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

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.

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.

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.

Now, what will happen in the UK.

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.

/s

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

Amex acceptance is lousy for a reason

> 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.

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.

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?

As long as all the other cards still get acceptance, this seems like a great system.

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.

Why a subset of the EU and of Europe?

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_scandal

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

  > I favor a policy of neutrality and world peace, not rivalry between major powers like the US and Russia.

  > 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".

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?

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.

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.

[1]: https://www.taler.net/en/

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.

Money would go directly bank-to-bank, nothing in the middle.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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)

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.

It's free, their tech is great and their fx rates are more than fair.

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

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.

So sorry, we do definitely get what this entails :)

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?

They didn't just switch. They purchased Discover.

edit: added the "just"

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.

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.

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.

… 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.

Europeans use these dispute protections much less, so Visa/Mastercard are mostly seen as expensive pass-throughs.

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.

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?

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.

  > Other sources disagree

  > 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.

  > 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.

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.

Let them focus on offering a payment system, and let others focus on their thing.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Sorry: This is Spain (to clarify).

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.

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

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

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.

It works for the purpose to pay something online.

If you want an example, Eurowings.

I thought Carte Bleue no longer existed?

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/nfc-gate-relay-attacks-2026/5...

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.

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.

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.

Even before UPI credit cards were common accepted online. So I am not sure about that as well.

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.

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.

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 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.

If you build it on IBAN it already works everywhere.

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.

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)

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!

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.

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!)

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.

That's ridiculous. Why should I, as a consumer, care about the merchant's "risk?"

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

You need to look at both sides of the transaction to figure out the total.

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.

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.

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).

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 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.

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?

There's a reason every European PSP charges 2-4x higher fees with Amex cards.

Wero is basically a rename (and territorial expansion) of the Dutch iDeal system, which processed €141 billion Euros in 2024.

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.

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.

Isn't that like the entire purpose of government and law - to help citizens come to a consensus?

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?

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

Opposed to what America has become.

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.

(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)