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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.

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.

>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.

> 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...

>Sure, there's an hypothetical risk of the EU turning sour.

European citizens getting sanctioned by the EU (basically a death sentence), is not hypothetical, IT'S REAL.[1]

Page 11, Jacques BAUD and Xavier MOREAU, Swiss and French nationals respectively, were sanctioned by the EU along with a laundry list of Russian nationals, on the accusation of being russian mouthpieces, with no due process or public trial where the EU could show their evidence and they could plead their case and defend themselves, but no, the EU just acted as judge, jury and executioner on the spot just because it didn't like what those people, that nobody has ever heard of, were saying about Ukraine and Russia in public.

I would get it if they only did this to russian citizens living in Russia in the current geopolitical context, but doing this to your own citizens living here is an unaccountable excessive use of force without democratic or humanitarian checks and bounds. This is far more dangerous than what any US tech company could do to us here.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...

Moreau is apparently a Russian citizen living in Russia since 2013. I have some concerns about process, but not for these guys. People working for enemy intelligence services tend to get treated harshly.

>Moreau is apparently a Russian citizen living in Russia since 2013.

Is he not still a French born citizen deserving of a fair trial? Or should getting a dual citizenship of a foreign passport, of a nation that later becomes an adversary, become an automatic death sentence? US should then put all it citizens with Cuban and Iranian passports in jail with that logic.

And then what about Jacques BAUD who's Swiss living in Belgium? He doesn't deserve a fair trial either? On what grounds? With what evidence?

How can you justify dishing out death sentences without trial? Remember that blindly supporting the authoritarian hand waving of due process with no trial or evidence, just to easily get rid of undesirable people, can always be used against you too, if what you say becomes undesirable when politics shifts.

This isn't a death sentence? But they probably do deserve legal redress. And jail sentences.

>This isn't a death sentence?

Being sanctioned means no bank will touch you, meaning no employer and landlord will touch you, meaning you don't get a national insurance health card to receive healthcare, and you'll be homeless and begging for food.

How is taking away all of someone's means to survive NOT a death sentence?

> Being sanctioned means no bank will touch you, meaning no employer and landlord will touch you, meaning you don't get a national insurance health card to receive healthcare, and you'll be homeless and begging for food.

How does being sanctioned by the EU *while living in Russia* do that?

Since when does Russia care?

(Assuming of course that the claim you responded to was in fact correct, that he has been living in Russia since 2013).

>How does being sanctioned by the EU while living in Russia* do that?*

Because Jacques BAUD is NOT living in Russia but is living in Belgium like I said 3 times already.

Has reading comprehension gotten THAT bad?

> Has reading comprehension gotten THAT bad?

  Assuming of course that the claim you responded to was in fact correct, that he has been living in Russia since 2013

Did anyone of them die?

Is unaccountable government legal overreach an issue for you only when you die by it?

To me death sentence has very specific meaning.

> Or should getting a dual citizenship of a foreign passport, of a nation that later becomes an adversary, become an automatic death sentence?

You seem to be invested in trying to stitch together flimsy arguments based on specious reasoning.

Your so-called victims are Russian agents with Russian nationality which have been engaged directly with a totalitarian regime that is engaged in war across Europe, both cold and hot.

You don't even try to argue for innocence. You know they are agents and guilty, but somehow opt to shift focus to technicalities. Why?

>Your so-called victims are Russian agents

WHere's the proof that they are? Would you be OK is someone accused you of being a russian agent because you criticized the EU too much, and sanction you with no opportunity to defend yourself in court?

>You don't even try to argue for innocence.

Why would I? I don't know if they are innocent, that's why I want a public trial.

>You know they are agents and guilty

I Don't know that. That's just what the EU told us. That's why I want a public trial.

> Where's the proof that they are? L

I think you are discussing topics you are not familiar with, or you're being disingenuous.

In case you live under a rock and chose to comment on issues that you know nothing about, you can start reading up on this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46973777

> Would you be OK is someone accused you of being a russian agent because you criticized the EU too much, and sanction you with no opportunity to defend yourself in court?

If I'm ever assigned Russian nationality and collaborate as a Russian observer on russia's sham elections on occupied territories, be my guest. Do you think you'd be wrong?

> Why would I? I don't know if they are innocent, that's why I want a public trial.

Yeah, you have been claiming ignorance on the topic. Willful or not, that is to be determined.

