In the meantime it would also help if existing laws would finally be enforced. It is clear that transferring european payment data into the USA cannot be legal under GDPR. We know that all of those “privacy shield” regulations are dead under Trump. There are good reasons to suspect that Visa and Mastercard are abusing their duopoly as payment processor - and there are laws against monopoly abuses.
That’s so true!
It would be nice if the banks stopped to trying to kill the local payment providers for a start.
In Denmark we’ve had Dankort since 1983, which is free for the consumers to have and use, and it’s very cheap volume based pricing for merchants.
However in the past 10 years or so, the banks have been pushing businesses and customers to use VISA/Mastercard. These are not free. The consumers pay an annual fee, and the merchants pay very high transaction fees. Yet the payment providers and banks sell the lie that they are somehow cheaper, even if they’re not. A lot of small businesses trust their banks or the payment providers to give them a good deal.
By now, it’s basically necessary for consumers to have some kind of foreign card, because so many businesses have stopped accepting Dankort. Most banks don’t even offer a “clean” Dankort anymore. They only have dual cards, where the Dankort and VISA are on the same card, which removes the choice from the consumer, since the businesses will charge the VISA. Many businesses don’t even understand what cards they accept. I always ask if they accept Dankort if the sign isn’t visible, and they think they do, but they don’t.
The story is almost the same for the instant payment systems. The banks are the ones who fucked it up, while fighting for and clinging to control of the domestic market, by confusing the customers and businesses and pushing their own limited product.
It’s long overdue for the EU to decide on a union wide solution. They’re already on it, but it’s way too slow or hindered by the political desire for this to be a private market. It really shouldn’t be.
A lot of countries have instant payments already. It is surprising there isn’t more push towards using this at least.
As an American, please do. If you start using other platforms, that will loosen Visa and MasterCard’s hold everywhere, and I unfortunately don’t see America doing shit about it ourselves, so if you start, we might also be able to.
There should be some sort of free and open source payment system with no central party in charge at all.
More banks and businesses should support Taler.
If Visa/Mastercard get replaced by another company’s centralized payment system, what prevent a large foreign corp from buying it, like they regularily do? Then we’re back to square one.
How the fuck does Europe not have it’s own payment system yet?
For one, visa and all the other US payment systems, suuuuuck. I never understood why nobody came up with something better, this just seems lazyness.
Buy hey, better late than never
How the fuck does Europe not have it’s own payment system yet?
Europe has everything of its own. But it’s almost always country-specific.
The advantage of Visa/Mastercard is that they work anywhere.
Europeans are rich and like to travel all over the world, so they want their cards to work everywhere too. Or order stuff online from abroad. Why bother using some local payment processor that barely works if you can just use your Visa card?
Independent payment systems only work in countries that are poor (where people don’t travel or buy stuff from abroad) and/or isolated by sanctions or internal restrictions.
the EU has the power to legislate that their version be offered in a non-discriminatory way anywhere cards with comparable fees are offered… similar to requirements to accept Euros etc
i could for sure see that having a “globally” requirement tacked onto it, arguing that if it’s implemented in Europe and is comparable or better for fees then it’s discriminatory rather than economic to not offer it elsewhere
Other countries need to implement it too
that’s what i mean about the globally requirement. there are plenty of companies that operate globally, so they could probably mandate that it’s accepted by these companies anywhere they do business
probably couldn’t mandate it for companies that don’t operate in the EU, but if it makes good business sense then they wouldn’t need to. the original mandates IMO are just needed for critical mass
France still has one. It’s called CB (Carte Bleue) and is working alongside Visa and Mastercard. Notoriously, some years ago Visa was down for a day and it impacted lots of countries except France because everyone fell back to the CB Network.
Also in Italy with Bancomat. But still, wouldn’t it be nice if you could use a European card across all Europe?
The actual answer: they did.
The chip payment standard used on modern cards and terminals falls under a specification called “EMV”, which was name after the three companies that made the standard - Europay, MasterCard and Visa.
Europay merged with MasterCard in 2002.
Source: used to write software to validate and test EMV.
Also the US payment systems and the European payment systems are identical (same standard) but implemented badly in the US, that’s why it’s much faster in Europe. I have several war stories about all this.
I want to hear those war stories.
I’ll give you a fun one.
A point of clarification before I begin though - when I talk about chip cards or smart cards, I mean cards equipped with an EMV chip in them. The USA was one of the last countries to adopt this technology, only doing so roughly in the last 10 or so years. The technology has existed since the 90’s (when Europay still existed) and gets regular updates to add new encryption schemes and security gubbins, so while it’s 90’s technology, it has been updated since (Today’s cards use AES and ECC).
Prior to that adoption, the USA basically refused to use them because of the cost (Cost of cards, cost of new terminals, cost of upgrading legacy infrastructure), however they wanted all the modern conveniences like contactless payments - so those first contactless cards were equipped with simple RFID chips. You know the kind, the ones that just spew out static data. Those are the ones the Mythbusters guys investigated and were forced to not air their findings because they’re so dogshit insecure (and where the idea of someone walking down the street with a big RFID reader hoovering up credit cards comes from).
With an EMV chip card, you can’t do that. Those chips are like mini computers, they don’t just spew out static data like your card number, they do challenges and responses, they do encryption, MAC’s, the works. They really are quite secure. A transaction works in such a way that the card doesn’t trust the terminal and the terminal doesn’t trust the card, they validate each other and at any time either of them can say “Nah fuck this, I want to talk to the Bank” - this is called “going online” and if that doesn’t work, the transaction is aborted.
