'March to independence': Christine Lagarde wants EU to ditch Visa, Mastercard for own platform
'March to independence': Christine Lagarde wants EU to ditch Visa, Mastercard for own platform
'March to independence': Christine Lagarde wants EU to ditch Visa, Mastercard for own platform
GNU-Taler is ready
This is a CBDC that she wants, something they have been talking about for years. Likely they want this because many European countries wont be able to survive higher interest rates caused by aging demographics, as the US high interest rates suck up global liquidity making rolling over debt more expensive.
They will be able to slow inflation using the programmability of the money to prevent you from surpassing your allotted climate credits, as they are already forcing companies to measure their c02 usage in a system called the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). They will also be able to increase inflation via issuing expiring stimulus, which would allow them to issue stimulus without worrying about the 18 month lag.
What Europe also wanted was a global climate change system, where they collect tax revenue from carbon credits, which would be charged to foreign emitters. Trump recently front run this with his own tariff system, following project 2025's idea of eliminating all international tariffs. Though countries like Canada are talking about joining Europes climate plan instead, I think all countries will have to decide where to hand the keys to their domestic economic policy.
I would like this. I enjoy playing hentai games, but MasterVisa bans or alters the games by denying their services to creators and stores alike. This is an affront to free speech.
Let's not forget, they Almost forced Onlyfans to shut down because they were going to cut them off from their payment system.
Does using Google wallet give any fee to Google?
They don't get paid directly, just with your data.
I hope Canada and Mexico can join. It's time to start bankrupting murican companies.
Most card transactions in Norway go through a local system called BankAxept, and have for decades. A lot of Norwegians don't even know, because the same cards also support VISA, and they think that's what they're using.
I know that both Portugal and The Netherlands also have their own local systems, but you can't really use the system of one country in another country.
The only country in Europe which I know for sure doesn't have its own local payments system is the UK, though it would not surprise me if there are others.
What's really needed is some sort of pan-european payments system, ideally one which also gets accepted in the rest of the World. The closest we have to it at the moment in the EU is that you can do normal (so called SEPA, if I remember it correctly) bank transfers to any account at any bank in the EU, all for the same cost (generally free) independently of it being in the same country or across borders, and quite a number of retailers all over Europe do accept payment via bank transfer, but that's not an actual payment system, it's a bank transfer system that you sometimes can use to pay an online order from a retailer.
As things stand now, if for example from my Portuguese bank account I want to buy something from an online store in Germany, the payment has to go via Visa (Mastercard isn't really common in Portugal)
Same in Germany with the girocard system. Key feature is that there's no real intermediary, it's a standard the banking sector came up with to easily authorise ordinary bank transfers. Online shopping was never an issue in Germany push come to shove you just wire them the money.
And I have no fucking idea why the EPI is launching a whole phone-based system instead/before standardising debit card infrastructure. That app offers literally nothing that I can't already do with my card and bank app on my phone short of a wallet and why the hell would I want that I already have a giro account. And why would I want to send money to a telephone number instead of an IBAN. What kind of stuff are those people on that they think that's a feature.
But at least the general structure of the EPI is similar to how girocard came about: A consortium of banks, public, cooperative, private, coming up with interoperability standards. Germany has like 1400 banks (and that's after a lot of mergers), most of them only serving a district or larger town and surrounding villages for those there was never an alternative to working with each other and the over-regional banks jumped on to not be left out.
Sometimes, all you need is some marketing. E.g. it's been possible to print out a QR code with your account info so you can receive transactions at a flea market for ages (in lieu of having your phone display it and people scanning from there), and ever since SEPA instant payment it's basically cash, as far as the seller is concerned.
My main takeaway from the comments on this post is that basically all of Europe solved this a long time ago at the domestic level, but that international interoperability is lacking.
I get the phone based system. People remember their phone number and email address, they do not remember their bank account details. It's a lot easier to initiate the transfer in the moment if it's based on something the recipient can just tell you. QR codes are an acceptable workaround for a small vendor, but not really ideal for paying back the friend who paid for lunch.
Pretty much every country has something like that ready or in the works. Venmo is huge in the US, Vipps (which uses the aforementioned BankAxept in the backend) is emerging as the de-facto standard for small transfers in Norway.
It was a bigger deal in the US than elsewhere due to how hard it is to do bank transfers there, but the rest of the world is also very keen on the concept.
Would be spectacular if they make an alternative that does not rely on commercial banks so that having a for-profit bank account isn't required to be able to pay for things electronically. Just like you don't need that with cash. This is something central banks can provide to the citizens of their country. If commercial banks want people's money, they better give an incentive. Currently they get it just so people can access the electronic payment systems.