It's weird, however, how you invest so little effort to educate yourself on the topic but still feel compelled such strong opinions on doubts and technicalities and turning blind eye to foreign interference.

Anything the government does should be viewed with the lens of "do I want somebody who hates me to have this power".

Do you honestly expect us to just turn a blind eye to Russian assets spreading disinformation in a time when Russia is literally waging wars of genocide in Europe? No. Strip his nationality and let him enjoy his Russian passport.

> Jacques BAUD and Xavier MOREAU, Swiss and French nationals respectively, were sanctioned by the EU along with a laundry list of Russian nationals, on the accusation of being russian mouthpieces (...)

If this is the best example you can muster, you don't have much of a case.

They are Russian nationals pushing propaganda for a totalitarian regime which has been engaging in wars of annexation throughout Europe and whose threats of nuclear war against Europe are pushed on almost on a daily basis.

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/12/18/who-are-the-we...

> I would get it if they only did this to russian citizens living in Russia in the current geopolitical context, (...)

They are. Nevertheless, it's stupid to even consider the idea that only foreign nationals can be foreign agents.

>They are Russian nationals pushing propaganda for a totalitarian regime which has been engaging in wars of annexation throughout Europe and whose threats of nuclear war against Europe are pushed on almost on a daily basis.

Where's the proof beyond reasonable doubt resulting from a trial, that those European citizens have done the things you say?

Or is Euro News propaganda supposed to be the only proof on which EU gets to throw people in jail without trial?

Shouldn't you get a trial where you get a chance to defend yourself before being sanctioned? I swear you people are cheering for 1984 authoritarianism to buttfuck you.

>Nevertheless, it's stupid to even consider the idea that only foreign nationals can be foreign agents.

As long as they are EU citizens, they deserve a fair EU trial and not just get sanctioned because EU says "trust me bro" about people they want to see disappeared.

> Where's the proof beyond reasonable doubt resulting from a trial, that those European citizens have done the things you say?

Are you nuts? Not only does the guy run a company dedicated exclusively to push Kremlin propaganda, he literally presents propaganda program's in Kremlin's RT.

Are you living under a rock?

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2023/12/15/the-web-...

At this point it's evident you are either playing the role of wilful ignorant, or heavily invested in being contrarian.

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.

> 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.

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.

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’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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

> 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.

They literally get arrested for posting memes.

‘They’ literally didn’t.

They who and what?

They’ll give you a small handful of examples, of which a number occurred in the UK (famously not a member of the EU), most of which were actually arrests for incitement, and of the remainder the majority were thrown out before ever going to trial, or subsequently on appeal.

Very few of the cases they present will have involved citizens being murdered in the streets by the government for exercising their absolute right to free speech.

The UK has more arrests for social media posts than any other country in the world, including authoritarian countries like Russia, Belarus, etc. Germany is the third highest. Both have thousands, not "a small handful".

Ah, the Joe Rogan school of geopolitics finally rears its HGH malformed head

{1}https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/wales-englan... {2}https://pa.media/blogs/fact-check/fact-check-international-d... {3}https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tommy-robinson-uk-speech-cla...

Most of the erroneous conclusions come from a cursory interpretation of a Times article from last year:

{4} https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...

In 2023, UK police forces made around 12,000 arrests under the Communications Act 2003 and the Malicious Communications Act 1988. These laws cover sending messages that are "grossly offensive, threatening, indecent, or menacing over communications networks" (which includes social media). Prosecutions resulting tend to come from a small subset of serious crimes - stalking, incitement to hatred, endangering minors etc...

This was gleefully misinterpreted by Musk, Steven Forbes and the rest of the right-wing braintrust as "12,000 people were arrested for saying politically incorrect things."

Germany at third highest is equally in the realm of complete fantasy. The Tagesschau debunked it and concluded that the German numbers make no sense. There is no statistic in Germany for the number of arrests, but the number of people investigated is lower for the period claimed and not all led to arrests so the number is simply a fabrication.

https://www.tagesschau.de/faktenfinder/grafik-festnahmen-onl...

Finally, the notion that China or Russia would self-report less cases than the UK and expect the figure to be believed is farcical. There isn't even something comparable to the anti-activism laws or the HK47 in the UK.

In general, Europe does not subscribe to the US absolutist version of freedom of speech.

At the same time, most European countries are also way more resilient against authoritarian takeover.

> 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

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...

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.

