Chief of Dutch Central Bank: US influence on payment systems is concerning, working on alternatives for Visa and Mastercard.
DNB maakt zich zorgen over Amerikaanse invloed op pinbetalingen
Please expand it to Canada too. We need a real alternative to Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover.
Canada shares a land border with Denmark and a maritime border with France.
I think that is sufficient to include them in any extended EU schemes.
(To the degree that they want it, of course)
France shares a land border with Brazil, we should get them into the EU as well.
Canada shares a land border with Denmark
🤔
A maritime border with France.
🤔
We also administer Vimy Ridge in France. While it isn't Canadian territory, we have been granted permanent usage of it. It's a little bit like a land border. :)
Canada has interac for debit no? Could that same system be used for credit transactions?
Too bad about crypto.
This is the exact kind of situation it was meant to deal with: finance independent of bad entities. But it’s such a dumpster fire…
I don’t think there’s a purer example of social media engagement hype, predatory capitalism, and disinformation ruining something neat so quick.
social media engagement hype, predatory capitalism, and disinformation ruining something
I mean, it still works for getting around Visa and Mastercard. For instance it can be used to make donations to various media piracy groups. It's just that it's so useful to scammers and many people see the technology as a whole as being one 'brand'.
It really depends on the cryptocurrency in question. Some coins are much more credible than others. Lumping them all in together is like saying that the Japanese Yen and the Lebanese Pound are the same.
Doesn't work when the valuation goes up and down like a yo-yo. You need same currency.
Stablecoin is a thing. So is a system to control inflation.
The more pressing issue to me is the core premise: a totally anonymized but publicly recorded financial system makes no sense, especially when the user generally won’t grasp it. It’s just begging for thieves and scammers, and that’s what it got.
Unlike fiat currencies most of the credible cryptocurrencies have increased in value over the past 10 years.
But you can use the technology behind it
Too bad about crypto. You mean cryptocurrencies? Which ones?
All of them?
Big/popular ones have been taking over by the day trading/tech bro crowd.
Small ones seem to be in the realm of scammers/hypers, and there is no way to sort through the sludge.
Those in the middle seem to spin with no traction, and even stablecoins or the GNU one have some inherit issues to adoption.
GNU Taler seems to be a good thing to look into. Not a crypto currency but a payment system which preserves anonymity of the buyer.
Yay GNU Taler is very promising, but I fear banks prefer proprietary systems.
It may become widely used if there's strong customer demand for GNU Taler, or regulation requiring an open electronic wallet. Most banks would probably be dragging their feet.
Money changer will always go this route hence why laws must be put in place to promote this.
Practically EU can't compete with US payment networks but I think going open source would permit them to actually compete. Not sure if there is sufficient political will to get it done.
EU governments wasted decades of spending on EU and us mega corps... Same way Germany wasted decades to fund Russia...
EU using all that tech spend on open source and actually using that open source could really fuck american corpos while giving us an out from dystopia they are building
It has been a while since this appeared; I wonder if it picks up steam. Now or never?
Imagine a future where Taler Systems SA becomes a financial powerhouse, holding a significant percentage of Euros to issue as tokens! Swiss bank accounts 2.0, giving Tether and USDC a run for their money.
Cashless payment is fucked. Using a phone to pay with? Sorry, only google wallet or apple pay, and in most cases only visa or mastercard. It's only recently that that Danish "Dankortet" is getting support in those apps. Bit fucking late, but US led companies don't give a fuck.
Samsung have their own wallet app, too. There are also a number of alternatives to Visa and Mastercard, but unfortunately, they are not as widespread or are limited to a particular countries banking system. In Canada, we have Interac, for example.
Yeah, but at least here in DK the banks have to "support" those wallets. And as far as I know, none of them do, it's just Apple or Google. For reference the biggest bank in Denmark, "Danske Bank" also support Garmin Pay, but that's for smartwatch NFC pay. (Also those products aren't for plebeians like myself.)
There's Wero, a European alternative to VISA and Mastercard.
Is it? Doesn't look like they offer debit/credit cards.
Looks more like a PayPal alternative.
Yup that’s the current state of it. They say they’re planning to add in-store and online payment options though
It’s based on iDEAL, which we use in the Netherlands since 2005. All the Dutch banks are connected to it and when you pay, you approve the payment in your banking app or website, after which it’s immediately deducted from your bank account and the webshop gets an instant payment confirmation. Variations of this are also used peer to peer, for example for splitting the bill or when buying second hand stuff. You send someone a payment request (url) or show a QR and payments arrive instantly on your bank account, without any fees.
So indeed, even though it’s immensely popular and widely used, it’s not a full replacement for physical debit cards and it doesn’t offer credit.
It's a PayPal alternative, but developed in tandem with most European banks. That way, it will at some point also be used as backend for your normal debit and credit card payments, instead of VISA / MasterCard. If I remember correctly.
I would love to have an EU bank card. Hope we get one soon.