But if course that's unlikely because commercial banks won't just let themselves be cut out of the sweet deal they got now.
agreed, this is really low hanging fruit for fixing society in general- services (banking but also insurance (remember Obama's failed public option)) that everyone needs but are privately run should have competition run by the government that is publicly funded and run with the goal of break-even instead of for profit.
Let the for profit ones try to find reasons to exist then!
Other candidates for a public option: ISPs, ride-sharing services, credit rating agencies, etc etc
At least most European banks are happy to cut out the American middlemen (Visa and Mastercard) since they're eating part of the cost, and we already have the infrastructure in place and working, it's called "instant SEPA bank transfer", most newer accounts offer it for free. The problem is the lack of political will to accelerate that indipendence and to stop hemorraging money (roughly 0.5% per transaction!)
Then as people learn to use it they'll hopefully also stop using Paypal (another American company) when sending money to someone, or getting tracked in general every single time they use their debit card.
There's also credit unions.
Knowing your nationality, some Canadian provinces do have a public bank too, like ATB in Alberta.
Yeah, I'm using Meridian in Ontario. While credit unions in Ontario are regulated as nonprofits, I'd still say it's probably better if Bank of Canada provided a public chequing account and payment processing since it'll still lower the base cost of participating in the payment system for everyone.
Digital euro is the solution
Do it! Canada will come play too.
We could add credit cards to the Interac system.
That's a great idea. I'd welcome a new option!
with all the transactions all around the world can you imagine the money they're making by doing literally nothing and if this move is successful how much money they stand to lose? I would be surprised if they were not literally talking to hitmen right now.
I can recommend the Aquired Podcast Episode. A 3h long Story of how VISA became the world leader and how much profit they make year over year. It is craaaaazy. We need to get rid of Visa and other US bases payment providers ASAP!
Back before crypto because a speculation vehicle we very nearly got rid of all this bullshit. Unfortunately it just wasn't convenient and widespread enough before people decided holding on to hashes forever was gonna make them rich.
Are there any companies working on something like that?
All for it! The orange fucking idiot is fusing the EU.
HEY GUYS! YOULL NEVER GUESS. Portugal already has such a platform! Even Romania has started using it!
Everyone and their cousins have their own platform. That's the issue. No one wants to standardize on someone else's alternative so the incumbents reign supreme.
Is a federation of different platforms not possible? Warning: I know absolutely nothing about this.
Maybe the @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu is in a good place to enforce a cross-border payment system.
The crux is having credit and being able to put blocks on it - say for renting cars.
But I am all for a European alternative. Bring it
I have a friend who works on this project. Still years away, but they are at least thinking very hard of not having US dependencies since the last months. I don't have much trust in some people involved though (exactly because for many this was not an issue until a few weeks ago).
I fear it will be horrible as long as it does not come close to something like Taler: https://www.taler.net/en/index.html https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/ngi-taler/
Why? I don't get it, how is it better than SEPA?
When you're looking at your bank balance you're seeing bank Euros, for which your bank has to hold a certain percentage of actual (central bank) Euros in reserve (that's what fractional reserve banking is about: Not just the central bank, also ordinary banks can create money), when you transfer money to another bank the receiving bank will have to make sure that it has enough central bank Euros to back up the recipient's balance. SEPA is a standard interface and procedure to negotiate such transfers.
The Digital Euro is central bank money, just as bank notes and coins. It's a (possible) step towards a full-reserve banking system without having to actually keep actual notes and coins around. And the ECB is very aware of this which is why they're talking so much about limiting how many digital Euros you can hold at one time so the current banking system doesn't get completely up-ended over night.
...if that doesn't really answer anything then that's because money is fucking complex, and how our system works is completely unintuitive. But, essentially, Digital Euros are the same stuff as money under the mattress, just digitally.
Humm, this will probably mean that the EU will need to look into if we need to setup a European mainframe manufacturer.
I am talking AS400/iSeries type stuff.
MasterCard and VISA process a huge number of transactions per second, and there can't be any risk of loosing a transaction in progress, so you need an extremely stable central processing node with very high redundancy.
At the moment I believe that only IBM and Fujistu makes mainframes these days, IBM is American which has now shown to not be an ideal long term trading partner, Fujistu is Japanese, with a strong presence in Europe, but they made the UK Post Office computer system, which makes me want to stay, far, far, far away from them.
Either one, whoever we pick will make it easy to get the system going, but to migrate away will be a nightmare.
I wonder if we could build something on open hardware like Risc-V, this make me wonder is Risc-V would even be suitable for this application
Tech guy here. There’s no way in hell a new system would be mainframe-based. A distributed queue with delivery receipt and many nodes to process messages along with many distributed read-only DBs is the way to scale this thing. And you can be isolated form local power and connectivity issues. Tech isn’t the problem in this situation, market penetration is.
There has been massive progress in the last 40 years in distributed computing and consensus algorithms (which is what you need for consistency in a distributed system). We don't need 1970 style centralised systems anymore.
