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Comment by m12k | Hacker News Reader

We desperately need to break Visa's stranglehold on access to the consumer side of commerce. As long as everyone's only innovating and competing on the merchant side of things, we're not really going to get anywhere.

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You're free to make your own card network. How will you convince banks to issue your cards and merchants to accept them?

You mean like the EU digital wallet

You're free to try and make something like that.

They are making something like that as we speak. I’m not sure why though, they’ve had free SEPA Instant transfers for ages now.

Many EU online shops accept SEPA payment. It isn't convenient, because it's a push payment (giro) which means the site can't stick it in the middle of the order flow and expect it to take a few seconds. Some users might have to visit a bank branch to send payment.

Not all banks do SEPA Instant, yeah. I suppose the answer to that is connecting using PSD2 and sending the payment request then checking payment actually went out (using something like https://gocardless.com/). Many countries also have local bank link systems (e.g. in the Baltics it’s common to have dedicated buttons in the payment form for the big 3 or 4 banks everyone uses).

I’m talking about in-person payments though. It would be so easy to implement QR payments backed by the existing SEPA Instant rails. Many bank apps already understand EPC QR codes (usually found on invoices), so shops could just show these to accept payment. In case your bank doesn’t support SEPA Instant, you could show the cashier the receipt in your bank app, which, well, horribly insecure, but probably fine for low-stakes cases like grocery shopping (you don’t want to be banned from your grocery store chain for forging a 35 € payment).

One problem with SEPA Instant is that it can sometimes fall back to regular SEPA which takes a few business days.

Are you prepared to protect customers by refunding them if they are victims of fraud when using your payment system? Visa and MasterCard are prepared to do that. That's how they could convince consumers to use their cards without worrying.

Clearly consumers do worry, since the ones found in this comment section are saying they refuse to use a card as it could be stolen.

Millions of card transactions are made every day. If consumers worried, they wouldn't have credit or debit cards and they wouldn't use credit or debit cards.

What a single hacker writes is on the other hand just what he wrote.

Millions of people type their banking username and password into services like POLi, too.

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