market with more sales. Not so long ago, India was a cash dominant economy so UPI actually opened that up. UPI actually helped Visa and Mastercard. Credit card spending has gone up a lot because of digitalization.

If in EU a local payment system captures the cash market, then the habit of using digital payments will actually also help Visa and Mastercard make more sale.

I currently don't have a credit card, but when I do, I find paying by a Visa/MasterCard much more preferable than UPI, simply because it's easier by tapping.

>simply because it's easier by tapping

i was under the impression UPI is just the underlying protocol, but an interface can be built on top be it tapping/QR/others? is that not the case?

I don’t see why there can’t be tap to pay via UPI. There is no holding back when it comes to technology. But it’s not implemented yet. We still have high corruption. Maybe they don’t want to make digital payments too easy that people forget cash. Just enough to win elections.

The same argument can be made that advertising boosts sales.

That doordash makes local eateries more prosperous.

It would elevate the debate if we acknowledge the dark patterns these business came up with to extract rents from the economy. That a category actor greatly benefits that's the outcome of any disrupting tech.

> But with wide adoption of digital payments they now just accept any payment with the goal that they don't want bad reviews and/or lose customers.

My experience is opposite, Now with UPI which 99% of people have access to there is no incentive for people to accept Credit Cards.

The competition is high with online ordering (which accepts cards), so the incentive is to not lose customers. in fact people have become so desperate for more sales that they would let you take something and pay later but not lose you as a customer.

I was talking about small businesses like restaurants which generally used to accept credit card even before UPI. Now very few accept credit cards.

Even before UPI credit cards were common accepted online. So I am not sure about that as well.

Small businesses generally dont because the setup for a merchant POS is quite a bit of hassle. In fact maintaining that device also costs money. A UPI merchant on the other hand is quite easy and free from what I know. This setup with visa mastercard might change in the future (with square like devices). However there is also a security problem so fraud might increase with that. Very interesting times for visa and mastercard who have basically not innovated since their existence and yet somehow have grown so big.

I was there when this started to roll this out - I remember a lot of nice pine labs payment terminals - it was really nice that I could begin to depend on my American Express card there more than trying to finagle cash (2000inr bills get you a lot of frustrated service workers). I say AmEx because they tended to work much better than my visa there.

That’s how all my non resident friends pay. They have chase bofa discover Amex etc cards that they use to pay most places. Ease of payments is the catch and credit cards bring that process down a lot. There is something psychological going on with cards that UPI and ApplePay simply don’t have. Swiping probably was fastest.

Apple Pay did not work when I was there (2018-2021). Does it now? I'm planning my next trip and little things like Apple Pay go a long way :)

Nope it doesn’t but it’s coming soon apparently. I’m assuming these POS just get a firmware update to get it to work.

Anecdata here, but the last times I tried to use VISA/MasterCard in a shopping mall meant to serve people from all over the world, it just did not work. UPI was flawless, though.

(And then as pointed out, anyone smaller straight up doesn’t support anything outside of UPI.)

This is the fourth attempt in two decades. Here is the short history of earlier attempts:

https://x.com/moo9000/status/2006304163404128289

The difference this time is that Digital Euro is forced by ECB and control (and deposits) are taken away from banks.

Let's be real: The difference this time is the open hostility from the US towards Europe.

It's now been about a month since a White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor openly talked about/advocated for taking Greenland by force. POTUS was vague for a while.

Northern European nations sent like a hundred military officers to Greenland. POTUS then threatened those nations with, wait for it, tariffs.

Then the markets crashed and Rutte/Nato provided a face-saving de-escalation path.

The OP article itself explains the history

> The core problem has always been fragmentation. Each EU country developed its own domestic payment solution — Bizum in Spain, iDEAL in the Netherlands, Payconiq in Belgium, Girocard in Germany — but none could work across borders. A Belgian consumer buying from a Dutch retailer still needed Visa or Mastercard. National pride and competing banking interests repeatedly sabotaged attempts at unification.

> The network effect compounds the challenge. Merchants accept Visa and Mastercard because consumers carry them. Consumers carry them because merchants accept them. Breaking that loop requires either regulatory force or a critical mass of users large enough to make merchants care — which is precisely what the EuroPA deal attempts to deliver by connecting existing national user bases rather than building from scratch.

I don't see an alternative to Visa and Mastercard being discussed in the article. I just see ways of making bank transfers easier. Banks generally don't provide ways to dispute transactions, which is why fraudsters generally use bank transfer mechanisms. Once your money leaves your account, it is possibly gone, and once it leaves the country it is definitely gone. Banks here are now inserting delays on transfers in an attempt to combat the problem. Without a consumer focused and consumer friendly way of disputing transactions, consumers will keep using Visa, Mastercard and Paypal.

Existing mobile wallets in Europe and beyond are absolutely eating into the market share of Visa and MC. Fraudulent transactions aren't that common since SCA became mandatory. Getting a chargeback in Europe is not trivial, this will change nothing to most consumers.

This is an American-centric POV. I can’t speak for Europe but in many parts of Asia payments are most commonly done as a transfer of digital cash rather than credit. Whether it’s “consumer friendly” is not particularly relevant. People already accept it as a way to transact and there’s very little reason to switch to credit cards.

Over here in Australia, it is mostly Visa and Mastercard debit cards in use (credit cards are available, but expensive and no longer popular). Your money still disappears from your account immediately, but you still can get a refund when using a payment network. Whereas a bank gets to say 'can't help, contact the vendor'. I suspect this is a result of how our consumer protection laws are setup, as the payment network takes on certain legal responsibilities when they accept my cash, even it they then just pass most of it on to the actual vendor. I guess that can work here, as until eCommerce arrived you were rarely making a payment over an international border.

The irony is that this new payment method has the exact same issue: it's deeply tied to US corporate.

Their site claims that it can only be used on iOS or Android: https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599074240...

Also:

> It is not possible to use Wero via a web browser or on a computer.

This seems an even worse situation than carrying around a Maestro (mastercard) with me.

> it's deeply tied to US corporate.

In what way specifically? Android and iOS are just the OS the banking apps that implement Wero happen to run on. There is nothing stopping them from releasing a Linux app. Or a web app.

But they won't though, will they? Or maybe we can look forward to that in another 30 years when they realise they are, once again, dependent on American tech.

You can't expect them to fix everything all at once. What about the hardware?

Let them focus on offering a payment system, and let others focus on their thing.

It is comical. Exchanging one set of US overlords for another. I suppose it is possible to use a degoogled android but most people won't be doing that.

Not even that. Most banking apps have a requirement that android is "certified" by google, ex. They won't run on GrapheneOS

Yep, I'm using Murena, a fork of Lineage OS but have to have a google account to use my banking app. I'm not even sure the bank understand this requirement exists.

"When Western sanctions cut Russia off from Visa and Mastercard in 2022, the country’s domestic payments were immediately disrupted." Lol. In reality this had 0(zero) effect on domestic payments. All Visa/Mastercard cards issued by Russian banks worked absolutely fine. Russia had built it's own payment system before war and just switched seemlessly.

Most, if not all countries have their own domestic payment systems. This is about cross-border payments within the EU.

“Breakup” seems a bit exaggerated considering the % of payment volume which might switch to the new system.

Russia switched 100% of its payments seamlessly, no reason for the EU not to do the same. Build up the network and tell banks to use that network even for transactions initiated with Visa/MC cards. At that point cards are still usable, but effectively a piece of identification plastic not directly controlled by Visa/MC anymore.

> seamlessly

It's not seamless if it includes a war, global isolation, exodus of all business and disconnection of the banks. This means they were left with no alternative, in which case, sure, it's 'seamless' to use the only alternative method.

Europe will have a lot of friction with consumer habits and Visa will always be relevant for buying things from outside EU. These are all competing entities which hate anything that makes them seamlessly lose their business.

Russia did it after 2014, not after 2022. So yes, it was seamless

That's not how it worked, Russia prepared well in advance before the war (admittedly, after Crimea-related sanctions scared the hell out of them in 2014). When the 2022 sanctions dropped, transactions within Russian borders kept working seamlessly because the banks were already using the Mir network for those regardless of card types, i.e. you can still use your Russian-bank-issued Visa today for internal purchases. And I firmly believe that Europe needs the same kind of security for its digital payment systems, something akin to IBAN that solved this for EU-wide bank transfers (which is why I'm not sure if it's wise to use some random commercial product as a base).

Of course, right now nothing can dethrone Visa/MC for international payments, besides perhaps crypto in very limited and often shady scenarios. And Europe can't really do anything about that. But that's a different problem altogether (one that annoys me to no end as a frequent purchaser of digital products from Japan).

Nitpick: IBAN is a global identifier for a bank account. The transaction system where you enter an IBAN is called SEPA payment, or SEPA bank transfer, or something along those lines.

Just like I access hacker news by the Internet, not by IP address.

Thank you for the correction, you're absolutely right.

> Of course, right now nothing can dethrone Visa/MC for international payments

UnionPay can. They are accepted in many parts of the world, and they are free from US restrictions.

Italy has a similar size economy as Russia and they also have their own payment network. Technically there is nothing special. Countries have to come together and decide on a solution together.

On the other hand, if you step back a little bit, Russia is currently stuck in a Sovjet civil war, so I don’t think the Kremlin way is that great.

It is a good way if you want to protect yourself against pressure from the US. Sure, the Kremlin did it for reasons that don't exactly paint them in a good light, but this has nonetheless become a real risk for Europe as well.

This isn't about the payment network. The EU already has their own payment network, too.

It's about card payment and even if things ending up in your network they first going through visa.

And it's about online payment (PayPal).

Not in Russia, payments made with a Visa card do not go through Visa any longer, at all. You can even use expired Visa cards (with most banks).

yes,

but also this means that major security features don't work anymore creating a higher risk for the bank

and Russia prepared for this for years after the sanctions related to the annexation of Crimea

and Russia kinda,nearly cut fully ties for the US

and it still hurt them quite a bit anyway

so such thing would be more like a last resort emergency solution then the "getting less dependent on while not cutting all ties" situations we currently have

A lot of European online stores support asynchronous SEPA transfer. You complete your order, they issue a code and amount of money to send. You send the money with that reference code attached and they don't ship it until they get the money. It works for online order because you might be waiting a week anyway.

yes, but in many cases that is because this payment method predates "modern" online payment and they "just kept it around"

depending on what you buy "a lot" can be close to non or close to all

In the end it has major issues:

on the consumer side

- majorly reduced consumer protection compared to e.g. pay pal. If you wire transfer by yourself doing charge backs ~two weeks later after not getting the goods is hard, potentially non-viable (dep. on country etc.).

- you can typo address or reference number, leading to a lot of headaches (also recently they changed it so that the recipient "name" has to be correct, but many companies send you only IBAN,BIC,ref number and not the exact by letter company name under which the bank account operates...)

on the seller side (sometimes also affecting consumer)

- the order is in a "in-between" state until they receive the money, which can be days. During that time they can't rely on actually receiving the money but they also have to keep the good ready to sell. Especially in situations where you e.g. sell limited time/amount goods (e.g. resellers, collector goods etc.) this can be a pain. If you then add any form of expiration data (e.g. concert ticket) this can make the payment method a absolute no-go.

- your selling/order processing system needs access to your companies incoming transaction history, which preferably should be a separate account. This mean additional administrative overhead and failure conditions. Also many such systems are kinda build crappy in my experience.

while I have been using that in some situations it really isn't competitive as a modern online banking solutions

but what it also shows is that you can get really far with comparably "dump/naive" methods.

----

Also for completion there is one additional SEPA method: That is you give the company the right to just take money from you bank account. You can split that into 2 versions: 1) permission for fixed amount reoccurring payments (e.g. donations,subscriptions) 2) arbitrary amounts at arbitrary times. The later requires a relatively high burden/overhead on the sellers side so you only see it with Amazone or Paypal

Standard legal protections still apply, one of you can sue the other for failing to fulfil the legally binding contract you made when you clicked checkout. Credit card payment can be fraudulent too, in all the same ways.

Russia had roughly ten years to prepare. First talks about building national payment system started around 2010-2012. And it was meeting notable opposition: "why should we care? MC/Visa are good enough, why spend money on national infrastructure".