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

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

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

Only from corporations, but not from their own governments. A lot of Europeans put a lot of blind faith into their governments and the EU, and criticism of these institutions is usually met with accusations of being a bot, MAGA or russian troll.

>The European institutions are characterized by a huge devision of power.

Didn't really stop them passing whatever rules they wanted during Covid, did it? Or today with Russia and Ukraine situation. Sure is convenient that we keep having more and more crisis and boogiemen that governments can leverage to deflect accountability and bypass the wishes of the population, for our own good of course.

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

Famous last words. People always can be, and routinely are, manipulated to vote against their own best interests, even if everyone claims manipulation doesn't work on them. The propaganda industry is HUGE. Why do you think Germans supported to tie themselves to Russia's gas and destroy their nuclear power. Was it all their original thoughts or was it a massive campaign of dis-/mis-information designed to get everyone on board the same train? And mass manipulation like this is every other Tuesday these days. See Cambridge Analytica.

A individual person can be smart, but people together as a collective voting block, are stupid, and the elites treat us like cattle, as seen in the recent files.

> Sure is convenient that we keep having more and more crisis and boogiemen that governments can leverage...

The problem with this phrasing is it makes it sound hyperbolic, but it is important to remember the world is large and there are always, in a literal and normal sense, multiple major crises going on at any moment.

People who don't pay much attention to politics sometimes get confused about why crises elevated by the corporate media get ignored. A big answer is becuase they are elevated for political reasons, usually the crisis is fairly routine in absolute terms.

>there are always, in a literal and normal sense, multiple major crises going on at any moment

True, but my point I wanted to draw attention to, is HOW these crisis are handled now, not that there's many of them.

Every crisis now seems to be exclusively used as a vehicle to justify taking away just a little bit more of your freedom and anonymity, or implement more fiscal policies that will leave you footing the bill but just so happens it will be enriching the wealthy as a side effect.

Because such policies shoved out the door in times of crisis, don't pass through the lengthy public debates and scrutiny regular policies have to go through, so it's the perfect opportunity to sneak and fast-track some nefarious stuff in.

I'm not that old yet, but I don't feel like this backdoor was misused to this extent in the past, like pre-2008 I mean (except 9/11 of course). It definitely feels like politicians have gooten of taste and are abusing this exploit now more with every little opportunity.

>Didn't really stop them passing whatever rules they wanted during Covid, did it?

>Or today with Russia and Ukraine situation. Sure is convenient that we keep having more and more crisis and boogiemen that governments can leverage to deflect accountability and bypass the wishes of the population, for our own good of course.

>Why do you think Germans supported to tie themselves to Russia's gas and destroy their nuclear power.

You see you might get called a bot, Russian troll, or MAGA a whole lot less, if you didn't pull out ALL the topics those groups are playing at once. There is plenty to criticize about the EU institutions, but man that is a very odd focus.

Two things can be true. While the user you're replying to has a weirdly focused agenda and insistence, some of the points raised are definitely valid.

I do not agree with the overall conclusion that "EU bad". But there are some pretty bad things going on, and the trend is definitely concerning. If you wait until you're on fire, you waited for too long.

>but man that is a very odd focus.

So Germany decides to tie itself to Russian gas ignoring the critical voices warning them, and then the people who point that out that mistake get called Russian trolls?

Great argument bro, what else you got?

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

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

>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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

After a fair trial and appeals process, right?

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Every government is an attacker.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

> 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

> 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.

>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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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).

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...

> 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).

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 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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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)

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.

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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".

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!

My friend says even the poorest Indians use it.

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

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.)

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).

> 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.

> 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.

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

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.

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

> 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.

> 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?

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.

Free cellphone roaming is a big plus.

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!

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

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

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!

> 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.

> 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).

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.

> 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?

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

Visa bought Carte Bleue in 2011. Yep.

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

Nice... /s

I thought Carte Bleue no longer existed?

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

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...

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

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.

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

Sorry: This is Spain (to clarify).

Real independence requires thinking about the full stack

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/

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.

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.

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’m sure Brussels will do the right thing.

What does Belgium's capital has to do with this? Do you imply Brussels = European Union?

It is called a metonymy where you substitute a name that is associated to some other thing instead of mentionning that thing.

