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.
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).
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.
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).
Just like I access hacker news by the Internet, not by IP address.
UnionPay can. They are accepted in many parts of the world, and they are free from US restrictions.
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).
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.
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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
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