I really hope that the EU introduces a global payment and banking system that is agnostic. I don't want to be under MasterVisa's thumb, and would prefer to keep the bulk of my money as Euros instead of American Dollars. Problem is, as an American, I can't readily use Euros in my daily life.
Here's hoping the EU can strike up a solution with Blue States, so that I don't need to ask Musk for permission to buy anything.
You could solve half of it by getting a Wise account which comes with both a real USD routing number as well as an European IBAN. You can keep your money as euros and do card payments in USD or any other currency with better rates than a normal European bank account would give you
HOWEVER
The Wise debit card is still a VISA one.
Don't let the Christians get up in there and dictate what you can and can't buy with it
Yeah, that is what happened to DLSite. It sells Japanese media such as hentai, so Visa & Mastercard put a universal ban on their products, no matter the category. It is a 1st Amendment violation IMO, since they are gatekeeping an entire culture.
I can easily see MasterVisa banning European or Canadian merchants for the sake of a Trump Regime.
we shouldn't allow private tyrants to control us like that
This is a worry for me. I opened an ebay.co.uk account in 2004. You had to pay for purchases via Paypal. I had all sorts of problems using Paypal and customer care was lousy. I started looking into Paypal and decided it was unethical. I opted out. Ever since, I have been looking for more ethical financial services. When I cannot find them, I just do without stuff.
Right now, I have allegedly ethical bank accounts with Co-Op Bank (UK), Smile Bank (UK) and Triodos (EU). I have a savings account with a community-run credit union (UK) and a prepaid debit card account through my trade union for online purchases (UK). This is good enough for UK-based activity. But I often need to send money abroad e.g. to charities in other countries or to support podcasts or creatives based abroad. I am asked to fund via USA resources like Patreon and I refuse. I want an ethical alternative.
I want to see each nation (or groups like the EU) create its own local resources and make them compatible with other nations via some exchange service that guarantees secure, quick, ethical transactions. I am glad EU is starting to do this, it is decades overdue. I guess UK will drag itself forward eventually but only after we get a government able to live in the here and now instead of the C20th like Starmer does - I suspect he has not had a new idea since 1995. He's younger than me but his mental processes make him seem like my grandfather. Oh, for some young people in government!
P.S. Hello, Media Storm, UK prize-winning investigative journalism podcast. You are great but I cannot fund you as you use oligarch-owned Patreon and communicate only via oligarch-run Instagram or gmail - if you read this, set up some UK-based, ethical comms or funding account and I will set up a monthly subscription. I will email you about this using mediastormpodcast(at)gmail.com but I resent it.
The EU plans this for many year, but the problem is every country is doing its own thing with its own standard, that is not working anywhere else. In Germany for example we have Giropay as a solution, which doesn't work in other countries. As it turns out, people move though, that's why for a couple of years now every bank is switching to VISA debit cards...
As far as I know, Giropay is being replaced by Wero, which is already supported by some banks in different European countries.
It is so far one if the better PayPal/Visa/MasterCard alternatives I‘ve used, but adoption is still a problem.
Yeah I’ve got a notification about Wero in my Sparkasse App but haven’t bothered checking it out yet lol
I have a couple of friends that seem to like it tho, I just rarely send any money
Annoyingly, we already have fast transactions as part of SEPA. But they're somewhat inconvenient to do and especially not available by just holding your card in front of a sensor.
If we had a harmonized standard for that we could get rid of Visa and MasterCard. And if we had a common web interface to make SEPA transactions more convenient than manually typing an IBAN into a homebanking interface we could get rid of PayPal as well.
Yes, I know services like that exist but I really hate how the current ones expect me to type the login credentials for my homebanking into a third-party website.
Exactly. Austria has eps which works well within Austria and with Austrian companies online, but no further than that.
We're so capable, it's crazy we needed to be threatened to realize it.
We got UPI in india and it's amazing. You use it and feel like the rest of the world is living in the past.
Every country except US has an equivalent system tho.
How does India and Brazil (PIX) have that but US/EU doesn't?
To me, it is a bastard child who turned out noble. In India, the government a few years back had announced overnight invalidity of the highest two denominations of cash notes, in an ill-informed attempt to "eliminate black money". The alternative note to replace the two, was of even a higher denomination and often in scarcity due to the sudden and unplanned decision. (ATMs were malfunctioning due to the different size of the note). It was a chaotic time and many daily-wage earners, and other vulnerable groups, the economy as a whole suffered. These events indirectly led to a very good technological infrastructure, but I will always believe that the price included some of our blood. (It didn't have to be)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetisation
The problem is the dollar. While international trade is in US dollars, US can dominate global economy. But Trump is trashing dollar and promoting crypto. How long will the dollar remain default currency? I think when dollar loses its value, USA economy will crash harder than any crash in history. Wheelbarrows of dollars will not buy matches. Will another traditional currency replace the dollar or is dollar's fall a sign that the old system no longer works for any currency. How does economics function after money fails? Are we all going to have to use crypto? How does that work? I hope some expert in economics has worked out a plan. I doubt they have though, this is all unchartered territory.