Some examples: Wall Street = NY Stock Exchange the White House = US president and his cabinet the Pentagon = US Dept of Defense Downing Street = UK prime minister

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy Scotland Yard = Greater London Metropolitan Police Tehran = Government/officials of the islamic republic of Iran

As a person who lived for a long time in a political capital I was so frustrated with news articles titled like this.

"[City] decides [XYZ stupid thing]!!!"

No! We in the city didn't decide it - our responsibility is limited to our political representative. Everyone else voted in idiots and sent them here to decide idiot things!

This is a common literary device in wide use everywhere. No one is saying that YOU PERSONALLY did something just because you live in a place. Chill out.

That works until you are speaking with people who literally ask why our city is deciding so much stupid stuff. Recall average intelligence and how many people are dumber than that.

The media shape perception but they don't help with critical thinking...

When the media say "Pentagon" is attacking Iran, there's just no level of mental acrobatics you can do to ever arrive at the idea that the actual physical Pentagon building is growing arms and legs and traveling to Iran.

If you truly believe this is a real problem then you need to turn off your internet and touch grass.

>It is called a metonymy

or called synecdoche (square/rectangle)

Brussels = location of EU headquarters, and in common lingo Brussels thus means "People running the EU and deciding things on everyone's behalf."

"Brussels" is often used to mean the entire blob of EU and related institutions.

Exactly, it's just like people saying Washington to refer to the US government, or Beijing to refer to Chinese government.

This literary device is so common it has a name: synecdoche. e.g. "The pentagon" to refer to the US military.

Now we just need a word for performative dense-ness.

I would not assume denseness -- many/most languages do not have this habit of referring to the capital. So it can easily sound weird if you aren't that immersed in English news and discussions.

I am not assuming denseness, I'm assuming performative denseness. People very often pretend to have stuff go over their head in a sad attempt to make a point.

It's kinda funny because in French, it depends on the situation.

If it's a French decision, you say "Matignon has done x" with Matignon being the home France's President. If it's local, you say "the mayor" , and if its European, you say Brussels.

In Canada, if it's federal, you say Carey's government, if it's provincial the name of the prime minister, or the name of the party and if its local, you use the mayor's name.

But in this situation, the ECB cited in the article is in Germany, not Brussels, with a high independence from the EU, but yes, with the Parliament in Brussels.

So I was downvoted because I asked why OP mentioned Brussels just to be sure that is wasn't the usual "eu bad" post.

Cunningham's law in action I guess.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> That's why business can flourish much more in the USA.

And look where that's gotten you.

Indeed!

Nah, more like the money is lent out because it's so profitable to exploit americans addicted to debt.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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)

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.

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?

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

Their self-harming has been impressive.

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

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

In Europe you typically have travel insurance on debit cards as well.

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.

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...

What? Where? I don't believe this to be common, and have some doubts about this existing anywhere at all.

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

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.

"Credit limit: £1200"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

I meant to write misunderstanding, sorry about the typo.

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.

> 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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).

> 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...

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

I agree the risk transfer is very important, but Visa and Mastercard don't do that (they just facilitate it)

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.

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.

Unlike americans, the rest of the world isn't as addicted to credit cards, and operate on a mostly debit based system already.

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.

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.

Lawsuit time! Against your bank.

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.

> 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 :)

> - 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.

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")

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.

This risk is all covered by the banks, not the interchange networks?

A debtless society probably wouldn't suffer as many catastrophic economic recessions/depressions though (usually a result of cascading liquidations/unpayable debts)

That's all the bank's problem, not the network's.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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...

Switch? We mostly use debit cards today.

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.

Replacing EM dash with "--" doesn't take away LLM smell.

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

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)

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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-...

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

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."

> 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.

> 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

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

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)

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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 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.

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?

> 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.

> 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?

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.

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.

> 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?)

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.

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

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

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.

> 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."

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

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.

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

> 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.

> It's just multiple computers keeping a balance. It's not complicated.

I'd argue this was the trolling

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 addition and subtraction, how hard can it really be???

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...

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

What about it?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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!

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

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.

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).

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.

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

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".

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.

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.

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.

Yes and a missile is just a big can of propellant. It’s not complicated

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.

Hosted on Amazon and Digital Ocean from what I can tell

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. >>

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?

The real leverage isn't elimination it's optionality

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Those two countries are also at war, hot and cold respectively, with the powers that be.

japan mostly uses paypay, just saying

One positive aspect to Trump is he makes it desirable to punish/break up with US companies .

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"

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...

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?

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.