But yeah, it is amazing that in 2022 nobody here even noticed that MC/Visa left. Even MC/Visa cards haven't stopped working and are working to this day (banks made a rule that cards that expire after 2022 continue to work for several more years so that everybody has time to switch to MIR).

> This is about cross-border payments within the EU.

no it isn't

for bank to bank payment your statement might be true

but this isn't true for EC card payment and most online payment

_all_ EC cards either use the Visa Payment network and secure modules or the Mastercard one (but by now it's mostly Visa in most places). Sure they have your banks local branding but it's Visa anyway.

This also applies to payment terminal, most (not all) go through the Visa payment network to process payments.

And even in the same country a lot of online payment either goes through credit cards (again mostly Visa in EU) or PayPal. This isn't technically needed at all but due to fragmentation whatever alternative you want to use is just sometimes available.

Which is where Wero comes in:

- try to reduce fragmentation by making it a cooperation across many banks (of which most had their own failed PayPal alternative)

- onboard people on (local) online banking and private Phone2Phone payment (e.g. bill sharing)

- then (now) expand to pushing some payment terminal providers to support it with Phone based payment. There are multiple initiatives for it.

The later part is possible due to 3 reasons:

- payment apps on phone bypassing secure module monopoly nonsense related to EC/Credit cards and visa

- a lot of the in-person checkout systems of small businesses are now a tablet + separate cash register + EC terminal. This means that even if the EC terminal doesn't support Wero the payment system can still do so through their tablet.

- Also I think some of the wider used payment terminal in large EU specific chains can get Wero support with a software update.

Still it's by far not a perfect situation:

- still too much fragmentation/to little adoption by banks

- "old" payment terminals and (physical) checkout systems which are bound to Visa and can't easily be updated

So there most likely won't be a hard break anytime soon, and your EC card will likely continue using Visa secure module and network for a very very long time.

But having a technical working alternative which can slowly start eating market share is already a huge step forward.

> “Breakup” seems a bit exaggerated considering the % of payment volume which might switch to the new system.

Brazil introduced Pix in 2019, it's now the most used payment method for all transactions nationwide, ahead of both cards & cash.

India introduced UPI in 2016, it now handles >80% of digital payments there, and handles more transactions a day than Visa does worldwide.

It's totally plausible to me that a similar replacement could overtake cards completely within a decade. The lack of cross-border support means "Pay with Bizum" is a niche feature that's only useful in Spain, but if "Pay with Wero" becomes an instant & ~free payment method that works for hundreds of millions of users then it's a very different ballgame.

And also much of East and Southeast Asia as well: AliPay (CN), Kakao (KR), PayPay (JP), JKO (TW), GrabPay (SG/MY), QRIS (ID), etc. with various interop compatibility between them. If you build it they will come.

> Brazil introduced Pix in 2019, it's now the most used payment method for all transactions nationwide, ahead of both cards & cash.

Is that by volume of transactions or total amount, or both?

Cash transactions can of course only be estimated for this statement.

It took over cash in 2024 by number of transactions. And yes, cash is estimated.

I imagine bank transfers are still the largest payment method by value. Pix is taking over bank transfers, but companies have very few reasons to migrate.

Can I use it without installing their software on my smartphone? Question is rhetorical - of course not, and your smartphone also needs to pass Google's or Apple's remote attestation schemes. Good riddance.

Is it really just PayPal left offering a sane online payment service?

---

From https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599074240...:

> It is not possible to use Wero via a web browser or on a computer.

Yes, you can. They have an app, but also integrations into bank apps.

That's interesting. In Belgium the pre-integration Payconiq could not do that.

Would be nice of the EU to provide a digital payment service quasi free of charge - without commercial provider's typical predatory fees and other costs. And don't counter with "privacy" .. it's not like all the American companies already have to provide backend access to their data to the NSA and other 3 letter agencies.

They will, and with privacy guarantees. But all liability will be on the consumer, and none in the merchant or the banks.

Uhm, the EU already has free instant SEPA transfers? I use it regularly, sadly not all EU banks support it (smaller ones sometimes have issues and have to resort to standard oldschool 2-day transfer, but they are also free).

How do you do your groceries with that?

With debit cards or cash like everyone else?

Then instant bank transfers didn't really help you with this use case, did they?

True, thanks for reminding me that this is about CC replacements :)

But I honestly don't know many people with a CC here, and those who do (myself included), we don't have the same advantages/disadvantages of a CC: no points, no "free" miles, no interest and no possibility to rack up debt like in the US since Visa automatically deducts the full amount from my bank account at the end of the monthly billing period.

It does but there aren't really any SEPA transfer point of sales. It's too asynchronous. You always use card or cash there. SEPA transfer can sometimes be used when paying for things asynchronously online, and they won't ship the item until they receive the money.

SEPA instant transfers aren't guaranteed instant as they might still be withheld for fraud checks.

The Eurozone has free instant SEPA transfers*

Non-Euro countries won't be guaranteed to have it until July 2027.

Wero, the system the article is about, already is free for personal transfers and 0,15€ for commercial acounts (at least for my bank)

The problem with these is always who pays for fraud.

With credit cards, they actually claw that money back from the merchant, and then if the merchant can't pay they just eat it themselves.

So the merchant has to work in fraud rates into their pricing, and the credit card company has to work in fraud rates that the merchant can't cover into their rates.

It always seemed toxic it to me that the merchants are the one's responsible, despite the fact that they easily have the least power to do anything about it. But the ease of payment processing, and the number of people who just won't buy it if they can't use a card, outweighs dealing with fraud I guess.

In theory merchants can notice some fraud signs so shifting fraud losses onto them gives an incentive to take action on those signs. In practice banks have a better overall view of fraud and this is just externalizing bank fraud losses onto stores.

> The problem with these is always who pays for fraud.

I'm curious how India's UPI handles fraud/refunds, as the system seems to have garnered near-universal praise.

India’s UPI is national service so fraud is “relatively easy” to combat but it depends on banks’ responsiveness.

However, i heard from my Indian friends is that UPI fraud is on the raise and becoming a big challenge.

Edit: UPI fraud rate is similar to CC fraud rate but only about ~6 % of the money lost to UPI fraud has been recovered. If this trend continues (fraud pct continues to grow and recovery rate does not improve) UPI system might get into trouble.

Btw, the stats say that the UPI fraud rate is doubling every year for past few years.

Could you describe what is the "fraud" you are talking about ?

Like, if someone stole a credit card and use it to buy stuff ?

Yes, that's considered the merchant's fault by the credit card companies.

Given that visa and mastercard just dump the liability on the merchant, The EU could hardly do worse.

It would be an economic boon to the bloc if they assumed more of the risk.

It does cost money to run the network. They already capped the fee at 0.2% which is pretty reasonable.

The use of a phone number rather than a username seems like a BIG downside. I’ve moved countries several times and as a result been forced to change my number several times. This causes a huge headache with any service that relies on phone numbers, especially two-factor etc. Phone numbers should be thought of as ephemeral while usernames can persist.

Ya i thought this as well… seems like a bad idea. I get that most ppl keep their phone number. Maybe better to let ppl just use their number than everyone creating an account? Idk..

But now i think of it… how does Visa and MC do it? Cuz i dont have a username or phone nber with them (i know they have my number). But i havent switched my number, so maybe if i did, i would have an issue?

No mention of GNU Taler (cf https://www.taler.net ) which is a bit of shame, especially knowing that "The NGI TALER project is funded under Horizon Europe (Pilots for the Next Generation Internet) with the aim of bringing GNU Taler to market across Europe." cf https://www.taler.net/en/ngi-taler.html

I use ING DIBA bank. I enabled WERO in the app, as that’s the only way for me to use it.

I can send money ONLY to my contacts. It doesn’t allow to type in phone number, one needs to create a contact.

I feel like Europe is just doomed. The stupidity is endless here.

Yeah but now we have instant EU-wide SEPA transfers for free, so it's not all stupidity! Also it took years to implement - banks are slow at implementing new tech. WERO is still very new, if it takes off, eventually banks will hopefully support it.

When I sold my car, the buyer wanted to use instant payments. Sounds good!

It didn’t work for the amount we needed (over 15k).

Weird, I googled around and I see every bank has their own limits, and all banks I could find claim a 30-100k or no limit at all.

Whatever LLM duckduckgo is using says 10k and ability increase as more transactions are made (to increase trust) - but it's probably using outdated data.

When did you try this? I'm guessing more than a year ago.

“Has begun” as in recent? BankAxept has been in use in Norway since 1991 to avoid the VISA/Mastercard “tax” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankAxept

Biggest banks here refused to support Apple Pay and worked hard on legislations to open NFC access. Now we can pay with no fees to Visa/Mastercard or Apple even from our phones.

There's implementations for this in most European countries (iDeal/Wero, Bizum, MultiBanco, BanContact have been mentioned). What's missing is a unified standard that works across all European webshops and banks.

People here don’t understand that Visa and Mastercard get only a small part of the fee. Most of it goes to the issuer and the acquiring banks.

I suspect they aren’t doing this (just) to avoid fees - it’s more about national security in a world where the US might stop being a reliable ally, and in a world where the US has used withdrawing Visa / Mastercard as a strategy to weaken enemy economies.

I think the recent stories of the International Criminal Court judge being forbidden to use VISA and Mastercard, making his life somewhat more challenging, did make some politicians aware of the risks.

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

If you have the cash its super easy. Need to have at least 300k euro frozen in the account, go through the process of getting EMI (european money institute) licensed and start fiddling with GNU Taler.

I'd rather have a GNU Taler based system (private for consumers, transparent for the business), but given the overextending urge to destroy any remaining privacy by EU governments, I doubt it would ever happen.

Instead, we are getting a digital euro, a fully dystopian abomination.

As far as I know the "digital euro" should allow for offline payments. At least in principle I should be able to offload to an offline/on-device wallet and give money to anyone without the servers knowledge.

But I'm sure there are plenty of villains and idiots that will try (and succeed) in diluting those principles and will get some dystopian (trace everything) version of that.

How is a digital euro worse than the current American dependant system?

Europe had a payment processor in Europay, the E in EMV (Europay-MasterCard-Visa), but stupidly allowed MasterCard to acquire it.

Hilarious. Someone would have got a nice retirement out of that. It's amazing that some people have the power to sell a slice of the entire population's financial transactions for the next 25 years.

Europe, just adopt Blik.

Even Polish banks discourage using debit cards directly and just switch to Blik.

Lost card? There's no card, so doesn't apply. ATM skimmers? Nope, I think all ATM support Blik, so can't sniff anything. Want to send money to a friend? Instant mobile-friendly transfer. It's even possible that the family can pull the cash out from the ATM from your account when you're in a different city if you'll give out the code.

Not anonymous even for small amounts of money. Without tricks and workarounds Blik apps requires Google/Apple approved smartphone with Google/Apple approved build of the OS logged into Google/Apple account. Participation in the network is tied to private will have Blik association even on small scale.

I don't think having anonymous transactions is the goal for most people. For sure it's not the goal for Blik. The requirement of having a Google/Apple-cerified phone is a requirement of bank apps I think, not Blik's.

It does not matter on which layer the restrictions are applied here. Effect on society is the same - ability to pay only for those that give up on basic freedoms (which anonimity of payments and choice of device you carry are).

> Creating a viable alternative to Visa and Mastercard requires “several billion euros” in investment

Just the transaction processing fees going to VISA and Mastercard now would probably pay that back within a few years. Also, we're talking about all or almost-all European countries. So it doesn't sound like that much.

> Low interchange fees under EU regulation make profitability difficult.

Mandating that businesses which accept US credit cards must accept the European payment card would take care of that. Actually, maybe that's not necessary, it's probably enough to mandate that companies making card processing tech which supports US credit cards must also include support for this card; and businesses would just get it with their next system upgrade / terminal replacement or something.

> Consumer habits are deeply entrenched

I 'like' how people are described as "consumers", as though every payment is for consumption.

Anyway, habits are not that deeply entrenched. Didn't people adopt those country-level payment cards? Don't people occasionally change credit cards? It's not even a change of tech, it's just yet another card.

> and neither Visa nor Mastercard will sit idle while Europe tries to dismantle their most profitable market.