When the same happened to the Zimbabwe currency - I have a friend who keeps a trillion dollar note in his wallet - they switched to US dollars. When the US economy crashes out something similar will happen.
I hope. Maybe Euro, maybe PRC's renminbi. We'll see.
I just wondered, give how US dollars is world's 'reserve currency' (since 1944 Bretton Woods pact), how its crash might affect the whole of global trade (it must hurt more than failure of a national currency like Zimbabwe's since it is a reserve currency and has a special role in the world). Will we get another reserve currency or has the world economy changed so much that we will get a new way of doing business with no reserve currency or multiple competing reserve currencies? I think we are in uncharted territory so its hard to predict...
My dad used drilled out and used his Zimbabwe coins as washers when he built a pergola there
An expert in economics saw the same problem and did work out a plan in 2009. Trump is trying to jump on the bandwagon of something much bigger than him.
Give us the sources, mate.
Cool. Thanks for that info.
Deny the money changer profit.
Take market share away from these parasites.
Portugal has it's own network, Multibanco, and I know our central bank is working on a system targeted to the SEPA+ area. We already can send money to each other usong our phone number and our fiscal number.
I'm Portuguese and also lived in other countries in Europe and Multibanco is a vastly superior system to everything else I've seen, but on the ATM side rather than the payments side (everybody seems to have their own payment solution or, like the UK, rely on the likes of Visa and MasterCard) - already back in the 90s in Portuguese ATMs, in addition to withdrawing money, you could check your bank account balance, get a statement with the last transactions on your account and even pay your bills all this well before widespread internet access and online banking: that stuff was way ahead of its time back then.
Right now they've added stuff like touchless mobile payments and transfers, but the rest has caught up with them so you'll find such solutions in most countries plus that whole system is entirely local as it's the product of ages ago (before neoliberalism) the government forcing the banks to get together and create a company - SIBS - under shared ownership of the banks, responsible for setting up and managing a national interbank payment systems.
I wouod even say that the Multibanco system probably helps Portuguese banks maintain market lock-in against external competitors, which does get translated to Portugal having pretty high banking fees compared to the rest of Europe, especially for one of the poorest countries in the EU.
SIBS came up with virtual credit cards since at least 2009 - those are Visa or Mastercard cards, mind you, although that's defined by the debit card that it's associated with (so defined by the bank).
You can pay your bills in Portuguese ATMs, buy tickets, recharge your travel pass, withdraw money without a card, etc... makes most other systems seem like the stoneage.
E eu a tentar ser resumido.
Portugal has it’s own network, Multibanco
That's the customer-facing ATM network, i'm not so sure SIBS's infrastructure doesn't rely on Via/Mastercard, even if they provide SPEA facilities.
Multibanco existed way before Visa/Mastercard arrived here.
Yes it'd s called GNU-Taler, Chief
Try it, you might just like it ;-)
I really like the concept of Taler.And I hope it goes somewhere.
Please let's think this ALL THE WAY: it is pointless to look for alternatives to the customer facing part if the backend still runs on US software.
We need European alternatives to the 2 American duopolies: Visa and Mastercard / Android and Apple.
Android is open source so any European company can just fork their flavor the same way Huawei did.
And there are alternatives to visa/mastercard but their local to each country: Cartes Bancaires in France, Girocard in Germany etc.
We have a few options …Fairphone with EOS is probably the best.
I’d love to see it.
I'm a firm believer in payment neutrality. Visa and Mastercard as payment processors should neither be held liable for what payments go through their pipes, but at the same time they cannot stop any payment going through their pipes.
For all things like money laundering etc. Those must be handled by banks and the government, not the payment processor. Visa and Mastercard are just pipes for money to travel through, not banks.
Cash is king
It's weird that this hasn't already long since happened. Most every Asian country I've been to has had its own local payment systems.
There seems to be this idea that Visa & Mastercard are somehow too big to be usurped, but it's all illusion.
fuck YES!
ALSO: fuck plastic bank money, cash is king
If only there was an encrypted permissionless way of sending money instantly, it's cryptic nobody hasn't invented a lite coin or moneyro like that.
The up/down voting ratio on your comment is quite enlightening with regards to bias (or pride).
If anything, I'm really glad how Europe has stepped up and started cooperating more as a consequence of US actions these past few months.
The Chinese jokingly call Trump "Comrade Jianguo", because of how his trade war has made China become more independent and stopped relying as much on American companies.
In the same way Trump's latest tantrum seems to be good for the Europe.
That's the Trump bump! And it's only been eight weeks.
Or is it hump 🤔?
Soon to be the Trump depression, but probably only for America.
Look into Wero. Only a couple countries and people to people payments for now, but should take off quickly as a universal Euro payement method
It's about time.