Hacker News Reader

Comment by __rito__ | Hacker News Reader

Can someone tell me why the EU doesn’t develop something like RuPay?

Indian UPI gets mentioned a lot, but when Visa, Mastercard didn't agree with data sovereignty rules among other rules, India quickly developed RuPay [0]. Now most debit cards in India are RuPay. CCs stand at 18% share.

They also integrate seamlessly to UPI.

Why doesn’t the EU consider something like that? They want to jump direct to digital currencies? Is that it? Something else?

[0]: Data rules came in 2017/18, RuPay was developed in 2012 iirc. But it got unprecedented push after the rule.

View on HN

They are, it’s called Wero. It is a stopgap, and sits on top of SEPA.

Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207004 - May 2026 (777 comments)

Wero – Digital payment wallet, made in Europe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47038965 - February 2026 (132 comments)

Europe's Banks Launch Wero Payments to Dislodge Visa, Mastercard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41666833 - September 2024 (88 comments)

Unofficial Wero Adoption Tracker - https://www.werotracker.eu/

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

Is Wero something you can hold in your hands?

RuPay is just like Visa/Mastercard in the sense you get physical cards that you can use at ATMs, use at ecomm sites, etc.

Wero doesn’t seem to be that. Am I missing something? Does making a new direct alternative to Visa/MC doesn’t make sense for the EU? If so, why?

Cards (as implemented in the US at least, i.e., with individual purchases not confirmed by the cardholder) are a relic of a different time in many ways.

If you're building out a brand new system, why not make use of the computing device with input/output capabilities (that can be used to confirm amount, payee etc.) almost everybody already has in their pocket/purse anyway and instead rely on merchants being honest and only taking what they're owed out of your account without your confirmation?

Of course physical cards will also play some role in any future EU payment system, if for nothing other than resiliency (a card works without any battery and is cheap to keep in a drawer or suitcase as a backup for a stolen phone) and sovereignty (note who makes most phones' operating systems and runs their attestation providers).

Okay, thanks. I get it.

ATM cards are still safer than mobile based payments.

Elderly fraud in the US, scam/fraud calls and digital arrests in India are made possible by social engineering attacks and duping people.

For ATMs, if one has online transactions turned off (default option when you get a new card in India for most if not all cards), it is impossible. One has to walk to an ATM in a crowded place, insert the card, enter a PIN, and can only then withdraw money.

Millions in India use debit cards this way.

> ATM cards are still safer than mobile based payments.

> For ATMs, if one has online transactions turned off (default option when you get a new card in India for most if not all cards), it is impossible. One has to walk to an ATM in a crowded place, insert the card, enter a PIN, and can only then withdraw money.

So you're really saying that not being able to transact cashlessly at all is safer than being able to do so? I'd agree, but it's also somewhat inconvenient.

> If you're building out a brand new system, why not make use of the computing device with input/output capabilities

There is no sovereign EU mobile OS. Adding a hard dependency to Android/iOS is removing one US hard dependency in your payment stack to add another. So, physical cards are a must until there is a European mobile OS with widespread adoption (i.e. never).

Unfortunately, the EU approach here has been not only adding this iOS/Android hard dependency, but also locking it down with crap like device attestation to make sure that it is impossible to use their "sovereign" systems without a US corporation (Google/Apple) certified device. They are actively hostile to alternatives like Lineage or Graphene for instance.

Yes, I acknowledged that in my second paragraph.

Oh yeah, let's put our financial sovereignty in the hands of American companies who have been fined repeatedly by the EU for breaking various laws. Seriously, if you have a problem with MasterCard and Visa, I can't imagine how you could NOT have a problem with Alphabet and Apple.

Sometimes it's worth reading the whole comment you're replying to.

> If you're building out a brand new system, why not make use of the computing device with input/output capabilities (that can be used to confirm amount, payee etc.) almost everybody already has in their pocket/purse anyway and instead rely on merchants being honest and only taking what they're owed out of your account without your confirmation?

Because I'd like to be able to pay for things even if my phone is out of battery. I'd also like my grandma to be able to pay for stuff without bringing her phone to the store.

Don't get me wrong, I like being able to pay with just my phone. But I'd like a fallback option (in theory, cash is this too, and I do carry that, but it's used to rarely these days).