Now this may be a significant factor... they could influence politicians, tech solutions makers (with sweetheart deals if they don't support the new payment tech, or whatever), they can get the US government to make some kind of threat (we've already seen the threat to invade Greenland). So, yeah, there's that.

Item one, that has been mentioned a lot of times in this discussion, is that a payment system that is independent of Visa/MC but is dependent on US based smartphones is about as useless.

Item two is convenience. All these systems are "faster wire transfers". I don't really see the point of them when you can already do instant IBAN or even phone number based transfers.

What they do not have is a line of credit backing them. Got to make sure you have money in "the particular system your merchant accepts". Also at least in eastern europe credit cards come with the possibility to pay in a few installments with zero interest (paid for by the merchant of course, so not everyone does that). This is gone in the new system.

What they also do not have is the fraud protection of a credit card. You may be able to revert a transaction but the money is gone from your account and it will take a long time to see it back.

On the other hand it's harder to spend money you do not have so perhaps the EU is trying to make its citizens more financially responsible? :)

I never understood the credit card thing Why would I want to spend money on loan by default? Why do the Americans do that all the time? What's the benefit?

The benefit is to the banks, making huge money this way!

Because it’s not my money but the banks money :)

Of course it only works to your advantage if you pay your credit cards in full every month.

For consumers, the risk of fraud is bear by the bank, not you, because you're spending the bank's money instead of yours. For banks, they make money through interests from the customers that don't pay off the bill each month.

They make more of their money from transaction fees and selling transaction data. The interest is a nice bonus.

I can't answer for Americans for a whole, but I live in the USA and I pay with credit card by default. My personal reasons:

* Cards are convenient. No need to go get cash, no change at each transaction to manage carrying around. * Cards give a discount in the form of "cash back". (As mentioned elsewhere, this really just inflates the cost of everything for everyone, but I might as well claw it back.) * I don't actually go "into debt". I pay off my card (automatically!) every month, and incur no interest charges. I use it like a slightly deferred debit card with benefits.

The last bullet being significant to your point: I don't "spend money on [a] loan".

Like the article mentioned many EU countries have their own payment systems. The challenge is not to build something from the scratch but rather to make existing solutions interoperable. The first talks about cross-border integrations started many years ago but they went very slowly. However, some work is being done, just a week ago a first transfer was done from Spanish Bizum to Polish Blik.

If there's anything the EU is good at, it's inter-op in markets.

In Poland we have quite popular and handy BLIK system: https://www.blik.com

Card terminals here in Poland usually accept BLIK payments

It is also very popular payment method in e-commerce

BLIK is very cool. I've seen people who were out of cash call family or friends, tell them the six digit code, and their payment was done in seconds.

In Czech Republic we have QR payments. They're ok, but could be more streamlined...

We have MobilePay - looks like it’s made by Vipps. It’s my preferred payment method these days and works great for things like farmer markets etc. zero fees and you can verify you got the right counterparty in seconds. I also pay e-commerce with it. The technology is not complicated to have an excellent payment system! People who think getting rid of Visa is impossible have not travelled anywhere - I even see people talk about PayPal as a good example smh

I wonder if this will draw tariff threats?

Last August US threatened tariffs on Brazil over their Pix system. One of the reasons given was that people using Pix instead of credit cards deprived Visa and Mastercard of fees.

When anything or nothing at all can draw tariff threats at any time it stops making sense to worry about what may or may not anger an insane clown overseas and you should just do the best thing for your nation and its people. Reducing dependence on the US is the smart thing to do and retaliation would just make it more obvious how important it is to get away from the US to the extent that you can as fast as possible.

Sending a few officers to a fellow NATO country draws tariff threats..

I think we have reach a point where the US have annoyed so much its past commercial partners that nobody care about tariff anymore and everybody want to do commerce with everyone EXCEPT the USA.

> Last August US threatened tariffs on Brazil over their Pix system.

Just a correction: the US imposed those tariffs. Threatened too, I guess, but the Orange Man did more than that.

What changed between then and now is that plastic cards stopped being the objectively best way to pay. Most countries already have online payment systems that are safer and easier to use than plastic cards - Wero is about putting them under one brand one network. Once this is done and people are familiar with the brand, you need to update terminals to accept Wero, then you roll out a software update that makes bank apps use virtual Wero cards or something like that.

It's not as much about replacing Visa/Mastercard, as it is about plastic card technology becoming obsolete, and the duopoly failing to react to the market because of corporate inertia. Had they created a modern online payment system, Wero would never take off.

What about GNU Taler[1]? If we're doing that to have yet another monopoly, I don't see the point. Even if it's European.

[1]: https://www.taler.net/en/

Is it backed with a large amount of money to hedge against the risk that the privacy or security could be flawed in some unexpected way? Are there people lobbying for its adoption at scale that can make cast-iron assurances about liability? Business people do not rely on technical proofs because they don't want to become cryptography.software engineering experts.

Nothing in France takes Discover, and my bank decided to go with Discover about 6 months ago. "Great" decision, thanks.

Yeah, really dumb move on the part of Chase bank. They'd previously marketed their accounts as being geared towards international travelers, but now their cards can't be used in much of the world.

Capital One just switched too.

https://investor.capitalone.com/news-releases/news-release-d...

They didn't just switch. They purchased Discover.

edit: added the "just"

Well, “just” as in “recently forced everyone to replace their cards” also works. My CapitalOne mastercard was deactivated January 14, even though it was still valid through 2030.

My wife found out her new card was Discover debit card right before her trip to France. Her bank sent her a new card unrequested. In an abundance of caution she activated the new card which automatically cancelled her debit Mastercard. Then when she landed in CDG found the new card didn't work anywhere.

This is what these peeps advocating for an "EU-based payment system" don't get, as they typically don't travel worldwide. VISA + Master just work. Have a debit plus credit for one each. (And no, Google / Apple pay won't do it, everyone who calls themselves a "hacker" should know that you too often can't even pay for transport using a rooted phone).

We do actually. The German Girocards were, until Maestro ceased to exist, often co-issued as Maestro + Girocard, and global acceptance was pretty good under the Mastercard network.

There are examples of other co-branded national payment systems out there (troy + Discover comes to mind).

If a European payment system (with cards, at a store) is to exist, then visa/mc will still want a piece of the pie by at least playing along to remain as a co-brand and taking their cuts from international payments.

Aside from what the other commenter said about the hybrid systems, you proudly state that you have 4 cards at minimum, but having a system that would work continent-wide for ~98% of all money you spend would not bootstrap if someone needed to be bothered with having a separate travel card, which would rest in the drawer or as second Apple/Google/Garmin Pay choice most of the time? Most adults I know have 2+ cards already, it's just that they were issued by Master Card or Visa. American Express and Discover still exist, despite definitely not having worldwide coverage.

VISA + Master just work _for now_. Debanking Nicolas Guillou[0] was a financial Greenland.

Short-term negative-sum transactionalists are governing the US. Even if November stabilises things somewhat, the cat is probably out of the bag.

Trust comes on foot, but leaves on horseback. _That_ is why a well-integrated EU-based payment system is needed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Guillou

The idea is for the US to not be able to shutdown CC transactions at points of sale in Europe on a whim. All cards in europe are dual-issued under Visa or Mastercard, and under a national card payment processor. In France, that's CB (Carte Bancaire). When you pay in europe, it uses the European network. Outside, it uses Visa/Mastercard.

So sorry, we do definitely get what this entails :)

For debit only she can use CIC or La Poste. They happily accept Discover, and they're everywhere in France.

fwiw: Discover technically goes through amex network in EU, and amex acceptance varies from pretty good (e.g. germany) to pretty awful. Completely incomparable to visa and mc acceptance ofc.

Just use wise or revolut.

"Just" get another bank account before travelling. Right...

I meant that as more of a long term solution. Even if your domestic bank supports overseas payments, they most likely screw you on the fx rates, so just get a specialised card like Wise or Revolut.

It's free, their tech is great and their fx rates are more than fair.

I thought the same, when my US bank (capital one) decided to change my debit card to their newly acquired Discover network. Sure enough, CIC and La Poste accept it for cash withdrawals, which preserves the advantage of great exchange rate, and no currency exchange fees (unlike wise, for example). Credit cards seem to stay on Mastercard (e.g. capital one) and visa (e.g. Chase), so still some life left with those, also. Wish the European solution will eventually have a rewards/points system, to bring it up to par with the US cards.

Many comments here assume this is about some hypothetical future project. Just to be clear: Wero is already live and in use.

So Wero is not a credit card, but something more like Venmo? How is it supposed to replace Visa and Mastercard?

It's for online payments only. You click on the wero button on a website/app, if on mobile takes you to your banking app (on desktop, you scan a QR code), you do MFA on your banking app and confirm, and the payment is done.

Wero are not in the business of issuing cards, though obviously they could get into that business - just like UnionPay did in China. I suspect there would be a lot of inertia there, as card payment fees are capped in Europe anyway.

Cards are also online payment. You can already pay with such systems in some physical shops and restaurants, alongside google/apple/alipay.

But cards are offline from the perspective of the consumer. Sometimes even on the merchant side of things. Not that it is an important distinction nowadays--but I have definitely tried to pay with a merchant's own app-based payment solution that refused to load due to a bad cellular connection. I haven't looked into how Wero will handle this.

Most payment terminal nowadays use 4g network and it is not uncommon to see shop/restaurants employees in some areas trying to desperately get a signal by moving the terminal close to the door or window.

They need much much less data than your phone. They could process several transactions with less data it would take for your phone to load the HTML of the payment page, let alone the Javascript or the bank's logo.

Also, such terminals often use multi-carrier data plans that can use the best carrier available, while your own phone is stuck with one of the options (of course, you always have the worst one).

Wero bought Payconiq which allow to pay at the physical terminal with a QR code to scan with your phone. So, they can cover the physical payment without having to issue cards.

By letting merchants receive payments from customers without going through Visa and Mastercard?

Granted, the FAQ entry is rather light in details:

https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/39413057671...

> So Wero is not a credit card

Neither are visa/MC for the most part. Mostly debit. ;) this isn’t really about the card anyway but the network behind it.

This is likely to be similar to the existing European payment systems just wider in scope. There are a bunch already it’s just fragmented and country specific. Sepa wero ideal girocard crates bancaires

I have always wondered what kind of shenanigans Mastercard or Visa did to convince so many banks to use their networks for debit cards.

When did banks actually make that switch?

It must be relatively recent, because I remember not that long ago my credit union ATM card was not part of Mastercard. Now I have a new one and it suddenly has a Mastercard logo.

They discontinued their debit networks Maestro and V-Pay, so they can get 0.1% more commission

And the result of that decision is that Europe is now moving away from both companies, so they will get 0% commission. Real genius move there.

Nah, that's because Trump is a dickhead. Otherwise that plan would have worked just fine

Visa/MC cozied up to major national banks in different countries (not just in the EU) and offered them a sweet deal the banks could not resist: ditch the national payment network in favour of our own cards and we will give a slice of each transaction fee. The transaction fees are tiered, with one part of it going to the payment network (Visa/MC) and the bank (card issuer) keeping the other part. For cross-border transactions, there is also (of course) the exchange rate that comes into play, and this is where each bank buffs its transaction profit margin up even further (as each bank sets its own exchange rate rather than using the interbank exchange rate), so…

… banks saw big, no, BIG $$$ and lost their minds. The transition was rather swift: between the very late 2000's and approximately 2015 (give or take a few years), the transition had been complete. Credit cards became a massively profitable and booming business for the banks, with all sorts of loyalty programmes and bonuses (at consumers’ expense, of course, as the banks also jacked up interest rates on revolving credits). Note that all of this took place before national governments stepped in to regulate the transaction fees.

This coincided with the growing allergy of Western governments to owning any critical infrastructure (including payment networks) and the rising trend of outsourcing as much as possible to the private sector. As it is easy to imagine, it did not take long for the national banks already being in bed with Visa/MC to convince their respective national governments to stop investments in maintenance and enhancement of domestic payment networks and delegate the payment processing to the cartel: «they can do it better than you do».

… all of which has led us to where we are right now. Technically, national payments are still alive, but they are more in the contained mode of operation and not in active use or development.