For normal tasks, absolutely, and if we can do it without a mainframe while maintaining the stability and redundancy of a mainframe system, then we should look into alternatives.
However, mainframes have been in continous development since they were created, there are absolutely tasks they still do better these days.
CPUs don't make something a mainframe, the whole system design does. They're transaction-based throughput monsters with all kinds of bells and whistles when it comes to reliability, seamless fallover, etc. The European CPU initiative currently focuses on supercomputing (weather simulations and such) which is a completely different beast when it comes to dataflow but certainly a good foundation for general compute.
Looking into my crystal ball, at some point SAP is going to enter the hardware business.
Mainframes have nothing to do with this.
RISCV is still just a computer - would work just fine on a logical level. Raw compute would be an issue with today's hardware.
Christine Lagarde is not someone the world Should listen to. She is also the director of the IMF and all the homies hate the IMF:
This is the bitch went to poor countries to give debt
Sometime in the future maybe people will look back on this as the beginning of money units being "credits" as in familiar sci fi terminology.
p.s. yeah I know "it's not the same thing" - I'm imagining that a monetary system could develop from an official credit mechanism.
Money is the credit mechanism originally (and still is in most developed countries). Coins and paper bills are IOUs from the central bank or the government, which will be exchanged for gold on request. Even though most countries moved away from the gold standard.
WERO is coming all over Europe. Germany, France and Belgium are already connected and this year also in the Netherlands. It's happening but ofcourse.... much too slow for many of us :-) www.wero-wallet.eu If they realy want to be innovative they should use blockchain technology to make it happen.
If they realy want to be innovative they should use blockchain
Lol
I can already send money instantly, for free, through SEPA without a singular private company earning a cut or tracking me.
A bank account is needed, but there are thousands to choose from, and in the EU by law they cannot refuse to open a basic account for a private EU citizen.
Why should we use Wero/Revolut/Venmo/whatever instead? Intercompatibility within just one network means another network effect, that does not look like a long term solution to me. Just like Telegram, though very convenient to use with a nice UI, is no solution to Whatsapp.
Wero seems to be solving the problem of copy-pasting our IBAN. What if any bank app would just recognise a standardised QR code with that data? Who would then subscribe to Wero with a phone number and email and risk getting scammed or blocked for any random reason?
Wero would actually be a downgrade in service for people living in Portugal.
This is very slow many countries have done something similar a long time ago:
Mir (Russia)
China UnionPay (CUP)
RuPay (India)
Elo (Brazil)
Interac (Canada)
BKM (Turkey)
Verve (Nigeria)
JCB (Japan)
Mada (Saudi Arabia)
Zapper (South Africa)
Naps (National Payment System) (UAE)
innovative
You spell "resume-based design" funny
In Portugal we have an app called MBWAY, it's a national fast payment service. with that we can send money just with phone number, withdrawal from atms an pay using qr code. I've heard they are already interconnected with their counterpart in Italy and Spain
Wero is great for what it does (sending money to other people) and it's going to gain the functionality needed for online commerce.
But that only covers half the functionality provided by Visa and MasterCard. You also need the functionality to pay at a restaurant or in the supermarket. You know, the card part of MasterCard?
Some European countries have their own debit card system (here in Germany for example giropay) but once you cross the border that stops working. Which is why those cards are usually co-badged with one of the big networks to act as a fallback. That's where the EU should act to ensure that the fallback functionality isn't necessary anymore, at least as long you're in the Euro-zone.
You're right, but they are working on it. You cannot build an alternative for VISA/Mastercard just in one day. Step-by-step we'll get there. Every country has his own system, every bank has his own system. The only thing they have in common is VISA/Mastercard. It will take a few years, but the US has started something that is not gonna stop very soon. April 2, 2025 is the day that Europe started to disconnect from US dominance.
Innovation and blockchain do not go in one sentence. Blockchain is a near dead technology. It has its use cases but if you want a fast moving money transactions option, you should look into UPI by India.
Oh, they can go in one sentence, if done right.
Nano offers fast transactions on a decentralized network while using very little energy.
Strictly speaking it's not just one blockchain, but one per account, which only the account owner can update (add blocks to it).
This asynchronous design is what makes Nano so fast, because there's no need to wait for others when updating one's own blockchain.
What it doesn't have (yet?) is a sufficiently large network effect, which it may never acquire.
But it is one example of an attempt at making digital money based on blockchain technology, which is not just a copycat, scam, rugpull or other malicious nonsense.
Monero comes to mind as well and maybe a handful others.
Sadly almost all around blockchain is not just not innovative, but outright evil.
We'll see. I believe in the blockchain technology, but not in the way it is used as today. IMO it's like the early days of the internet. Only for the nerds, until they started to build RWA. But again... we'll see.