The largest payment systems in the world, in China [1] [2], India [3], Brazil's Pix [4] etc, leverage QR codes and other non card primitives for moving value. You can encode EMV [5] in a QR code [6].

> Wero doesn’t seem to be that. Am I missing something? Does making a new direct alternative to Visa/MC doesn’t make sense for the EU? If so, why?

To avoid US government control of your payments and US corporate payment processor extraction of value via your payment flows. How do you avoid someone else controlling your infra? You instantiate, operate, and maintain your own infra. Brazil runs their instant payment system Pix for ~$10M/year, for example. The cost is very reasonable to do so.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAChinese/comments/1qgq6ya/why_di...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/chinas-digital-payments-r...

[3] https://easebuzz.in/explainers/upi/upi-qr-code/

[4] https://dev.to/woovi/how-does-pix-qrcode-work-5e3k

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV

[6] https://www.w3.org/2020/Talks/emvco-qr-20201021.pdf

Wero is more UPI-ish than RuPay-ish. RuPay is just a local card scheme (Europe has a bunch of these on a national level, but attempts at an EU-level one have largely gone nowhere).

This is literally what the article is about - Digital Euro and Wero are two competing solutions that are debated right now.

Wero isn’t a physical card if I am getting this right.

RuPay is.

You get a physical cc/dc with RuPay as provider instead of MC/Visa.

If I am not missing something, Wero is not that.

That is what I wanted to know: why not a traditional, homegrown card that is a direct 1-to-1 alternative of MC/Visa cards? Does that not make sense for the EU now? Why?

> why not a traditional, homegrown card that is a direct 1-to-1 alternative of MC/Visa cards

Because the European market is fragmented. France, Italy, Germany, etc all have some sort of established localized payment system and in some states like Ireland and the Netherlands are entirely dependent on Visa.

There is no "pan-European" bank and individual states still care about their sovereignity. France will continue to back and support BNP and Credit Agricole against Germany's Deutsche Bank (and vice versa). The only solution at that point is to just bypass the whole problem and just go directly with mobile payments.

Additionally, China, India, and Brazil began building their DPD stack in the 2000s but European states didn't start until the last 2-3 years.

> why the EU doesn’t develop something like RuPay

We used to have Europay, which competed with Visa and MasterCard. But it merged with MasterCard in 2002.

If you were starting from scratch today, though, would you really re-invent credit cards? There was at some point I think a vague plan for a European debit card network (at least one of the national debit card network actually supports foreign issuers on a technical level, though I don't think in practice this was ever implemented), but really, why use the card format, beyond "well, this is already a thing"?

> would you really re-invent credit cards

Probably something like it. 99% of my transactions are card / tap payments. The last thing I need on my main bank statement is 100s of small transactions - bucketing these into a separate "account" is 3/4 of the point of using a credit card for me - the alternative is entirely separate "cash" like account the only difference then would be paying in advance vs paying in arrears (I do both).

It's simple: banks don't want the people they've fleeced to realise that they no longer have a role in the present age. If you let legal tender be exchanged directly via a central bank (which is semi-public by nature), banks lose a huge amount of liquidity that fuels fractional-reserve banking through loans made to generate massive amounts of cash, and without these, the banks are bust.

In many countries, at least some banks are nationalized. India’s biggest bank SBI (State Bank of India) is a PSU (Public Sector Undertaking).

UPI still connects with bank accounts.

My question was about something else: why EU doesn’t try and develop a homegrown card provider? It would provide exactly what MC/Visa does. Are we beyond that point in terms of technological advancement? Some other reason?

> why EU doesn’t try and develop a homegrown card provider? It would provide exactly what MC/Visa does

They have. A combination of petty squabbling and the lack of any real value proposition has always killed it. To have any chance of succeeding in the EU a new system needs to be something that no-one currently provides, because consumers are unlikely to adopt something that isn't clearly better than what they currently have, but more importantly no EU country is going to adopt a different EU country's system.

It took some time but RuPay branded CCs are also available. I have been using them for the last 2-3 years at least. They work, mostly, with UPI.

Some merchants disable RuPay CC payments even when they don't get charged merchant fees till the payment crosses the INR 2K threshold.

Strangest thing is when I can pay the guy pushing a handcart around selling vegetables using a RuPay CC while a medical store refuses to accept it.

The medical store is cooking the books.

100%.

My colleague's father runs medical store. He apparently cooks the books too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com