Easy when shops start supporting them.

I've paid numerous time using the swiss counterpart, Twint, in small shops. For some like the farm I used to buy vegetables to it was their only supported payment besides cash because they deemed the card systems too expensive.

The same way chinese tourists can already pay with alipay in many retatail outlets in europe, you can already pay with such european systems on Aliexpress. More are probably comming.

Annecdata. Not reliably feasible.

This is not anecdata, this is a slow but observable shift towards more payment systems.

The concept of a physical card is obsolete. That North Americans and western Europeans for a good part still use them is just stickiness of the infrastructure, and habits.

Developing countries have mostly leapfrogged to total contactless payments.

In South Aast Asia, you typically scan a QR code and approve a payment from your own phone. Far less fraud as a result. Nobody is able to touch your card, you don't have one.

Europe likely identified they better make the jump.

I can assure you that south east asians also still have cards, despite not making most of their payments with it. Not all ATMs support withdrawing with just a QR code from all banks, for one.

There are benefits to non-QR based payment systems, such as not wanting to pull out your phone, open an app, scan a QR and approve to make a payment that takes me 2 seconds with regular contactless payments.

Physical cards are also a nice fallback to have in cases of running out of battery, theft, etc.

I don't really understand why this is better than tap and pay with a card. Why would I want a single point of failure for both my communications and my ability to make payments?

Because your bank doesn't want the hassle of mailing cards. It's another reduction in quality for profit.

Qr apps just sound cumbersome compared to contactless tap to pay.

Contactless is the convenience provided to get us into some wall garden. Apple pay. Google pay. Samsung pay.

These are not open or interchangeable standard, they aren't interested in that. They want our valuable transactional data, and location when those are made.

QR codes are a standard. It allows any bank to issue funds. It's a wire transfer. Transfer are a standard. Any bank can adopt it. Typically a bank adopts it..it doesn't require a specific device or partnership for merchant, nor the payer.

It also offers the ability to transfer funds remotely. In that sense it is more so contact "less" than the proximity handshake that contactless payments do, which is somewhat proprietary.

You can save a QR code, make a payment later. QR codes also are more intuitive because they represent an identity. An electronic device that can be swapped, tempered with, is unhelpful to help figure out a fraud or who we are actually paying until the handshake happens.

More importantly they don't incur a hidden fee for either the payer or merchant. Because it's a transfer. Not a transfer disguised as card payment.

A QR code scan keep the payer in control. Merchant presents an amount to pay, payer initiates the transactions, approves, and gets a confirmation. Can use bank A, or Y, or even a bank in another country, so long as it supports QR scan and a fast wire so that the merchant can be assured the transfer is well received.

Yeah, but... QR codes are annoying. I live in Thailand and I have to scan them every day. Pretty much every time, I wish it was as seamless as Apple Pay.

> Far less fraud as a result.

Who returns your money to you if you purchased something on mail order with this, and it turned out to be fraud?

Third party escrow, if you explicitly used one. There's no free lunch.

And now you have invented Visa and MasterCard again.

Rather a dissociated escrowing from payment processing.

When you go to your local restaurant, do groceries you are paying a few percentage in tax for using you card.

Platforms online already act as escrow anyway. PayPal, Stripe, act as escrow..yes they take a percentage, but that's more granted for these cases.

I'm confused by your comment.

PayPal and Stripe are the payment processors who are taxing the card usage and acting as escrow. The technology part of transactions is with Visa and MasterCard. Who will do that part for free if they are not to be involved? What would be the benefit of separating escrow and processing, and how would it realistically be done?

And how do you do this without a phone?

I concede that's a drawback pushing us more dependent to owning and carrying a smart phone at all times. But I would say payments just piggy backs on a societal change that already makes it very challenging to opt for a brick phone or nothing.

Also to say, cash remains. That's more radical and effective as a fall back than a card which one can lose. When abroad I remember the anxiety of losing my wallet when abroad. With a phone, it's actually less problematic to walk into a shop, get the cheapest android in there and set up all my banking on it. Half a day of a holiday wasted, that's an acceptable inconvenience given the risk. Losing a card, not really.

There is no such societal change except this pressure itself. A plastic card is affordable, accessible, private, and easy to use for just about everyone. Smartphone not.

> Also to say, cash remains. That's more radical

> and effective as a fall back than a card which one can lose.

Cash loss is a thing, actually. Plus cash is more attractive for theft.

> The concept of a physical card is obsolete.

We have progressively absorbed single function items into a mobile computer.

Watch, notepad, calendar, phone, flashlight, camera, dictionary, encyclopedia, etc.

The issue with declaring single function items as obsolete is that it removes redundancy and really sets us all up for an increasingly more critical single point of failure in our pocket.

Wero is just one of many systems available that allow individuals to make transfers easily and almost instantly. There is also Bizum in Iberia and Blik in Poland. These instant phone-to-phone transfers are very popular, especially among young people who rarely use cash. Wero itself was launched by large banking networks because they had no solution to compete with neo-banks such as Lydia, which was a pioneer in this type of service. France has its own payment network, Carte Bleue, which dates back to when the very first smart cards were introduced, but it is not European. The real problem is therefore not a lack of projects, banks or services, but a lack of interoperability, too many players and geographical fragmentation. Europe is not fast, but it has worked wonders with SEPA transfers. It needs to put in place a clear timetable imposing the interoperability of these services. The absence of plastic cards is absolutely not a problem, just look at WeChat, Alipay, etc.

I think the misunderstanding is that when I say “credit card,” I do not mean a physical card. I have not used a physical card in years. In the US, when people hear Mastercard or Visa, they usually associate that with a credit card (virtual or physical), meaning the money is not taken directly from your bank account. You pay the balance later, which gives you credit and strong dispute protections.

Debit or ATM cards are different. They pull money directly from your account and can exist independently of Visa and Mastercard. For example, some credit unions still issue ATM only debit cards that are not part of the Visa or Mastercard networks.

> In the US, when people hear Mastercard or Visa, they usually associate that with a credit card (virtual or physical), meaning the money is not taken directly from your bank account. You pay the balance later, which gives you credit and strong dispute protections.

Europeans use these dispute protections much less, so Visa/Mastercard are mostly seen as expensive pass-throughs.

And I thing the misunderstanding here is that Europeans don't really use credit cards: we use the term "credit card" when we should use "debit card", but that's language for you. Literally, you have to go out of your way to get an actual credit card instead of the ubiquitous debit card everybody has.

And in Europe, when people hear Mastercard or Visa, they just associate the name with refused payments at points of sale depending on the luck they had with the merchant, or the foreign country, etc.

I do agree that in this case, picking MC/VISA is not really important. When I changed banks a few years ago, it so happened that I switched from a Visa to a Mastercard. Nothing changed save for the logo on the card.

I really cannot imagine a world without credit cards. How do you buy Christmas presents, everything in cash? I am half joking.

But that might be one reason why business ideas from the US do not always translate well to Europe, and vice versa.

Well, yes, we pay "cash" in the sense we pay direct debit. So literally the same as you, we tap the card. Except we don't have to keep track of the credit balance at the end of the month: money's taken directly from the account. The bank app shows you have enough? You're set.

As to how, in the financial term: we europeans don't really have the credit culture the US has. Having a credit is something very last resort, especially for "trivial" stuff (e.g. christmas shopping, to keep your example). Most europeans will have one or two credits tops: real estate loan, and sometimes car loan. Companies (mostly US) start offering payments spread over multiple months, but it does not really have a high penetration (at least in France), being in small useless debts is something we avoid like the plague.

And how do we have enough money in the bank? We just shop after payday, not after. Or, for most people, we keep a somewhat constant amount in the daily account. It's just another way of managing your own money.

Venmo isn't needed, because bank transfers are free and "real time" as in <60s.

even better, its not public.

> Venmo isn't needed, because bank transfers are free and "real time" as in <60s.

This depends highly on what countries and banks are involved.

If I (as a Swede) want to send money to my german friend, I have to use Revolut or Wise since going through my bank is an enormous hassle and involves higher fees.

I believe its similar to PayNow Singapore, UPI India, PromptPay Thailand etc where you register your phone number with your bank app, you can send money to those mobile who are on the same network using your bank app, or use your bank's app to scan a QR when making payment to a vendor. The QR code is actually the vendor's number. There are now cross border link, for example I can send money to someone in India using just his mobile number on UPI.

Europe finally realizing that payments infrastructure is geopolitical infrastructure

GO BLIK! Go! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blik

One of their job ads (https://careers.epicompany.eu/jobs/7187954-backend-engineer-...) lists AWS among the tech stack, which you just gotta love considering that the whole project is about moving away from US infrastructure.

You either wait until you can do it all at once and never do anything, or you make progress step by step.

As an european, I'm for all the european tech stack funding projects going on, but I'm also glad we move on these other issues without waiting forever.

I'm guessing US will be fuming about this.

One not-so-fun fact is that when the US sanctions anyone, their ability to transfer and use money via Visa etc. is taken away. In the modern world, being cut away from even using your debit card is a huge, massive hassle.

It is one of the many different ways being sanctioned makes life more difficult. I can't imagine the US being too keen on giving up those powers.

Whenever people say Bitcoin has no usecase, this is exactly my usecase. Of course, only in conjunction with Lightning (a layer 2 solution building on Bitcoin with anonymity and instant transaction settlement). Censorship-free, no relying on third parties, free and open source software to make and receive payments. Yes, I know, bitcoin is too volatile. The reason that it is volatile, is because it has almost no adoption compared to the Euro. But lightning can also be used to transfer stable coins - i.e USDT works via bitcoin taproot asset management. Now I don't trust a El Salvador baed company and thus not USDT, but the EU could fix this by having a central bank issued stable coin pegged to the Euro. The entire software stack would be based around taproot asset management and lightning, done in the open by the people, for the people.

>Censorship-free

and you think the EU would want that?

Good thing is, if we can live with the volatility, we the people, who want that, can have it. No matter what the EU wants.

What about the fraud protection offered by credit cards?

What about it? Once you have a decentralized digital payment system (no matter if its Bitcoin, Lightning, Stablecoins) any corporate entity can offer trusted escrow services for online purchases. As in, merchant verification, chargebacks etc. No need for the government here.

Crypto was and is inconvenient to use. So many years passed and almost nobody uses crypto daily. It's too inconvenient.

And it's not secure or anonymous at all. At some point you need to buy crypto or sell crypto, or buy some goods with crypto, and at that point you can be easily identified. Happened so many times.

Even here in Russia, under all US sanctions, only a few use crypto. It's so inconvenient that even under pressure of US sanctions it hadn't become more popular.

I would agree that no one uses it - but not out of convenience. It is an adoption problem, no one accepts lightning payments because no one has lightning balance. If you download a modern, non-custodial wallet such as Phoenix or Wallet of Satoshi, it is easier than paypal or my online banking website. It sure as hell is easier than opening any online bank account (Wise, Revolut etc.) as there is no kyc.

Regarding anonimity when exchanging, yes. But you can make the same point about cash. You are identified when withdrawing, and identified when depositing. You cannot be identified when cash changes owners, and the same holds true for lightning payments. So if anonimity is the same, lightning is still to be considered superior as it works also for online payments while cash is bound to physical means of payments.

Too bad Europe does everything it can to make it inconvenient. In the beginning of this year, when confirmo was finally getting popular, they banned european shops from using it.

How is this not the primary use case for a Blockchain? Of all the nonsense blockchains have been used for, this one actually makes sense. Just need a layer like Lightning with high throughput, and equally distribute network costs across the chain based on transaction amount, no?

If you need a lightning layer on top anyway, there is no reason to use block chain. It will be better for every single person and business to have an account directly with a European Union Central Bank.

No.

You'd add a lot of technical complexity, especially if you need this to be instant. You'd loose the ability to effectively fight fraud, and because of this get a huge target on your back attracting all sorts of unwanted behavior.

On the other hand, you'd gain... nothing? Especially since consumers cannot be expected to run their own blockchain stack, they'd need to fully trust their banks and intermediaries anyhow.

It should be enough to make it mandatory for banks to let people send money to each other for free, even abroad (within the EU). Then, at the shop, you can simply pay by making a bank transaction through the internet banking (which can be a phone app, a website, etc). The payment details (account number of the receiver, the amount, etc) can be transferred through NFC or a QR code.