The point of all of this preamble is to say that it’s actually really difficult to perform fraud on a proper chip card (And again I’m talking about EMV chips, not RFID chips). Not impossible, but very difficult to the point where it’s usually not worth it.
So, to try and push adoption of the EMV standard in the USA, the big issuers (Your Mastercards and your Visas) tried to push what they termed the “Liability shift”. To put it simply, they’d say something like “If you don’t support EMV by November 15th, any fraud in your shop/bank/whatever will come out of your pockets, not ours”. Meanwhile, they charged a fee (like 2%) on every transaction to cover fraud. So as a shopkeeper, you’d lose an extra 2% (or whatever it was) on every sale, but if someone came in and bought 10 big-assed TV’s using a stolen or cloned card, you didn’t lose that money.
The problem is, no shops or businesses were going to upgrade all their equipment any time soon and certainly not before their banks could support it. Likewise the banks didn’t want to spend all that money and then tell their clients to buy all new equipment - they were afraid of losing customers because why would a customer spend thousands on a new terminal to stick with the same bank, they may as well shop around.
This weird stalemate meant that adoption was basically nill, so the issuers had to keep pushing back the liability shift over and over. Each time they got a little bit firmer, a sort of “Okay it’s now October next year before you need to adopt EMV but this time we mean it for realsies!”. This went on for YEARS and years until one day, Mastercard decided “you know what, fuck it, we’re not going to bother at all”. It turns out, those fees for protecting against fraud? They were lucrative. They made shitloads of money from it, way more than what the actual fraud was costing them.
We got told in advance that an announcement was going to go out - pushing back the liability shift “Indefinitely”, which was a real bummer for us because we were about to make shitloads of money selling testing tools and equipment to every fucker who suddenly needed to adopt EMV. Then, literally like 4 days before that announcement was due, a miracle happened - Target got hacked.
Yes, that target hack from 2013 where like 40 million credit cards were leaked onto the internet. The hack that made national news for weeks, the one that rustled the jimmies of everyone who had ever set foot inside a target. There was the biggest credit card breach on record, costing hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud and untold bad blood for tens of millions of customers and Mastercard was about to make an announcement to the effect of “Hey we’re going to cancel the one thing that would have prevented all this impending fraud from ever being able to happen”.
Yeah, they didn’t make that announcement. Instead, they put their foot down and suddenly the USA woke the fuck up and decided to finally adopt chip card technology.
(And of course they did a shit job of it, but that’s another story for another day).
I was not aware there were RFID CCs. That’s hilarious.
It’s like cheques. I’ve been in the US for half a year, I did experience getting a cheque and cashing it in an ATM.
The most ridiculous thing for someone who lives in Europe and knows SEPA.
How in the fuck did US ever get to become the world police. I would guess WW2.
You’ll notice that they don’t like to use PIN with credit cards, either.
I forgot to thank you for your war story. It’s a hell of a good one, too, so thanks.
If you ever want to share more, I’m here for it.
You’re very welcome! I’m glad you enjoyed the story :)
I have high hopes for the Digital Euro.
To have a digital payment medium that is issued by the central bank and can be exchanged without fees as a 1:1 digital equipment of cash would be amazing and go beyond just replacing American credit card providers.
Wero and iDeal seem promising.
Wero works great
And neither has a card available, they’re more of a convenient frontend for your regular ol’ bank transfers.
Yet your elected officials are trying to force a digital ID through Zionist Larry Ellisons company Oracle onto the EU populace so it’s a little hard to believe they are going to do anything to challenge the powers that be.
Could you say the same thing minus the antissemitism? Of course, but wouldn’t be the same, would it?
Here is a list of Anti-Zionist Jewish groups are they antisemitic? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_anti-Zionist_organizations
Bringing up Zionism on a discussion about payment solutions in the European Union shows an unhealthy obsession with the topic… so yeah, bringing this kind of topic into this discussion is an assured sign of someone obsessing with the Jews… Get real man.
The ongoing genocide, the corrupt technocratic city being built on the bodies of children in Gaza, The fact that Epstein and Ghisline were Mossad and trafficking children to the most powerful people in our governments and the FACT that these mass surveillance technologies were being used to target people like aid workers and journalists in Gaza kinda proves that this Israel issue is the moral test of our time and I find it pretty cowardly of Israel to hide behind religion to justify the atrocities that they are committing around the globe. I don’t really like any religion, I am very anti racist and I have Jewish people in my family who are anti Zionist so your feeble attempt at labeling me antisemetic falls flat. Bye Felicia
“I even have friends”, right. You sound very much like a nazi though, over and out
It’s ridiculous to say that me saying i literally have Jewish family close blood relatives that are antizionist is the same level of racism as claiming I have a non existent black friend. Also I’m not a white supremisist so you just sound like the modern version of a Nazi = Zionist= you
We’ve had Twint for over a decade in Switzerland and it’s adopted everywhere here, I have no idea why every country is cooking their own new system right now.
Pick one that works already and roll it out on the whole continent, it’s not that hard.
Because Switzerland is not in the EU and the ECB won’t let that happen. They’d rather have the yanks ripping them off than allow real competition.
Protectionism sucks.
I’m pretty sure it’s Switzerland that doesn’t want to join the EU and not the other way around
Norway has BankAxept I believe. Fully homegrown, works just like visa.
Every country in Europe has its own payment system, that’s kind of the whole point
Fully dependent on Mastercard and Visa here in the Baltics for an example.
Isn’t that what WERU is all about; "The service competes with PayPal, credit cards and similar services. "?
It’s WERO and afaik they don’t issue cards. If you want to make in-store payments you’re stuck with visa of mastercard.