Money would go directly bank-to-bank, nothing in the middle.

What is the benefit for the customer? This idea seems to only give minor benefits to businesses and no benefits for customers.

"Fraud" has become a major political weapon since "Operation Chokepoint" and earlier (check wikileaks)

If the government is going to act irrationally and (through visa/mc) prevent legitimate transactions then people will just deal with fraud.

Even if Europeans agree with the DLsite ban they see the writing on the wall for European eCommerce sites.

Why would anyone use wero when the digital euro gets released?

The article briefly touches this point but dismisses it saying wero and the digital euro complement each other, but doesn't go into detail on how. I see no point in a privately run digital currency when we can have a public one. I guess whichever has good privacy, reliability, ease of use and speed will win.

A digital euro is intended to the the digital equivalent of cash. It is issued directly by the central bank. Currently, consumers cannot have an account at the central bank. They have a balance at a commercial bank, and the commercial bank has an account at the central bank. Right now, you must have a private middleman to do any banking. The digital euro should offer a public alternative to that.

(but it probably won't ever happen, because banks are lobbying against it with FUD campaigns, they feel like it threatens their existence)

Wero is something completely different. It allows consumers to easily pay merchants, mostly online. The digital euro is not a payment network in the same sense as Visa, Mastercard, iDEAL and others.

Is it really not?

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/faqs/html/ecb.fa...

It says they'll have offline transactions, if they have that, then you can probably make those "offline" transactions from Kms away from the receiver. We'll see how things evolve, I'm still not convinced that wero will have any use once the digital euro arrives.

Wero is fun to use, but there so many features missing. The terminals, for example.

Or, an easy way for vendors or car rental agencies to block a set amount when you rent a car.

However, all of these things can be built and I hope Wero gets the time to grow into a full alternative to US-based payment systems.

Not because I want them to fail, but because this market can use a bit of competition and new ideas.

Yes, actually car rentals is the only reason why I still keep a credit card. I vastly prefer that to any kind of insurance.

Probably merchants like Netflix would also love recurring payment functionality. Let's just hope they'll make them cancelable this yime.

> neither Visa nor Mastercard will sit idle while Europe tries to dismantle their most profitable market.

Earnest question: is the EU really Visa and Mastercard's most profitable market? I would have expected it to be the US, both by customer volume numbers and in terms of regulatory environment (i.e. the US allowing payment processors to take a larger cut).

Speculation: Europe has a lower risk management cost than the US when it comes to card transactions, making it more profitable.

Smartcards with PINs were ubiquitous much much sooner (it being a French idea did not help for US market penetration), which means today the magnetic stripe on our cards is little more than decoration. Seriously, I'm 29 and I've yet to see a single magstripe payment here (while it was daily when I went to the US).

Also, we pretty much only have debit cards (don't know why, but don't know why I would want a credit card). This is even less risk for both the network and the merchant and the bank, reducing issues for all links in the chain.

Or the fact that Europe has 100M extra people in it, and a lot of countries seldom use cash nowadays.

"Consumer habits are deeply entrenched".

I disagree. In Portugal, MB Way arrived, allowing people to use their phone to send money to each other, or pay in terminals, and it was widely adopted. People want ease of use and low fees, not to keep their credit cards.

With this being said, the Digital Euro has more potential.

Ease of use, and a bit of customer protection.

Living in the Netherlands iDeal is perfect for online shopping, but once the money is gone there is no way to get it back.

With Visa/Mastercard there is a level of protection available which leaves the door open to get your money back if you are being scammed.

I believe Wero is going to implement this as well, so time will tell but I think any move to break the duopoly of Visa/Mastercard is good for consumers.

Whether this particular attempt is really the disconnect or not , it doesn’t matter. The train has left the station this time and they are going to replace the visa/mastercard duopoly. India and China proved it’s absolutely doable, the administration just pushed Europe down this path.

Switzerland and denmark have proven it is possible. An interesting challenge will be to see if these national systems can be integrated somehow. If so, problem solved.

If they are serious, they should replace every local system with one new, well thought out solution spanning across Europe. It should not be just a replacement for Europe but compete with visa all over the world. If done right this will be more attractive to the world than the monopoly and authoritarian regime based implementation that is visa/mastercard

A major win would be if this would be adopted at some point in the future outside of the EU.

In Asia you can pay with Alipay in most countries. In South America you can pay QR codes via Mercado Pago (for example).

Or at least make this new system interoperable with the more established players worldwide without the need for a Visa/Mastercard.

> National pride and competing banking interests repeatedly sabotaged attempts at unification.

That's exactly the problem. Several actors have won the market of their country, but only of their country.

Will Trump be enough to make the europeans realize that they need to work together, and that an italian win is just as good as a german win?

But more importantly, that walled gardens should be abolished and portability and compatibility of user accounts should be enshrined into law and protected at all costs.

That's a great point. With more open systems there can be multiple winners, instead of a single winner that takes all.

>and that an italian win is just as good as a german win

I agree with you

However that specific example somehow feels off and déjà vu

> and that an italian win is just as good as a german win?

For someone from france, sure.

For both italians and germans, it matters who wins (and i'm not making a pun here).

> to build a pan-European interoperable payment network covering 130 million users across 13 countries

wow, so not even all of the European Union, not even all Eurozone countries, hmm

I get their SEPA system but do they really not have a functioning credit network between consumers and merchants?

I m wondering why they are trying to build a competing product rather than a successor product?

The digital euro could be a good candidate here and it also aspires to have cash-like privacy features. It's also mentioned in the article as separate and hopefully non overlapping product.

CBDC euro upends the entire economic structure of the entire union, which could be very good or very bad and definitely needs to be approached with extreme caution. But card networks used with ordinary banks are a known quantity.

> Creating a viable alternative to Visa and Mastercard requires “several billion euros” in investment, according to EPI’s own estimates. Low interchange fees under EU regulation make profitability difficult.

I think it's absolutely amazing that "crypto" (from bitcoins to shitcoins) have turned out to be no more useful as a currency than chips from the local casino. This has damaged their ability to function as a simple currency that can be used to pay for goods and services. And they have damaged the reputation of the whole distributed ledger technology to the point where, in 2026, banks aren't even considering implementing a closed circuit inter-bank distributed ledger as a way to send euro from one bank account to another. If the digital currency in this closed system was actual euro, there would be no reason to speculate on its value and turn the whole thing into a circus.

I'm sure I'm missing something (a lot actually)

Lots of skepticism on how Europe could possibly handle something like that on their own.

NASDAQ (NYC) currently runs on software/systems built and maintained by Stockholm-based developers. NASDAQ merged with Swedish OMX in 2008, founded as Optionsmäklarna OM AB in the 80s.

> The Problem No One Thinks About

> Well, either the US or China.”

> The host’s response — “I didn’t realise this” — captured the broader European blind spot.

People have been firing warning shorts for years. It is not a blind spot. It is just being ignored.

If only they'd moved so quickly with Russian natural gas in 2008 when Georgia was invaded.

China successfully did this with UnionPay; no reason why the EU can't do the same.

China is a country.

I hope we can finish Environmental Impact Study, Data Protection Impact Assessments and perform State aid notification to the European Commission within my lifetime which would be a breathtaking speed.

Basically Europe solution to state/companies surveillance is an European managed surveillance, plus a CBDC to get even more into their citizens. Know your enemies, there are solutions out there.

the UK will be caught in the middle and lose out.

Not part of US not part of EU either.

what a losing proposition.

if it can be a card network with fraud protections that visa offer -- this will easily overtake Visa, Mastercard

Brazil with Pix have already proved this.

> the UK will be caught in the middle and lose out.

Not necessarily

If we can have visa and MasterCard while not being part of the US, we can potentially take part in whatever the EU creates

Bitcoin. Swish (Sweden) sees quite a lot of downtime. Why not settle for something that doesn't have these inherent issues that closed, proprietary systems have?

Because then you have the inherent issues that come from open, federated systems. ;-)

so something that is a horrible store of value, has monumental transaction fees, non-instant confirmation and is associated by laypersons mostly with speculation, fraud & illegal transactions will solve those?

You just described fiat.

Terrible store of value(worse than bitcoin) Horrible International transaction fees(swift much worse than bitcoin) Most money laundering and criminal activities happen in the current banking system.

That's just a deflection, and a great example of how to slow down crypto adoption.

Good to begin now , but again, we have been so naive and comfy.

We rode on USA infra for too long. Europe is full of "managers".

When China and Russia have their own pay systems, why not EU?

"Wero lets users send money using just a phone number — no IBAN, no card, no intermediary."

As long as all the other cards still get acceptance, this seems like a great system.

(Almost?) all these EU efforts to be independent from the USA are born with a fatal flaw. They require you need to be an Apple user or a Google user.

this don't require that.

https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599074240...

> The Wero app can be installed on any mobile device or tablet running iOS 16 or later, or Android version 9 or later. We recommend updating your device to the latest version of its operating system for maximum performance, convenience and security.

> It is not possible to use Wero via a web browser or on a computer.

Next step EU can force phone manufacturers to offer root access so we can start the year of the Linux mobile

North Korea would be very excited about this

Exactly. Taking control from Visa and MasterCard...and handing it to Apple and Google. Well done, EU

Your comment is of course downvoted

Right, but you do understand that solving every problem all at once is far harder than focusing on a few key ones and doing it properly right?

I am waiting for the multi-$24T breakup from any American tech. But I am not so optimistic and not sure if it will be $T, $B or $M.

Even if somehow EU is able to pull this off it would be a nightmare in terms of user experience. I live in Germany and this is how I would imagine it would work base on my experience in Germany.

1. You first need to install an app (because you want to use tap to pay)

2. Then you need to download another app to authenticate the first app

3. But to set up the 2nd app you need to wait for an actual physical mail which contains a code.

4. Then you set up the 2nd app, but then again it asks for you to do a KYC using your Id Card.

5. Now you need to download another app to do the KYC using your Id, but it asks for another code which you receive by physical mail when you got your Id years ago, but you have no idea where that mail or code is, now you have to request for another code and wait like 2 weeks till you get a physical mail with that code....

.... and the story goes on.

Then every app has to be always the latest version working only with the recent smartphone operating systems, of course the authentication is invalidated on app upgrade. They'll make sure to turn in into some insolvable hellish paradox.

You forgot the part where they send you two distinct snail mails, one with the username and one with a one-time password, for a double chance the post will lose one of the envelopes! Or the part where they silently truncate your new password to 6 digits because muh security.

I guess France and Germany are siblings in kafkaesque administrative shenanigans.

In Germany if they silently truncate your password and you contact their customer service, they will scream at you for not remembering your password. I guess this beats France.

> a pan-European interoperable payment network covering 130 million users across 13 countries

Why a subset of the EU and of Europe?

Sigh

The fact that EU sees dependence on American tech in the same way as Russian oil now is saddening and telling.

Americans and American companies had it really good - our tech extracted money from the world, and they were mostly willing to pay for it. And it was an incredible advantage to the US.

But now, it seems that we are happily throwing all that away, for what benefit I do not yet see. Regardless of whether this effort succeeds, why stoke this fire at all?

I would say I hope Americans realize what they’ve done by making their own companies enemies of the world at large, but I’m not holding my breath for any sort of self reflection.

Malignant Narcissists always self destruct.

trump is disliked by the majority of Americans, and his actions antagonizing Europe are disliked even by most republicans. this is an obvious fact accessible to anyone who reads the news. he will only be around for 2 more years and will be effectively a lame duck after republicans get crushed in the midterms, starting 2027.

all of this infrastructure Europe claims to want to build will take many many years to realize, particularly at the relaxed European pace. trump will be out of office by the time the EU has held it's fifteenth planning meeting to issue it's first strongly worded letter of intent.

The Europeans spent years scolding us for being warmongers. Then when Ukraine got invaded, they quickly switched to scolding Biden for not warmongering harder in Ukraine. Zero self-awareness.

America was called an "enemy of Europe" (before the Greenland stuff) even though it was more generous towards Ukraine than a bunch of European countries, and essentially every country outside of Europe. Polls showed that China has higher approval than the US in Europe, despite the fact that China actively supplies war material to Russia. Again, this was before the Greenland stuff (I'm against that obviously).

There's no point in trying to please these people. They regard us as a vassal state. They're not joking when they say they think of Americans as idiots. We should've withdrawn from NATO a long time ago. Hopefully Europe's corporate boycotts will help to pass Massie's withdrawal bill.

It will also be interesting to see drug prices in Europe rise after the Europeans spent years making fun of the US for high drug prices. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/02/tr...

The Europeans tend to reap what they sow in the US/Europe relationship.

Is there a problem? Americans keep saying that China has no combat experience and its weapons have not been proven in actual combat. Is there any doubt that a country that hasn't fought a war in decades is more popular than countries like the US and Russia, which are constantly at war?

I'm an advocate for the US withdrawing from NATO so we don't have to fight so many wars. I'm an isolationist, and I advocate a non-imperialist, Swiss-style foreign policy for the US. If you'll join me in that advocacy, then good.

Aside from Ukraine & Afghanistan war(and this one is for US self), what wars have been fought because the US intervened due to threats against NATO members?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_... -- initiated by France and Britain, proving that NATO is not a "defensive military alliance"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bombing_of_Yugoslavia -- another offensive "humanitarian" action

By withdrawing from NATO and pulling our military bases out of Europe, it becomes more difficult for the US to "intervene" in the Middle East at the pleasure of Middle Eastern interests.

Furthermore, if Russia invades more countries in Europe, I don't want the US to "intervene" with yet another "humanitarian" operation.

We can slash the size of our military and spend that money at home on healthcare, debt reduction, etc.

So here's the problem. Assuming what you said is correct, the US, UK, and France want NATO to be more than just a defensive organization. But what about other NATO members? They don't have as many interests to protect in Africa and the Middle East, but they need NATO to defend against Russia. So why should they care about competition between China and the US elsewhere?

and you said China actively supplies war material to Russia. but in early 2025, China’s top UAV export destinations were Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and the United States, https://www.airmobi.com/from-billion-dollar-orders-to-global... why Netherlands need so many UAV? That's why polls showed that China has higher approval than the US in Europe.

I don't know why you expect us to solve your Russia problem. Why don't you ask your new friend China for help? As Europeans themselves have said many times, the US does not do a good job playing world police. We need to stop warmongering and involving ourselves in the affairs of other countries. It never does any good.

Furthermore, Europe has very little soft power in the US at this point. There's no region of the world I am less interested in helping. With every post I read from you guys, I understand more and more why my ancestors left that place. Think of it this way: We need to reallocate money away from our military, and towards our healthcare system which you guys are always making fun of. Does that help make my point clear?

As a user named raven12345 stated:

>Is there any doubt that a country that hasn't fought a war in decades is more popular than countries like the US and Russia, which are constantly at war?

We in the United States need to stop involving ourselves in so many wars. Plain and simple. You said it yourself.

>So why should they care about competition between China and the US elsewhere?

Where did I say that? I don't want the US to be competing with China. I'm an isolationist. I prefer a Swiss approach to foreign policy for the United States.

>That's why polls showed that China has higher approval than the US in Europe.

So we need to drop sanctions on Russia, like China has done, so that the Europeans will like us more?

"...companies — possibly with the tacit approval of customs authorities — have also engaged in classification fraud, concealing sensitive goods under misleading labels. In addition, some shipments are routed through third countries to disguise their final destination in Russia. By continuing to publish detailed customs data, Beijing openly signals its disregard for Western trade sanctions against Russia. But the data reveals only what China chooses to make visible — and it remains unclear what volume or categories of trade may lie beyond the published figures."

https://kinacentrum.se/en/publications/china-russia-trade-in...

"To help prevent a further deterioration of Russia’s economy and defense industrial base, Russia has leaned heavily on China. China-Russia trade reached nearly $250 billion in 2024, up from $190 billion in 2022.46 China has been Russia’s top trading partner since 2014, with its share of Russia’s foreign trade increasing from 11.3 percent in 2014 to 33.8 percent in 2024.47 In addition, Russia relies on oil exports to China, which now make up about 75 percent of China’s imports, compared to a pre-2022 average of between 60 and 65 percent.48

In the defense sector, China has significantly increased exports to Russia of “high-priority items,” a set of 50 dual-use goods that include computer chips, machine tools, radars, and sensors that Russia needs to sustain its war efforts.49 While Russia lacks the capacity to produce many of these goods in sufficient quantities, China’s massive manufacturing sector can produce a number of them at scale.50 Chinese exports helped Russia triple its production of Iskander-M ballistic missiles from 2023 to 2024, which Russia has used to pound Ukrainian cities.51 In addition, China accounted for 70 percent of Russia’s imports of ammonium perchlorate in 2024, an essential ingredient in ballistic missile fuel.52 China has also provided Russia with drone bodies, lithium batteries, and fiber-optic cables—the critical components for fiber-optic drones used in Ukraine, which can bypass electronic jamming.53"

https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-grinding-war-ukraine

Contrast the $250 billion Russia/China bilateral trade figure, with the $146 million worth of drones which the Netherlands imported from China. Like comparing an apple to a grizzly bear.

$146 million is also fairly tiny compared with the $60 billion worth of weapons that Europe bought from the US over 2022-2024: https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/military-balance/2024/1...

When you buy weapons from the US, it's a worrisome dependence on an evil warmonger. When you buy weapons from China, it's "yay we are buddies with China now". See why I've had enough of your "friendship"?

For years, Europeans have sharply criticizing the United States for sometimes partnering with authoritarian countries. It's fascinating to see the rapidity of your reversal: how eager you now are to partner with China, an authoritarian country which happily trades with Russia. It goes to show that this "don't partner with authoritarian countries" stuff is just disingenuous virtue signalling.

> your Russia problem

Unless you have already prescribed to the acceptance of big countries swallow the small ones at whim, it is not only our problem. Also Russia gaining control means often the USA loosing.

> Why don't you ask your new friend China for help?

Who said China is the friend of Europe? The USA has become a new unpredictable adversary, while China is an old enemy. Human nature is just to choose certainty over uncertainty even if that is actually worse.

> We need to reallocate money away from our military, and towards our healthcare system

I don't think EU countries have a problem with that. They rather complain, that you are currently allocating money to a military, that wants to attack EU states and to a para-military that attacks USA citizens.

> So we need to drop sanctions on Russia, like China has done, so that the Europeans will like us more?

It is that China is seen as evil anyway, so nobody expects them to sanction Russia for real, while we didn't saw the USA that way.

> For years, Europeans have sharply criticizing the United States for sometimes partnering with authoritarian countries.

You don't criticize enemies, you criticize friends. I think the criticism also was more that you create authoritarian countries, partnering was also done by European nations, that's called realpolitik.

>Unless you have already prescribed to the acceptance of big countries swallow the small ones at whim, it is not only our problem.

The US is a big country. Why would it be affected by a problem of big countries swallowing smaller ones?

The Europeans always argue that the US only acts in its self-interest. But then when they explain why helping Europe is in the self-interest of the US, they always have the most nonsensical arguments.

>Also Russia gaining control means often the USA loosing.

I favor a policy of neutrality and world peace, not rivalry between major powers like the US and Russia.

>It is that China is seen as evil anyway, so nobody expects them to sanction Russia for real, while we didn't saw the USA that way.

Why is China more popular than the US in European opinion polls?

>You don't criticize enemies, you criticize friends.

That doesn't make any sense, you criticized Russia plenty. Furthermore, European "criticism" of the US is far too mean-spirited for it to be plausible that you are our friend. (That's been true for decades.)

>I think the criticism also was more that you create authoritarian countries, partnering was also done by European nations, that's called realpolitik.

Interesting how "realpolitik" can be used to explain European behavior but not American behavior.

Nothing new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Committee#Issues

That's exactly the problem. US foreign policy analysts think that every issue is the next WW2, and that leads us to military misadventures all over the place. Utter foolishness.

It's always the same double bind. If we are involved, we're called imperialist. If not, we're called complicit. There's no way to win.

Earlier you wrote:

  > I favor a policy of neutrality and world peace, not rivalry between major powers like the US and Russia.

The thing is, nobody's offering you that. In the ideal scenario for Russia, the US would be mired in internal conflict and instability to such an extent that it would be unable to function as a country, leaving Russia to dominate the world:

  > Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States and Canada to fuel instability and separatism against neoliberal globalist Western hegemony, such as, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists" to create severe backlash against the rotten political state of affairs in the current present-day system of the United States and Canada. Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social, and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics#Con...

In other words, they want an endless line of Donald Trumps to ruin your country and turn it into a banana republic so that you wouldn't have the energy to pay attention to Russia stomping over the rest of the world.

Why would any American voluntarily choose this fate?

So according to you, the current state of the US is a result of us trying to "contain" Russia and protect Europe through NATO. Can you see why I wouldn't be particularly enthusiastic about continuing to do this?

None of this would've happened if we had avoided imperialism post-WW2.

No, the Euro-Atlantic alliance produced incredible prosperity in its heyday.

The current deteriorating state of the US is the result of departure from the previously held values and forms of cooperation. Nothing illustrates this better than the US president openly threatening the sovereignty of Canada and Denmark while accepting massive bribes from Arab sheikhs and calling genocidal dictators like Putin his "friends". This is the wet dream of people who want to see the US fail.

Why would any American want to hit the gas pedal and accelerate even further down this road?

The US prosperity trend has been the same before and after WW2:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/GDP_per_...

You yourself just explained how Russia saw us as a threat and destabilized our politics, which lead to the current situation. We would have been better off if NATO was never formed.

If you believe I'm a Trump supporter then you're misunderstanding my position.

Russia sees you as a threat since 1917 and you aren't going to change that. You can blame that on Germany if you want, but the German regime has been toppled since four times, so good luck holding anyone accountable for that now.

Russia has made major leaps in destabilizing your politics since we (the EU too) believed we won the cold war and stopped treating the Russian empire and allies (which China definitely was, now it's more equal or the opposite) as a threat. The USA also has a superiority complex, like most European nations also had, which certainly isn't helping now.

> If you believe I'm a Trump supporter then you're misunderstanding my position.

You said the USA going isolationist is going to solve problems, which granted isn't as extreme as the Trump foreign policy, i.e. it won't fuel the worsening of the current situation, but it isn't going the improve it either.

  > The US prosperity trend has been the same before and after WW2:

GDP alone doesn't tell the story, because it has become detached from real income metrics: https://aneconomicsense.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/going...

  > You yourself just explained how Russia saw us as a threat and destabilized our politics, which lead to the current situation. We would have been better off if NATO was never formed.

No, Russia fundamentally wants to see you fail and take your place in the world. Without NATO, that would've been simply easier. You can castrate yourself, but that will not change their goal.

>GDP alone doesn't tell the story: https://aneconomicsense.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/going...

Other sources disagree: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=l...

But it doesn't matter--you're arguing that prosperity for the average US worker began stagnating about 20 years after the formation of NATO. That's basically an anti-NATO argument, from the US perspective.

>Russia fundamentally wants to see you fail and take your place in the world.

My goal is to abandon our place in the world and be like the Swiss. I don't want to destabilize yet another country (Russia in this case). We're gonna have to live with Russia whether we like it or not.

  > Other sources disagree

"Consumption" figures are also misleading. In monetary terms, Americans consume more health services than anyone else, yet have fallen behind in life expectancy: https://ourworldindata.org/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/qLq-8BTgXU8... Key life milestones like getting a college degree, starting a family, buying a house, or retiring have all become much more difficult to achieve despite skyrocketing GDP figures. Less and less of the total wealth (which is growing) is reaching the average American family.

  > But it doesn't matter--you're arguing that prosperity for the average US worker began stagnating about 20 years after the formation of NATO. That's basically an anti-NATO argument, from the US perspective.

The prosperity of the average worker did not begin to stagnate when NATO was formed, but indeed decades later, when the US began to diverge from shared values to pursue financialization of the economy, deunionization and other forms of free-market radicalism that have set it apart from other advanced economies. NATO allies and US workers have been abandoned alike to pursue short-term gains, whether from outsourcing to China or cozying up to kleptocrats who promise to share their loot personally with the US president, his family, and his business buddies. Why should any American support this?

  > My goal is to abandon our place in the world and be like the Swiss. I don't want to destabilize yet another country (Russia in this case). We're gonna have to live with Russia whether we like it or not.

I don't think you understand what it means in practical terms. Switzerland is entirely surrounded by the EU, and its economic prosperity depends on access to the European Common Market. Switzerland must follow the policies adopted by the EU without having a voice in the process, because it is not a member of the union, yet the Common Market is vital and losing access is not an option. Switzerland has to abide by EU's state aid and competition rules, manufacturing standards, and countless other policies, but Switzerland cannot even restrict entry of people from the EU to live and work in the country. Again, why should any American want to lose control over their country to such extent? Are you really ready for an European-South American economic alliance that dictates how many Mexicans can enter the US or how much subsidies you can pay farmers? I seriously doubt that.

As for Russia, you have the luxury of shaping the kind of Russia you live with. Is it the Russia that enslaved half of Europe and is using their brains to build a massive stockpile of nuclear missiles to blackmail you while you dig shelters in your backyard out of fear for your life, or is it a different, more peaceful Russia that has abandoned imperialism like Germany was forced to? Isolationism is a fool's errand. You can very well pretend that the war in Ukraine doesn't affect you, but consider that the nuclear missiles Russians tried to set up on Cuba were built in Ukraine. Would you rather have Ukrainians living under Russian boot and building nuclear missiles to burn down American cities, or have them building rocket engines in support of NASA space explorations programs like they did in the same Soviet-era nuclear missile factories in the early 2000s? It's not a difficult choice.

Most countries in the world don't have a choice and have to deal with whatever the life throws at them. You do have choice. Use it wisely.

>"Consumption" figures are also misleading.

I don't see why they would be, generally speaking.

"it’s very difficult to look at a country where the typical person lives in a larger house, is more likely to own a car, eats more meat, and uses more electricity than people in other rich countries, and to conclude that this is “a poor society”." https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/no-the-us-is-not-a-poor-societ...

>In monetary terms, Americans consume more health services than anyone else, yet have fallen behind in life expectancy

US life expectancy has little to do with our healthcare system. See https://xcancel.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799742228144130#...

>The prosperity of the average worker did not begin to stagnate when NATO was formed, but indeed decades later

My claim is simply that NATO is not key to our prosperity. Post-NATO stagnation, insofar as it exists, is quite compatible with that claim.

>Switzerland is entirely surrounded by the EU, and its economic prosperity depends on access to the European Common Market.

None of the objections in this paragraph would apply to a more geopolitically neutral US. The US economy is large and relatively self-sufficient. Imports and exports are a relatively small fraction of our GDP.

>nuclear missiles Russians tried to set up on Cuba

...after we set up missiles in Turkey...

The Cuban missile crisis demonstrates the danger of American belligerence, and the importance of us being more peaceful, less paranoid, and more neutral.

> But it doesn't matter--you're arguing that prosperity for the average US worker began stagnating about 20 years after the formation of NATO. That's basically an anti-NATO argument, from the US perspective.

Irregardless of what the economic data actually says, why is this to be blamed on the NATO? I don't see the causal relation. If there was indeed something in the 1970s then I would default to blame the oil crisis.

> My goal is to abandon our place in the world and be like the Swiss.

They were directly in between the other nations in WW2 and capturing them made no sense for the others. They are also pretty small and lie in naturally protected mountains. I doubt the USA can become that, they are just too large.

Also the Swiss just gave that up partially. How much is currently under dispute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_neutrality#Russian_invas...

> We're gonna have to live with Russia whether we like it or not.

Yeah, I guess the US is in the privileged position that they can make that decision baring cyber attacks and domestic destabilizing.

I'm not sure exactly what you refer to with "the current state of the US". Domestic issues (e.g. personal financial struggle of the populace, "immigration", and cultural war like ICE), economic issues (bubbles, monopolies) or the role of the USA in world politics? It's the latter, that was the topic of the discussion so far, but I'm not sure if you call that "the current state of the US".

"mopsi" stated how you going isolationist and stuck in domestic struggles, is following Russias plan. So no, the current state of the US results in you stopping to

> "contain" Russia and protect Europe through NATO.

So this is what the EU complains about and tries to tell you: you follow Russians plan and that can't be in your best interest. (Not that the EU would be free from such interests either.) Do you think Russia would leave you alone when there plan succeeded? That would be the biggest success of Russian policy since 1945. When they can get you from the major world power to being a isolationist country with domestic struggles, why would they stop?

> None of this would've happened if we had avoided imperialism post-WW2.

I think you need to define terms here. What exactly counts as "imperialism post-WW2" and what not? I mean the arms race let to the collapse of the soviet union, so I guess until to the 90s it went pretty good for the countries part of the "First World".

If you wouldn't have stayed in Europe after WW2, the USSR would have reached to the Atlantic. And no not just in 1945, they also tried that in the 50s and continued to want that. Not sure, if you already know, but Putin was in prison in Germany in the 90s for trying to topple the German government and his goal was to expand the "Soviet/Russian" empire to the Atlantic. He was already ~40 and has served in the KGB before, so I guess he hasn't changed his opinion since.

>When they can get you from the major world power to being a isolationist country with domestic struggles, why would they stop?

Why would they continue?

>If you wouldn't have stayed in Europe after WW2, the USSR would have reached to the Atlantic. And no not just in 1945, they also tried that in the 50s and continued to want that. Not sure, if you already know, but Putin was in prison in Germany in the 90s for trying to topple the German government and his goal was to expand the "Soviet/Russian" empire to the Atlantic. He was already ~40 and has served in the KGB before, so I guess he hasn't changed his opinion since.

Interesting. So the US saved Europe, you say. Yet we get nothing but complaints, mockery, and condescension from Europeans. You mock us for the same military-industrial complex which saved your butts. Wonder why we aren't interested in saving Europe again?

> Why would they continue?

Because they like to increase their influence and territorial control and already did the hard part? Granted the USA becoming like Iran or Venezuela today seems a bit of a stretch. I honestly lack the imagination how a USA in ten years, that hasn't had elections that actually affect things, serves the best leader of all time and is a major ally of Russia looks like. There will also be so much other territorial changes in that scenario.

> Interesting. So the US saved Europe, you say. Yet we get nothing but complaints, mockery, and condescension from Europeans.

I don't think you get much mockery about the US cold war policy *in Europe*. Granted these people exist, but they also often do sit in the same party that merged with the ruling party of the GDR.

> You mock us for the same military-industrial complex which saved your butts.

I think a military industry propped up in war times by the government, and the resulting military complex having subverted civil rights and politicians are different situations. A military that is conjured by the people makes a country stronger, large "dead capital" in weapons and industry starting to control the government becomes dangerous.

> Wonder why we aren't interested in saving Europe again?

To some point yeah. I'm not going to say the EU hasn't made bad decisions in the last 30 years. I don't see it that black an white, so e.g. "So the US saved Europe, you say." I would say the US in alliance with West-European nations did save Europe, the Morgenthau plan wouldn't have helped against the USSR either. But my main argument for this discussion is, when the USA go isolationist now, it first messes up a lot of other things in the process and second the same will repeat that happened in the 1940s, there will be the need for the USA to intervene, because it affects their bottom line, and the situation will be much worse, and it causes much more loss (of human life).

This is essentially the same that process the EU just went through. It did "nothing" in 2014, because that is not NATO and we don't want to get involved in a war, and now it became worse. (I think our "we did get involved too much" is Yugoslavia, to some point participation in wars with the US and of course WW2.) Now we did get involved, because the next border will be a NATO and EU border. Sure, we can say it won't happen, Russia is not THAT strong, but the next decision would be to either get the EU in a complete war against Russia, or to give up on the territorial integrity of EU states. And we don't want to face that.

If we continue the discussion, I think it stops to make sense to treat both the US and the EU as single entities, because in both there are parties that have been arguing for one policy and for others.

Both intervening with the military jimmy like toppling democratic regimes and turning a blind eye like going isolationist are two sides of the same coin of ignorance and thinking it won't actually affect you.

> US foreign policy analysts think that every issue is the next WW2

If "US foreign policy analysts" would actually think that these situations might lead to the next WW2, then you wouldn't counter them with destabilizing countries, that leads to the rise of extreme parties and then treating them with ignorance. Because THAT is exactly how WW2 happened.

> If we are involved, we're called imperialist

Deploying the military is not the only way to get involved.

> It's always the same double bind. If we are involved, we're called imperialist. If not, we're called complicit. There's no way to win.

If other countries say that has bad consequences, you deploy the military, if they say we need your help here, you turn the blind eye. I mean you are a sovereign country and can do what you like, but you do it, because your administration thinks that is a good idea, not because all the other countries would tell you to. You frame it like other countries called for action and you did them and now they complain. No, they told you they won't like that, and you did it either way.

>Both intervening with the military jimmy like toppling democratic regimes and turning a blind eye like going isolationist are two sides of the same coin of ignorance and thinking it won't actually affect you.

Nope. Just the opposite. The reason the US did regime changes during the Cold War was because we were paranoid that communism would affect us. We need to be less paranoid.

>Deploying the military is not the only way to get involved.

Doesn't matter, we're called imperialist however we choose to get involved. Ever heard the term "neocolonialism"?

>If other countries say that has bad consequences, you deploy the military, if they say we need your help here, you turn the blind eye.

Even when US military action is requested or approved of by people in the country, we're still called imperialists. Consider the war in Vietnam. The South Vietnamese were attacked. We came to their aid for some time. They kept fighting after we left. Yet this was still described as "neocolonialist" activity on our part. That's how our actions are always described.

> Nope. Just the opposite. The reason the US did regime changes during the Cold War was because we were paranoid that communism would affect us. We need to be less paranoid.

I was more thinking of "post" Cold War interventions.

> Doesn't matter, we're called imperialist however we choose to get involved. Ever heard the term "neocolonialism"?

Yes. The US isn't alone in that situation. The EU is described as neocolonialist in the same way. Personally I think that is stupid and we shouldn't have let us be influenced by that. Now Europe stopped being "neocolonialist" and the Chinese has taken over that role in Africa. Now it's much worse both for us (EU) and for Africa. Great.

> Consider the war in Vietnam.

Honestly I wasn't alive and don't know the public opinion of that time. I basically only know it from history class. The rough sentiment is that the French messed up and the US has payed for it. It's true, that some actions in the war are portrayed as bad, most famously Agent Orange, but I think the war in total isn't blamed on the US.

> That's how our actions are always described.

Reading the other thread you linked, I think you have a worse view of the public opinion of the US then it actually is.

> Why would it be affected by a problem of big countries swallowing smaller ones?

Because of less trading partners? Because supply chains exist? Because big evil empire is still better than bigger evil empire that is also a neighbor? Because treating problems when they are "small" is less resource-intensive then when they have grown? Because you have military-bases in these regions that you use to project power across the world? Sorry, but don't say you don't find them useful. If you wouldn't have a use for them, you wouldn't use your software power and money to maintain and them. Europe has long appeased the national interests of the USA as inheritance of the world war two, which like you say has also raised reluctant opinions.

> they always have the most nonsensical arguments.

Do you seriously think, that globalization can let you reap the world as a cash cow, but aggression, war and destruction in a not so far part of the world, even if it is no longer your ally, won't affect you?

> Why is China more popular than the US in European opinion polls?

I already addressed exactly that:

>> The USA has become a new unpredictable adversary, while China is an old enemy. Human nature is just to choose certainty over uncertainty even if that is actually worse.

It is just not known what the USA are going to do in the next 10 years. From slippery-slope to an open alliance with Russia to do a Polish-style division of Europe and America, over war with China to actually having midterms and a 180° turn in policy, all seems possible.

> That doesn't make any sense, you criticized Russia plenty.

While believing to have some power via financial ties. Now it's back to formal complaints and deadlines.

> European "criticism" of the US is far too mean-spirited for it to be plausible that you are our friend.

From the European viewpoint the criticism on the US administration is what would be also in the interest of the US populace. The US electorate of course begs to disagree, they elected Trump after all. Sorry, that protesting against expansion of corporate and state surveillance, influence of the military industry conglomerate and erosion of worker and environment regulation offends you personally. I fail to see how that is mean-spirited.

> That's been true for decades

The same criticism has existed for decades, but the official policy has stayed the same for a long time, namely that supporting "our" camp in world politics is worth compromising on international law, human rights and national security interest.

> Interesting how "realpolitik" can be used to explain European behavior but not American behavior.

It literally just used the word to explain American behaviour.

>Because of less trading partners? Because supply chains exist? Because big evil empire is still better than bigger evil empire that is also a neighbor?

None of these arguments make much sense.

>Because treating problems when they are "small" is less resource-intensive then when they have grown?

I don't think it is a problem for us either way. No one is going to attack the US.

>Because you have military-bases in these regions that you use to project power across the world? Sorry, but don't say you don't find them useful. If you wouldn't have a use for them, you wouldn't use your software power and money to maintain and them.

The US has made many mistakes in its foreign policy. I've made my opinion clear on that. Just because we did something in the past does not make it a good idea.

>Europe has long appeased the national interests of the USA as inheritance of the world war two, which like you say has also raised reluctant opinions.

Well you'll be glad to stop then.

>Do you seriously think, that globalization can let you reap the world as a cash cow, but aggression, war and destruction in a not so far part of the world, even if it is no longer your ally, won't affect you?

Tell that to the Swiss.

American soldiers should not die due to European ineptitude. There were only 2.5 years between Pearl Harbor and D-Day. Russia invaded Ukraine almost 4 years ago. If you truly believed this was an existential threat, then you've had plenty of time to prepare.

>It is just not known what the USA are going to do in the next 10 years. From slippery-slope to an open alliance with Russia to do a Polish-style division of Europe and America, over war with China to actually having midterms and a 180° turn in policy, all seems possible.

How about you respect our ability to determine our own foreign policy, and take responsibility for your own issues? As I said, stop treating us like a vassal state and telling us you know what is best for us (as you do in your comments). I'm not the only one who notices you doing this: https://substack.com/home/post/p-158145261

Look at this argument I had the other day... a European spent a bunch of time condescending to me, and wasn't able to muster a single factual argument in favor of their position. This sort of thing is very typical in my discussions with Europeans: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46742363

When Elon Musk endorses parties in Europe, Europeans complain he is interfering in their politics. The trouble is that Europeans have been doing the same in US politics for a heck of a lot longer. It's always the same patronizing and ignorant interference, based on a caricatured view of the US: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/eurocope "Haha, Americans are dumb. Haha, Americans die in school shootings. Haha, the American healthcare system sucks." All along, we've been deterring Russia for Europeans, and now as a result, Russia is working to destabilize the US (according to another commenter in this thread). I'm sick of it.

Think of it this way. I want out of NATO, so as to reduce the influence of the evil "military industry conglomerate". Just like you yourself said, we need to reduce its influence -- which means reducing our military size and commitments. Get it? I'm just taking your arguments to their logical conclusion.

Using a US debit card in France will continue to be awful.

Wero isn’t even supported by all banks in the EU. :/

All banks in the EU are part of their respective national pay schemes. They need to figure out a way for the national pay schemes to add wero compatibility.

with Apple Pay no data goes to America, it's straight to your bank for auth, i believe it also bypasses mastercard/visa, no?

Wirecard[0] round 2.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_scandal

logbuch netzpolitik did an episode last year about this wero and honestly… i got the impression it doesn’t bode well for wero

Good. To hell with american corporations!

That's 2-3,5% extra growth for the EU.

I didn't care at all about Wero until Trump indirectly declared us Europeans as enemies. Now I really hope that it manages to replace Visa/Mastercard.

Though at least in Germany we have "girocards/EC-cards" that are not owned by Visa/Mastercard. Some banks are phasing them out in favor of a Visa/Mastercard debit card.

So maybe this is just an attempt to make Wero a bit stronger in comparison to PayPal. AFAIK Wero does not replace a credit card.

In the end we will need to thanks Trump if we actually get a more federated and less centralized Internet (well, or layers on top of the Internet)

Think Global, Act Local

all EU policies are joke, that's all you need to know.

23% of people in Poland, assembled luggage in case of war. Yet EU is still buying russian gas and oil.

and they don't have permissions to military to pass through in case of help from country to country

This is about control, not sovereignty.

I hate having to use visa or mastercard when better options exist but the solution is to allow competitive solutions and make surcharge mandatory so customers bear the cost of their payment choices.

In the begining of this year, they basicly banned EU merchants from using confirmo (crypto payment gateway), when it was finally getting traction.

Visa stock is essentially unchanged in the last month, in the last three months.

Competition is good.

Will it be accepted in hotels abroad? Can i withdraw cash at ATM abroad? Can i add it as a card to my Google wallet?

Usually banks app are nightmare. Pins everywhere, extra passwords. MFA not with my dongle....

Sigh.

Seriously, I have had no issues with visa or mastercard. This euro-nationalism is odd to me.

> A coalition of 16 banks thinks it has the answer.

Oh! That's exactly what we all needed - 16 banks suggest their own "system", even more crude and clumsy imitation of the surveillance standards of payment systems and marketplaces, which shielded banks from snitching clients' consumption patterns.

They don't need anything advanced like Apple Pay layered tokenizations that at least respects a little of privacy. Everything is linked to a single phone (the article states that the focus is on Bizum and those pathetic peer-to-peer payment systems). The banks are in good shape to capture data, the tax authorities have a clear picture of how to squeeze the plebs even more - nice.

How about stablecoins with native yield from ECB treasuries? It solves everything and costs nothing. But we see what happens in US - "treasuries spread is not for plebs", - banks say.

Trump has destroyed the US. I know it’s a generic comment but he has left us friendless, broke and eating ourselves.

I for one enjoy my cash back points with American Express. This is not a commercial.

After paying 5% Commission to them in the overpriced stores that take it. Great Job, you played yourself

Nope. Merchant pays.

And who pays the merchant? I think you're this close to getting it...

> And who pays the merchant?

Card and cash users alike.

That is correct. And I get 10-30 000 usd in business class tickets per year for a fraction (only paying taxes) with companion tickets and bonus points to buy business tickets. It is an expensive hobby but totally worth it.

I am also about to score life time golf status at one of the airlines. Yes thank you

If the store increases prices due to cash back cards, and I don't have a cash back card, then I'm losing. If I have a cash back card, then I'm losing less.

Or you just shop at a store that doesn't accept American Express and charges lower prices.

Amex acceptance is lousy for a reason

Reads like Wero AI slop. Which it probably is.

Trump is so crazy, it made Europe build alternatives to Visa and Mastercard. Unprecedented.

Good.

Now, what will happen in the UK.

We will see how it works out.

I have a recent background as a member of the Senior Management of one of the largest banks in Europe (8 years stint).

I worked in IT - and build the only successful platform for financial services done in-house and to ever make it as a standard not because management tried to force people, no because it solved customer's problem (external and internal customers aka employees).

I don't buy any of these EU is going fully independently. EU's IT isn't capable of doing this. No way ever ever.

I will 100% of the time bet against it. I saw so many things, experienced so many things - and no way is there anyone out there in Europe who to this day simply can acknowledge and appreciate the marvelous work and evolution that for example Google took or any other startup to leading global business like Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and so on.

Even IBM's mainframe: if you do not understand the very problem they solve - don't talk about "independence from X".

There is no successful startup from Europe, that has any results like the mentioned. All have to do with IT, all went from idea to what they are now.

And Europe now wants to do what?

All my fellow European's here boasting around: I feel sorry for you. All the "Let's build our own Google" (Google search) folks that predated the other independence stories like this here simply disqualify themselves the moment the say out loud such sentences.

Read 5 books about Engineering at Google, read the HTML5 spec by searching for Ian Hickson, go to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA - and tell me that EU is going well in IT independence in taking a totally different approach, ignoring every and any circumstance and context the mentioned companies had, using design by committee, state dictated orders, establishing standards by enforcing them by law instead of evolution and being the best there is.

Good luck, we will see how it went.

And no, building something that looks somewhat okish from the outside, but is utterly crap inside - we talk about, excuse me my corporate language I was penetrated with, "best in class world leading number one" apps that leave any comparable solutions in the dust - just as Google, Apple, Microsoft etc. did.

If you cannot win in free markets - you declare victory by misusing regulation. That's cheap and well, socialism.

All of you will beg that all the systems and providers will still do business with you after years of trashing them.

Are Mastercard etc. awesome? Are they objectionable? Of course - but trashing them, boasting you will easily beat them while having the double standard on relying on them freely is disgusting.

All EU patriots: Throw away your iPhones, deinstall all the US apps - use at least existing Open Source alternatives. Cancel your Netflix, Microsoft Office subscription - do it.

Good luck anyway. After all, you are doing a live experiment on the head of the people forced to live with a minorities decision.

So I guess we'll have a system whose API is "open and interoperable", meaning "spread across 3000 pages of 5 ETSI TS PDfs that nobody can understand, with the only integration environment available after an expensive security audit, and requiring you to send an email to an email address that hasn't existed for the last 5 years."

2026 is really the year of USA going down in history. US dollar is collapsing, its stock is having a hard time, Europe is ditching US techs like Google and Microsoft and now this.

Visa/Mastercard are the biggest evil. Why do you think Trump got pissed at Brazil having its own payment system without Visa/Mastercard network deleting billions in revenue from Visa/Mastercard

The problem major problem is already mentioned: Each EU country wanna have their own independent system. Nothing prevent the countries from doing that but it must talk within the same payment network so people in the Netherlands can buy from Italy using their own payment system.

Own payment system is different than payment network :)

> Wero lets users send money using just a phone number

Of course, what could go wrong!!

Unbelievable, a chance to make a whole new standard, new system, new everything, but yet we still have the need to tie it to ancient protocols, only to find later it’s broken by design and we start adding all sort of duct tape solutions to make it “secure”..

This is either a completely and entirely stupid move by some boomers living in the 80s, or maybe, it’s intentional to enforce something insecure like a phone number/GSM as a “national ID” to easily track citizens and force them to have a phone number linked to their real life, and I think it’s the second one, the same reason why many “secure” chatting apps still require a phone number.

TBH many European payment apps use the phone number as an ID and people seem to love it. I share the privacy concerns but if I don't want someone to know my phone number I just give them my IBAN.

I would rather give out my Phone Number than watching my account for sketchy direct debits if I was wary of some person

It screams of needing a Google or Apple app

We have had these apps in various EU countries for quite a while and it's been fine. You can get a prepaid SIM from a grocery store and register it with them, and so on. You can always SEPA transfer the money if you don't want to use this.

It's also more convenient than giving out an opaque UUID to your friend to transfer you money or something similar.

The bigger problem I see with this is it being one more service locked exclusively to Android and iOS devices, but it's the same with most currently used banking apps anyways.

> You can get a prepaid SIM from a grocery store and register it with them

After you provide your gov ID

https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/sim-card-regist...

So now this phone number is tied to your gov ID and bank account, amazing design of a single point of failure based on a broken protocol (GSM).

I don't know how the procedure looks like in wherever-you-are but in EU phone number is required to either have a call from agent or to receive verification codes from text messages if bank you've pick offers opening an account on your own. Either way, bank gets all your personal data - you are not anonymous for them.

And the SIM registration requirement in nearly every EU country exists for 10 years now - in my case it was as simple as replying with code to operator's message because they had my personal information already for over a decade. There was a grace period after which unregistered SIM cards become dead - the requirement was dubious but you had to comply in order to call, text. There were "solutions" I've bumped on in depths of the Internet but neither felt serious nor safe.

> After you provide your gov ID

I could get it without an ID and my (EU member) country is painted green/blue on those maps in your source. I always love it when people from abroad try to tell me how things work in my country, when they clearly have no idea.

Once European banks realize how horrible EU is to do business with they will reunite with Visa

European banks operating in EU countries, using Euros, and under the European Central Bank already know things work.

Not to mention that some of the alternatives are owned by a consortium of... European banks.

That is not true. EU members barely understand their own regulations and often out source to US firms for this.

Crypto gets a lot of hate... but this really puts its utility into perspective: No counterparty risk with random banks or foreign companies, near-instant settlement, vastly lower fees, immediate fx conversion.

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